Dedication:

To WadeH: because we've discussed dead Darcy stories.

To Myship: because you always help me find the right word.

Chapter One

October 5, 1810

It was a cold and blustery Sunday, just after Michaelmas. Mr. Bennet set off on foot for Longbourn once services were over. The Longbourn carriage was to meet them at Mrs. Phillips' house, for their Aunt Phillips lived in town and Mrs. Bennet wished to call upon her sister.

Mrs. Phillips had, all told, an extremely fine house in town. It was not an estate. Mr. Phillips was a country attorney (their aunt had not done as well as Mrs. Bennet by marrying a gentleman) but still, having family so close was of comfort to Mrs. Bennet.

The mother of five's face was flushed and excessively red that blustery day as she led her troop of daughters down the graveyard path towards Townsend Lane where Mrs. Phillips lived. Mrs. Bennet often remarked how she hated having to walk that particular pathway. She wished for a different way to get to her sister's house though she would never go so far as to take the main path out of church. That involved walking up to the High Street, around to Church Lane and then to Townsend—a path that was twice the distance to her poor tired feet, and aching, over-taxed heart.

Mrs. Bennet thought they ought to put in a proper path in the churchyard, one which carried on straight, over to the edge of the property (in between the graves) and that they should cut down the line of yew trees that ran along the eastern side of the churchyard as well. Elizabeth had always been horrified at the idea of cutting those trees down because she knew that crows nested in those trees.

Elizabeth followed her family, though with slower footsteps. She turned and saw that most of the crows were not in attendance in the graveyard. It was as if they knew that if they appeared, Mrs. Bennet would yell at them and wave her stick about.

In the last year (since the spring), Mrs. Bennet had affected to use a walking stick to lean upon. It had become a fashion accessory among the rich, and her daughters weren't sure if she had purchased it because it was fashionable, or because she actually needed its assistance in walking. But Mrs. Bennet often waved it about. The crows seemed to remember her; they would note she was coming and fly out of her way.

But Elizabeth tarried behind her family. Catherine and Lydia ran ahead, out of sight, wishing to discover what sorts of visitors Aunt Phillips might have waiting for them, while Jane and Mary dutifully walked beside their mother.

A caw caught Elizabeth's attention, and she turned to see that there was a small group of crows in the largest of the oak trees in the graveyard, ones which had not fled, despite Mrs. Bennet's presence. Elizabeth was surprised that there was an odd number of them—there were five of them.

There was one odd little gentlemen crow. Elizabeth was not sure why she thought it was a gentleman crow, she just felt that it was, as she stopped and paused to look at him. She wondered where has your mate got to? With so many years of observation of her little friends, Elizabeth knew that they stayed true to each other for life, so she was surprised that this one did not have a companion with him. He cocked his head there on his perch up on the oak branch as he peered down at her.

A great cry resounded in the graveyard, and it was not the call of the crows. It was Mary calling out in a garbled fashion, and it was Jane calling "Mamma!" Elizabeth looked towards the yew fence and saw her sisters bending over a form on the ground: her mother's form. She took off running to that trio of figures. Jane was kneeling on the ground; Mary was bent at the waist and staring at a moving form on the ground.

Her mother lay on her side as though she had fallen forward; the stick had not done its job to keep her on her feet. And despite fears that she had been already been taken from this earth, she was breathing though the sound coming from her lungs was odd and distorted. Mrs. Bennet was twitching, but her eyes were open.

"I'll run for Mr. Jones," said Elizabeth. "Mary,can you run to the Phillips' house for help?" Mary seemed unable to answer. Lizzy moved and pulled Mary to her in a rough embrace then began to drag her to the graveyard gate; they needed to head in the same direction.

"Mary!" she cried again. "You need to fetch Uncle Phillips!" Elizabeth opened the half-gate at the graveyard's edge between that line of yew trees and pulled her sister after her.

Mrs. Bennet lay in her sickbed for three days, unable to move or respond, and thankfully—due to Mr. Jones' administrations and laudanum—asleep. She was mostly attended by Mrs. Hill, the housekeeper, with daily visits from Mr. Jones to determine her progress (or rather her deterioration). It seemed no one in Meryton ever took her complaints about those heart palpitations seriously, but apparently she had been ill.

