Elizabeth had not heard her father raise his voice above twice in her life. Certainly she had never heard him rant and storm with all the fury of a young lover; until now, she had not believed him capable of it.
And even now, she and her sisters could scarcely believe their ears. Mr Bennet, as indifferent to his wife as any man could be, was shouting at her, his voice easily carrying past the walls of his study. Jane, after one shocked glance at the door, whisked Kitty and Mary away.
"Good God, woman, what were you thinking? How could you - even you - conceive of such a mad scheme?"
Lydia began to giggle. "How droll!" she cried. "What do you suppose she's done now? It must be just dreadful. He never cared about anything she did before."
The two of them, more strangers than sisters, stood in awkward silence for a moment. Then Lydia, unable to consider anything for more than thirty seconds, drifted away, and Elizabeth knocked on the door.
There was a long pause. "Lizzy?" said Mr Bennet.
"Yes, Papa, I - "
The door swung open. Her father stared at her blankly for a moment, seeming hardly to recognise her, then managed to summon up a rictus of a smile. "Mrs Bennet was just leaving," he said. "Send for your sister Jane. I must speak to you both."
"I am doing no such thing!" Mrs Bennet burst out. "I shall remain here until - until - "
Her indignation dissipated at one swift look from her husband. She scuttled away.
"Forgive me, Papa," said Elizabeth, "but surely this can wait? You look exhausted, and Jane and I are not going anywhere."
Mr Bennet's only response was a brusque nod at her usual chair.
Jane joined them a few minutes later. "I hope nothing is wrong, sir?"
"Sit down, Jane," he said. For one sickening moment, Elizabeth felt certain he was to finally tell them what he had already confided in Darcy, of all people. Then she thought of Mrs Bennet's pinched, nervous face and Mr Bennet's furious voice. His illness could hardly be attributed to a scheme of hers.
"My father and I," said Mr Bennet, "were not on the best of terms after my marriage. He sent us to live in Yorkshire, where he owned a small estate. I was a dilatory correspondent even then; he did not hear from me more than three or four times a year.
"Those few letters contained little more than accounts of the weather and enquiries after my mother's health. I certainly never mentioned that Mrs Bennet had conceived and lost two children in rapid succession."
His elder daughter's eyes filled with tears. "Oh, Papa," she whispered, reaching for his hand, "I am so sorry. You must have - "
"I do not wish for compassion," he said, brushing her fingers and sympathy aside. "I say this only because it is difficult enough already, without pausing to explain how we accomplished what we did. In any case, we had been in Yorkshire for almost four years, married for nearly five, when I took your mother to see Houghton Park, the Earl of Ancaster's seat. This was eighteen years ago."
Jane caught her breath.
"Close your mouth, Jane," said Mr Bennet. "You will need all the shocked expressions at your disposal when I reach the skeleton behind the veil."
"Forgive us, sir," Elizabeth said. "We thought you said Houghton, not Udopho - we had not realised skeletons were involved in the story."
His eyes crinkled at her; then he sobered. "She had never seen it, and since it had been raining that day, we were the only visitors. We went all around the grounds, and while I was admiring the architecture, your mother vanished. You may gasp now, Jane."
"I - do not - understand," she said, frowning. "There must be a mistake. Mr Darcy said - "
"Mr Darcy takes an eager interest in your affairs, Jane," said Mr Bennet dryly. "Did he tell you about Houghton?"
"A little," Jane confessed. "It was that day at Netherfield, before we came home. I have had the oddest feeling that I know him, you see, and I kept looking at him, trying to remember, and would find him staring at me, in exactly the same way. Finally, I asked him about it, and he said - he said we used to play together, when we were children - at that same place you just mentioned, Papa. I remembered all sorts of things after that, things he did not talk about, things he did not even know about. He could not have known that Mama used to hover over my bed when I was ill, singing lullabies, and her hair would hang me around like a black veil."
Mr Bennet turned ashen. It was left to Elizabeth to say, "I am sorry, dearest, but you must be mistaken. Mama's hair was the same colour as Mary's and Lydia's when she was young, I have heard my uncle and aunt say so."
"I am not mistaken!" cried Jane, a mulish expression settling over her face. "Her hair was as black as yours, Lizzy. She called me Jenny, and sang and laughed and cried - she did, I remember it."
"This is one of those delightfully rare occasions when nobody is wrong," Mr Bennet said, in something more akin to his usual manner - but his hands were shaking. "Not even your friend Mr Darcy, Jane. You see, Mrs Bennet returned in due time, with a pair of ragged little girls clinging to her skirts. All three of them were soaked to the bone, and one - the younger of the two children - seemed to have misplaced most of her clothing.
"I looked at my wife in considerable bewilderment, as you might imagine, but she explained before any of the rest of us could say a word. She told me that the children were orphans - sisters - whom she had rescued from drowning. I wrapped my coat over the younger girl, and said,
" 'Tell me, child, do you have a mother or father?'
"The poor thing was frightened out of her wits, so the other answered for her.
" 'No,' she said, 'they died last year.'
