A/N: Never fear, this chapter isn't me recounting the same event from Henry's POV this time. We go back to the present (well, sort of). Hope you enjoy, and please read and review!

-----

Chapter Four – The Other Woman

-----

Elizabeth listened intently as Mr. Lennox told her more about his plans. He and his wife had come to Milton, he explained, to learn a bit more about the cotton industry, and also to go over a business matter with Mr. Thornton. She in turn shared with him some of the many things she had learned about the industry in the years since her family had moved to Milton, and he seemed impressed with the extent of her knowledge.

Elizabeth liked this man – he did not simplify what he was talking about for her benefit and nor did he assume that patronizing manner that some Milton men invariably adopted when speaking to ladies. In that respect, Mr. Lennox reminded her of her husband – neither of these men underestimated her and both actually seemed sincerely interested in hearing her opinion.

She glanced over at the latter man, hoping he was being at least passably attentive and hospitable towards Mrs. Lennox. Really, but she had not seen him look so moody and taciturn since during the first few months of their courtship and marriage. She had never been able to pinpoint the exact source of those occasional bouts of despondency; it seemed too profound to be simply worry about the ups and downs of the mill business. Any questions about what was wrong and entreaties to confide in her had been curtly brushed away, and she could not help feeling hurt, but knowing his family history, she did not probe further, reasoning that he would come to her in his own time.

Despite this and despite their unfortunate first meeting, Elizabeth felt that she and John shared a good relationship. They had progressed over the years to a more harmonious balance from that first meeting where one had been distressed and guilt-ridden and the other unconscious. Now that was a story they could tell their grandchildren…

*

Elizabeth Maria Brown was the only child of her parents, and probably would therefore have been much spoilt by over-indulgence had not her father been carried away by consumption when she was but a year old. The people of the small town of Cranford where they had lived, twenty miles from Milton, had called it indelicate when her mother had remarried three years later, choosing for her second husband none other than the family doctor who had tried his best to save Elizabeth's father.

Neither Elizabeth nor Mrs. Brown cared what other people said. Elizabeth had a father again, a man who was loved by her first for making her mother happy, and then as she got to know him, for his own sake; and Mrs. Brown had through him discovered that the heart was large enough to love again – and though nobody could ever take Mr. Brown's place, Dr. Bennet had made one for himself.

Fifteen years later, after her mother's death, Elizabeth and her stepfather had decided to make the move twenty miles north to Milton. Dr. Bennet's protégé was quite ready and capable of taking over the Cranford practice, and Dr. Bennet had a month previously received an invitation to Milton from an old friend of his from medical academy in Edinburgh, Dr. Donaldson. The latter was thinking of retiring, and could think of no one better to take over his practice than his old friend, he said. Once her mother, a Cranford woman through and through, had died, there was nothing to keep either the doctor or Elizabeth in the little town anymore. Both felt they would be glad of a change to prevent them from dwelling on her mother's death too much.

Nothing was left to be done except to pack and be off directly. Her stepfather left two days before her, to make the house ready and to have Dr. Donaldson introduce him to the people who would be his future patients.

At first she had protested against this and had wanted to arrive in Milton with him, but his reasons for her staying were reasonable and practical, and anyway in two days she was bundled up in a carriage on the way to Milton, loaded with the trunks which contained everything she had ever owned.

She had been to Milton once when she was a little girl, to visit an aunt who was now dead, or so her mother had said. She had no memory of the city, and in any case it was very much changed over the past sixteen years. It was not like Cranford which seemed ever to be the same; rather it was an ever-changing place, always bursting with new machinery and ideas.

This was the opinion she had formed in the years since it had become her home. At the time she had simply been so excited to be finally seeing a new place that she was prepared to overlook the forbidding grey haze that loomed as the city approached, the haze which she soon learnt was due to the smoke from the factories. This did not matter to her: she was nineteen, she was finally seeing a new city and she had not been this happy since before her mother's death.

She was so absorbed in her own thoughts and in taking in the scenery around her that she did not register the coachman's shout of 'Watch out, man!'. She did not realize anything was wrong until she felt the carriage swerve sharply, causing her trunk which was sitting on the luggage rack behind her head, to slide towards her and slam into the side of her head. For a few moments, she was vaguely aware of the feeling of something warm and wet trickling down the side of her face as well as a pair of anguished blue eyes watching her, eyes which were set in a face she could not quite make out through the haze in her head and the glass of the carriage window, but then her eyes rolled back into her head and she sank into nothingness.

*