Mr. Bennet did not visit but kept to his bookroom asking for updates. He did not seem inclined to see his lady wife out of this world. Jane and Elizabeth took turns sitting with their mother. Mrs. Hill was there out of a sense of obligation for her mistress, but the two oldest were there out of a new-found sense of love for that small, lace-capped figure in the bed. She was, after all, the mother who had given birth to them, raised them as well as she could, was devoted to them in the way most mothers are, but would be parting from them in short order. They were under no expectations that Mrs. Bennet would sit up from the bed and demand tea. Everyone knew that she would pass from this world to the next.

Mary seemed to have quite a difficult time with her mother lying insensible and spiritless, yet not having gone on. Mary could not sit with her mother. She could not view that frail figure, for Mrs. Bennet had not really been that kind to her plain middle daughter. Mary spent most of her time playing mournful tunes on the pianoforte. Elizabeth suggested once to her that perhaps she try playing something different, to raise her spirits. But Mary said it was what she needed to do, so Elizabeth left her to it.

Catherine and Lydia seemed to have no concept or understanding of what losing their mother would mean. Lydia, in particular, was a bundle of emotion and energy. A thirteen year old could only understand the world in her terms, how it affected her. The person who indulged her every whim no longer existed, and Lydia gave way to hysterics and tears. Not for the first time did a number of people in that household wish there had been a governess, or that the old nursery-maid, Miss Pickens, had lived to see a few more years that there might be another hand to take charge of that loud and hysterical girl.

Aunt Phillips came every day. The older sisters hoped that their aunt might help with Lydia, but their aunt wished to have a parting sit with her sister and did not wish to deal with the tantrums of a thirteen year old. By the second day the antics and hysterics from Lydia had begun to influence Catherine. It riled up Kitty (who had seemed quiet and introspective before), but who now seemed to feel left out and lost.

The noise level was such that by the afternoon of the third day, Elizabeth dragged her two youngest sisters out of doors to give the household some relief. She took her two sisters out for a walk, bullying and badgering them to seek exercise with her, leaving Aunt Phillips, Jane, and Mrs. Hill at her mother's side. It was another cold and blustery day, quite like the day when Mrs. Bennet had collapsed in the graveyard.

Twilight seemed to set upon them earlier than Elizabeth expected as they finished their walk and headed back to Longbourn. She had achieved her purpose with the walk, however. Lydia had quite the peace to speak when they had left, and she had talked nonstop; Catherine had added her own words whenever she could, which was whenever Lydia had stopped to draw breath. The length of the walk meant that eventually the pair needed to save their breath for the trip home.

At the end, all three were quiet as they crept back towards Longbourn in the diminishing light of the afternoon. Catherine, in particular, did not care to be out when it was dark, and had long had a fear of dark places, something which Lydia used to frequently tease her about.

Longbourn was a small estate; Mr. Bennet only saw about two thousand a year from it. There was a small wood, Hollybush Woods, in one corner of it, the north-west corner. There it spilled over into the next property to the north, Wheaton, which belonged to the Meeks. There was also a brook, a river actually, which ran through the woods.

It had often been a favorite place for Elizabeth to stroll through, particularly in the summer and on fine days, though blustery and cold autumn days did not make it the best destination. But she had dragged two protesting sisters and their vociferous, rambunctious, and selfish selves in that direction to give her mother's final days or hours a certain peace.

The grayness of the day added to the darkness of the woods though it was not so very dark that afternoon, however it was autumn, and late afternoon, and the light was failing. She noticed a shift in her sisters' behavior as they seemed to draw closer to each other and closer to her.

"Lizzy, we need to hurry home," insisted Kitty.

"We should," agreed Elizabeth. "I have left Jane to care for Mamma for too long."

The two younger sisters held hands and moved on ahead of Elizabeth like mice scurrying in a room with foreknowledge of a cat nearby.

