Mr Bennet's Daughter

by timunderwood9

Mrs. Bennet fled from Longbourn with her lover and Jane two months after Elizabeth was born, leaving little Elizabeth behind with Mr. Bennet. Mr. Bennet dedicated his life to raising Elizabeth. He had loved Elizabeth dearly from the first time he picked his little girl up and she smiled her baby smile at him, and grabbed at his sideburns.

11. Chapter 11

Mr. Darcy had done his best to keep up a fast pace while walking with Mr. Bennet, so that Bingley would have his opportunity.

He felt vomitous inside, but he knew he did the right thing by not interfering between them.

By now Mr. Bennet knew Darcy well enough to recognize that his mood was not the best, but Darcy had good hopes that Mr. Bennet did not know what his ill mood consisted of. For the first several minutes of their walk Mr. Bennet allowed Darcy to not speak.

The day was beautiful and sunny, but the ground in many places was still damp from recent rains that had come down for five days straight. Much of the fallen leaves had been washed into the swelling streams, and the ground was a rich healthy brown covered in grasses and bushes, that promised fertile growth in spring. Perhaps by spring Elizabeth would begin to swell with another man's child.

If she had flirted with him, or done something to suggest to him that she had some love for him, any wisdom he may have had would not have stopped him from pursuing her. But she talked to him seriously and cleverly, about matters that interested them both, and with Bingley she spoke like an infatuated fool.

It was clear who she preferred.

Darcy had horrible visions of Elizabeth delightedly squealing as Mr. Bingley asked her to make him the happiest man in the world. Bingley would probably make some fool gesture, like falling to his knees, and the muddy dirt would ruin his pants, and Bingley's valet would complain about his master to the other servants for three days straight.

They wouldn't stay happy either. They were badly matched, Elizabeth was too clever, and Bingley could not speak to the matters that Darcy saw lie deepest in her soul.

But that thought was simply something like the fox spurning the grapes. It was beneath him.

"Darcy." Mr. Bennet at last spoke firmly. "You've had time enough to brood. What is eating your mind?"

Darcy flushed and looked at Mr. Bennet. He wore a fine heavy black overcoat that kept him so warm in the early winter, that he wore it open, showing the blue coat he wore inside, and a fine silk waistcoat. Two pockets of Mr. Bennet's overcoat bulged with small books covered by carefully buttoned pockets, presumably Mr. Bennet would read those books on his walks when the lack of company and the weather permitted him.

Darcy shrugged.

Mr. Bennet had a slightly sardonic smile. "Doesn't do much good to pretend there isn't anything bothering you. None of your confidences, but I heard snatches of your conversation with Lizzy the other day. When I was sick. You are bothered with some matter, and you have already brooded upon it, like the Lord brooded over the waters."

"I perhaps have worried myself this entire time upon the wrong matter, and this… Byronic brooding you accuse me of —"

"I did not compare you to one of that scribblers strangely unhappy and insensible philanderers. You don't have the character of a Byron at all."

Darcy blinked. "I am not sure whether to wish I could be a Byron, or happy that I am not. In this brooding upon matters from the summer… I have ignored thoughts about matters today, until it is too late."

"Never too late to be happy. Never too late. That is why Byron is a nitwit. He'll never be happy, and it is his own bloody fault."

With loud branch crackling footsteps, a footman from the house ran up to Mr. Bennet. "Sir, sir. Visitors have called and Mrs. Hill wanted you to be found to speak to them as soon as possible."

"What is their business?"

The footman shrugged. "Mrs. Hill did not explain. But I gained an impression it was some hurry." Mr. Bennet glanced backwards to where Elizabeth and Mr. Bingley strolled through the wilderness behind them.

"I might as well see who this —" Mr. Bennet began by speaking to Darcy, but then turned to the footman. "Do you know anything about my caller? What sort of gentleman is he?

"Three ladies, sir."

Mr. Bennet strode quickly towards the back entrance of Longbourn. Darcy followed him, slightly awkwardly, not sure if he should leave Mr. Bennet to greet his guests without company. But then he would be expected to rejoin Mr. Bingley and Elizabeth, and he really did not wish to do that.

"Anything else you can say about my callers?" Mr. Bennet sharply asked the footman. "Beyond their female nature?"

"Two young and one old, and one of the younger is more than passing pretty."

The footman had a distant look in his eyes, like he wanted to lick his lips, but knew he should not show too much attraction to a gentlewoman in front of his employer.

Mr. Bennet blinked and frowned as he came up to the door. "I wonder…"

He shook his head, as though throwing the idea away.

Mr. Bennet let himself in and hung his coat on a fine walnut rack. He then sat down to quickly wipe any mud off his boots.

"I can go elsewhere," Darcy said as he followed suit, taking off his coat and cleaning his boots. "If you think you ought to greet your new guests without additional company."

"Aren't you curious about the girl labelled particularly pretty?"

Darcy shook his head. In truth he had not the slightest care at this moment for any girl who was not Elizabeth Bennet.

Mr. Bennet laughed, and led the way to his drawing room. A few female voices were speaking on the other side of the door, one of them Darcy thought was Mrs. Hill the housekeeper.

Mr. Bennet knocked and entered without waiting for more than a second.