Mr Bennet met their astonished gazes and gave a wry little half-nod. "Indeed. I would like to say that your mother persuaded me to take you, but in truth, I required very little persuasion. You could hardly have presented a more pathetic sight, and after Mrs Bennet saved your lives, we felt a sort of responsibility for them. At the same time, I knew that my father longed for grandchildren, and presenting a pair of daughters would heal the breach more quickly than anything else.
"You were so grateful, Jane, that you would have done anything Mrs Bennet asked, and Elizabeth went wherever you did. It was easily done; we had seen no one but a boy of perhaps nine or ten, and that some time earlier. We simply took you in our arms and left, quite unnoticed. There were moments of anxiety, of course; at first, you were always crying - Jane, for your mother, and Lizzy, for a cat, of all things." He paused, rubbing his drooping eyelids. "In time, however, you seemed to forget what had gone before, and we brought you home to Longbourn."
"You are quite serious, sir?" Elizabeth asked. "Jane and I are - are foundlings?"
"Well," said Jane matter-of-factly, "we knew that already."
Elizabeth and Mr Bennet both stared; then the former said, with some asperity, "We knew nothing of the kind!"
She had imagined it, of course, as children do. The young Elizabeth knew she must be a foundling - and the grown-up Elizabeth knew better. How could she possibly have supposed otherwise? There were dozens of logical reasons why she should not resemble any of her family but Jane, why Mrs Bennet liked her so much less than the other girls, for all of those things. This one, irrational and improbable in the extreme, happened to insipidly perfect heroines, not to real people, certainly not to her.
"Why, my grandmother Bennet told me," Jane was saying. "She knew because of your hair, Lizzy, and some things you said when we first came to Longbourn, but - but she said it did not matter, so I never thought of it. Should I have?"
"Oh, Jane," said Elizabeth. "Only you could discover such a thing and think nothing of it!"
Brimming with curiosity, she hardly knew what to ask first - not that it mattered. Her father had fallen asleep again.
*****
"Jane, of course I do not blame you," said Elizabeth for the fourth time. She stared at the pale, wide-eyed stranger in the mirror, brushed her fingers over the high cheekbones and small upturned nose, as if to make certain they had not changed. Somehow, she thought, they had.
"Lizzy?"
Elizabeth turned around; Jane sat forlornly on the bed, arms wrapped about her knees. "Yes?"
"Why does it matter? I can see that it does, somehow, but I still do not understand why. It was so very long ago, and it is not as if there were anyone to miss us." She took a deep breath. "I do not even see why it is so important that we know, now, when everything is finished and done."
"My dearest Jane," said Elizabeth, trying not to betray any of the incredulity she felt, "Papa's intelligence signifies little in and of itself. If we knew nothing else, if Mr Bingley had not brought his friend into the country, this would be another situation entirely. Instead, you and Mr Darcy recognised each other after eighteen years. You still remember playing with him, playing tricks on Edward - on the earl's son! Whatever I may be, whoever I may be, you were not poor and you were not friendless and -" she hesitated only a moment, then flung her head back - "and I do not believe you were an orphan, either."
"Oh dear," said Jane, covering her face with her hands. "It cannot be true, Lizzy, it cannot! Such a lack of decency - it is beyond imagining!"
"I certainly would not have imagined it."
"How could they abduct a stranger's children?" Jane cried. "It is too fantastic to be believed. It must not be true. Besides, our parents cannot be alive. Papa did ask, and -"
"Jane," said Elizabeth, her expression gentle, "he asked if my parents were dead; you merely answered for me. Besides, there is something else. I heard Papa talking to Mr Darcy about all this."
Jane dropped her hands, peering over them with red, swollen eyes. "You knew, Lizzy?"
"No, of course not. I did not understand what it meant, then." She scowled, trying to recall that incoherent, terrifying conversation. "Papa was saying that he would tell us something, but that he needed time, and asked Mr Darcy to keep it secret." Despite the fog of memory, she could hear the cold, clear response perfectly. "He - Mr Darcy - said, 'I have hated you for eighteen years, and I do not accept requests even from people I like. Why should I perform any favour, let alone this one?' "
Her sister went a ghastly shade of grey. "Eighteen years," she said. "That - that cannot be coincidental, can it?"
"No," said Elizabeth, and reached over to clasp her hands. "Papa told him to think of Miss Darcy, and he said he would consider it. Since nothing has happened since then, I suppose he agreed. Now do you understand? If this is true, if I am right, you were part of a family. Can you imagine what it must have been for them, for a little girl to simply vanish?"
Jane blinked tears away. "We must not exhaust Papa with any further questions," she said, with something of her usual resolve, "or he shall never recover."
"Jane - "
"Mr Darcy is several years older than I am. He remembers it all much more clearly than I do, and he is the only reason that Papa ever discovered this - this dreadful misunderstanding. If he is at Mr Bingley's ball, we must ask him to tell us the entire truth."
Elizabeth opened her mouth, then closed it again. "Very well."
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Lucy65: Thanks! I hope you enjoy it all over again.
Cata: Thank you. I can't spoil too much, but you're a very good reader. ;)