There was a sound, a rustling, that made Elizabeth stop and look up into the trees. They weren't so very dense just there, and she saw a crow. She thought it odd that she should see just one in the forest. She also could not recall seeing them in this part of the woods before. It let out a loud caw as if speaking to her, and cocked its head with meaning. It fluttered its wings, cawed again, and then flew back the way she had come.

There was something that compelled Elizabeth to turn around and watch it. The crow didn't exactly fly, but flew and hopped in a single motion as it moved back into the woods, back into the darkness on that gray afternoon under the canopy of the trees. Elizabeth's steps matched its hops as she followed it. She did not think that they had retreated that far, but it stopped with its claws firmly grasped around a branch, and it let out a long series of sounds, harsh calls as if to say "we have come far enough and you need to take in your surroundings."

She turned to look. There did not seem to be anything special or particular about where she stood, it was not a special place to her, there was nothing singular or peculiar about where the crow had led her.

Elizabeth looked back down the path and noted that Catherine and Lydia were coming towards her. She wondered if something had spooked Kitty that she needed a guiding arm around her waist to get her home. No doubt, Lydia had teased her too much, and Kitty was storming back up the path to seek Elizabeth's far more reassuring company.

But as she watched those two female figures coming towards her, Elizabeth also realized that she had strayed from the path. Her feet were no longer on any sort of packed dirt, and she stood on a bed of fallen leaves. She also noted that there was not the usual disparity of height between the two figures, for Lydia (despite being the youngest sister and only thirteen) had suddenly shot up just that summer, and was taller than all of her sisters. It was something she found great joy in, particularly since she was taller than her next older sister, Catherine, whom she often cajoled and scolded to do her bidding even though Kitty was two years older.

Elizabeth's eyes looked again at those figures, and then she realized that it was Jane, and though Elizabeth couldn't believe her eyes, it was her mother. Her heart leapt at that sight. She thought that despite everyone's fears, and Mr. Jones' pronouncements, and all of Aunt Phillips' assurances that Mrs. Bennet's last hours were upon them, here was her mother apparently risen from her sick bed to take a restorative stroll on Jane's arm. They were walking together in the woods.

But then logic intruded. Meaning. Her mother had never been one for walks; Jane hardly less so. Jane most often strolled about only in the formal Longbourn gardens. She would not be one to walk a half mile out to this point in the Hollybush Woods, and return home as Elizabeth did most days (and as she had just cajoled her two youngest sisters to do). Elizabeth's heart constricted after that giant leap of joy as she considered was that truly Jane and her mother walking towards her?

Somehow, she could not keep her eyes off of Jane, her form in particular, as the pair grew closer. Elizabeth looked at the face and the clothes, and she realized that she did not recognize her sister's dress, it looked out of place. The closer the figure drew, the more Elizabeth looked at the face, and the more she realized that this was an older version of Jane. An aged one. This figure looked like how Jane might look in five years, and not as she currently did as a woman who was on the verge of turning twenty. Mrs. Bennet looked exactly as Mrs. Bennet always did, from her lace cap down to her choice of clothes, predictable particularly because of that lace collar which was the one Aunt Gardiner had given her last Christmas.

The pair drew near her, then passed on the road in front of Elizabeth. It was only as they walked by, walked by without acknowledging her, and as Elizabeth turned her head to watch them pass, that she noticed something. It was something to be seen out of the corner of her eye; there was a cloudiness about those figures. If she looked fully at them they seemed solid, real. She had also been afforded an even better chance to look at the figure she had first mistaken for her sister Jane and realized it was not Jane.

There was some instinct inside that put a label on that face as Grandmother Gardiner, her mother's mother. Her grandmother had been just as much of a renowned beauty in her day as Jane was now, and as Mrs. Bennet was known to have been. Mrs. Gardiner had died in childbirth before she even saw her thirtieth birthday, that child having died with her. She left behind three little children without a mother. Her early death was likely the cause which Elizabeth thought contributed to her mother's nature being so fleeting and fickle. Elizabeth wondered if what she had just witnessed walking in the woods, were the figures of her departed grandmother and her now departed mother.