Disclaimer: I don't own these characters, obvs.
Mrs. Bennet, Kitty, Lydia, and Mary had all walked to Meryton. With Jane in London, they found Meryton to be the only diversion comparable to having a sister in Town.
Lizzy, however, sat at the desk the sitting room reading Jane's letters.
Dear Lizzy,
I hope you are well. The Gardiners were so kind as to take me to the Rooms Thursday evening. They were so very different from how I have heard them described in Bath, though just as lovely, I am sure. I have several new acquaintances of whom the Gardiners assure me I should certainly see more. I saw neither Mr. Bingley nor Caroline, but I expect even if they were there when I was, that I would not have seen them, for there were so many people I could hardly step away from my aunt for fear of being lost in the crowd…
The letter continued, but Lizzy found that her spirits sank considerably when she read of Jane's lack of progress with Mr. Bingley. Surely Bingley did not know Jane was in town, or he would have called on her at his earliest convenience.
The sitting room was deliciously silent. Apart from Mr. Bennet in his study, she was alone in the house, which was strangely still. She was sure she had not been so solitary in quite some time, and brushing off the feeling of inquietude, she set herself to answering Jane's letter.
But as her pen scratched the paper, she heard a loud screeching sound from the tea room.
"What in heaven's name?" she thought, rising out of her chair. Again the house was silent and the door to Mr. Bennet's study remained soundly closed.
Lizzy turned out of of the sitting room, passed Mary's suffering spinet, and walked into the tea room, where she chanced upon a large, blue box. She gasped slightly, but did not step away.
"Police…Call Box?" she muttered, placing her hand on the blue paneling. "What a very odd place to call on a policeman."
She circled around the blue box, trying to imagine just how it had ended up in the middle of the Longbourn tea room. As she came around the back, she heard its doors burst open, and she hid herself.
"Aha!" said a male voice. "Wait, no. I think…hmm…is anyone home?"
Lizzy peered around the corner of the box to find a very skinny man in very skinny breeches, which were not breeches at all, but trousers. He wore no waist coat, and in the place of a sensible cravat, he had tied about his neck a sort of bow, which she thought ridiculous.
The gentleman—if indeed he was one—looked around the room for signs of life in a way that suggested he'd taken too much wine.
"Excuse me, sir," she offered. "But might you explain how this box came to sit in the tea room of my father's home?"
The man spun around, and a smile no sooner unfurled across his face.
"Excellent!" he shouted. "People! Well, a person, but I do love people. People are the best things to talk to. Most of the time. But really, you win with no competition when it comes to cats in wimples."
"Cats in wimples?" Lizzy repeated. "I've never known cat to have any sort of religion, never mind the Pope's."
The man chuckled. "I like you. You're clever."
"You may be the first man I've met to enjoy both of those qualities existing simultaneously in a lady."
"I'm the first man to have done a number of things."
"Should I be afraid of you?" she asked.
"Do I look like a man you should be afraid of?" he countered.
"You certainly don't look a rogue, but you certainly don't look ordinary. But for a man who has come unannounced into the tea room from a large blue box, perhaps you are some kind of ordinary of which I am unaware."
"I am hardly ordinary…sorry, what was your name? And on that subject, where exactly am I? I'd say England, most likely, but you never know. Could be Anglo 5."
"Miss Elizabeth Bennet, I am at liberty to say, is my name. And you're in Hertfordshire."
"Lovely! I love Hertfordshire. What's the year?"
She looked at him incredulously. It was one thing not to know the place one was in, for it was easy to lose oneself in the country, but certainly he must be some degree of mad not to know the year.
"1795, Mr…."
"Doctor."
"Oh, you're a doctor. Have you come from London? Though that still does not explain what you are doing in the tea room."
"Of sorts. I come from far away."
"Inverness?"
"Bit further." He turned around and had a long look at the room. "Wait," he said, turning around. "Did you say Elizabeth Bennet?"
"Yes."
"Informally 'Lizzy'?"
"Yes…" She was not known in Town, and she could not fathom how this man in such strange clothing could know her name, unless her family's reputation preceded them much more than she had originally thought. She smothered the thought and the accompanying embarrassment.
"Oh, well, this is definitely odd."
"I should say so."
"I should go," he said, spinning around to the doors of the blue box. "Unless…"
"Unless what? I certainly cannot let you leave without telling me how you came. It isn't even calling hours."
"Would you like to see inside?" the man asked, eyeing behind the doors.
"Sir, you might be a doctor, but I know better than to step into the large box of a strange man with a bow around his neck."
"'A bow around my neck'? I, Miss. Bennet, am offended. This is a bow tie, and bow ties are cool."
"'Cool'?" Lizzy asked, her brow furrowed in confusion. "Why are they particularly cold to the touch?"
"Er, never mind. Are you sure you don't want just a peek?"
"I think not, doctor…doctor who?"
"Just the Doctor, thanks."
She gave him a quizzical look, but continued. "I have no brothers to fight you to defend my virtue, and I am afraid my father is too old to take up the cause. So, no, Doctor, I am afraid I will stay just here."
"Perhaps that's wise, although I'm not sure anyone has called me particularly wise. Clever, yes. Wise? Maybe a long time ago."
"Your sister, is she still in London?" he continued suddenly.
"…Yes, yes she is. How did you—?"
"The plot thickens, Lizzy!" He hopped back into his box and began to close the doors.
"One more thing!" he said, peering out the door. "
"Yes?"
"It is easy to see the people the way you want to see them, instead of how they actually are."
"Is that supposed to be advice?"
"It's…it's not very good, is it?"
"Oh, I don't know. It is vague, certainly, but perhaps not wholly useless."
A slanted sort of smile crept up the corner of his mouth.
"That's the spirit!" he announced. "Absolute pleasure to meet you, Miss. Bennet." He closed the door to his box, and in the next moment, Lizzy again faced the hearth of the fireplace, wondering still how a mad man in a box came to sit in Longbourn, and if she ought to have gone into Meryton with her mother and sisters, as solitude and quiet seemed not so much to clear her mind, but fill it with fantastic hallucinations.
Please review!