Besides the Bennets' housekeeper who nervously wrung her hands together as she looked towards the master of the house, there were three women.

The first to catch Darcy's eye naturally was the one who the footman had noticed: A blond beauty, with the most perfect facial features and clearest skin that Darcy had ever seen. Even in a plain travelling dress, she shined.

She looked towards Mr. Bennet as she rose to greet the new entrants to the room with some strange intensity; with the girl's beauty Darcy almost thought that expression could inspire a painting by Gainsborough, or a poem by Byron.

The other young woman in the room was barely more than a child, though she was tall and well formed, with attractive features, but nothing that marked her as particularly special. Except her nose looked just like Elizabeth's.

The final woman looked to be in the middle of life, and she had strangely familiar features. They all did. The mother (so Darcy assumed her to be) was blond like the beauty, and she had lines around her eyes that suggested she tended to smile and laugh, though she did neither now as she looked with a tilted curious expression towards Mr. Bennet. She was dressed in the stuffy, sober, and well made clothes which the families of tradesmen tended to prefer.

Mr. Bennet stared at her first with a confused frown, and then his face turned wary and cold.

"Good day, Mr. Bennet." The woman spoke with a firm voice.

Mr. Bennet stared at her for what seemed like an eternity. He then looked at the angelic yellow haired girl, with a strange expression that combined both longing and disgust. "She looks just like you did at that age." The girl smiled at him, and her smile transformed her into something more than simply breathtaking, but Mr. Bennet looked almost pained. He turned back towards the older woman, "I confess surprise upon seeing you once more, Mrs. Yates."

It still took Darcy half a minute before he realized who these almost familiar people were.

This was Elizabeth's mother and her sisters.

Mrs. Yates — Elizabeth's mother — stepped closer to Mr. Bennet and gestured at the beautiful woman. "This is Jane; don't you wish to meet your daughter, at last?"

The young woman stepped forward, and hesitantly curtsied to Mr. Bennet. "Hello, I am very… pleased to meet you, sir." She had a hesitant musical voice and a strong Newcastle dialect, with a tendency to speak the last syllable of each word very softly.

"Jove!" Mr. Bennet exclaimed at a whisper. He was pale and rattled. "The very likeness of you two decades ago. Like when I saw you for the first time."

"I hope," Miss Jane said, appearing unsettled by Mr. Bennet's being filled with memories that could not be pleasant, "that… that I would very much like to know you. Better, sir."

"Would you now?" Mr. Bennet frowned at her. "I hope you shall not fill my ears with any tales of how much you wish to hear about classical literature."

The girl shook her head mutely, a little confused. "Not at all."

"Don't look at me in that manner. Jove! You must hear this often; you look so very much like your mother. Much like her…" Mr. Bennet appeared confused, as if he had a sense that it was his duty to determine what would be said at this unexpected meeting with his apparently shy daughter, who he had not seen for twenty years, but he had no sense of what to say. At last he said gruffly. "Do you like to read at all?"

The girl smiled, "A little… mostly from the circulating libraries." She hung her head slightly at that confession. "I know that you are very learned, while I am not."

"Good God! Good God! Your mother had the very same manner. The very same when I met her." He looked at Mrs. Yates. "So out with it. No games, I am too old and too tested by life now to be fooled by your pretences. Why are you here?"

"Can I not wish to see my daughter, at last, and have you to see Jane once more?"

"After all this time? Why now — where is Mr. Yates?"

A flash of pain twisted Mrs. Yates's forehead and cheeks. "Two yards under in our parish churchyard these six months."

"Oh." Mr. Bennet drew in a deep breath. He seemed taken aback and not sure what to say. He said with a lopsided grimace, "And he was ten years my junior. Too young to die. My sorrow for your loss, Mrs. Yates. I know he made you happy, and you made him happy likewise, and that is worth something."

Mrs. Yates brushed at the corner of her eye. "Thank you. That is very kind of you… surprisingly kind."

"Yes, well." Mr. Bennet looked aside and tugged at one of his long sideburns. "What happenstance brings you to the south?"

Darcy had a suspicion, a suspicion he suspected Mr. Bennet shared: That Mrs. Yates wanted money in some form now that her husband could no longer support her.

"You are suspicious. You must want to meet Jane. It would be unnatural not to. I want to see Elizabeth — you've kept her from her mother all these years, never allowing her to —"

"It was her choice since she was fifteen. I suggested she write to you if she wished. It has been her choice since then. But I suppose…" Mr. Bennet looked at Jane. "My blood. My daughter. Yes… we will never be like if I had raised you. I have always considered," Mr. Bennet replied, "That you are far more her daughter than mine, and that was what it meant when I did not chuse to set the law to seize you and return you."

"I do, I do wish to know you better," Miss Jane said sweetly. "While Mr. Yates raised me, I always wanted to know you as well, a little."

Mrs. Yates said, "It was very kind of you to not demand Jane."

"Elizabeth was mine. I had a notion there was more fairness in this, that each of us kept a girl. And you must have considered it fairer as well, and you had scrupled not to steal my Elizabeth from her father."

"Yes…" Mrs. Yates said in a hesitant manner that gave Darcy the certain suspicion that was not why she left Elizabeth.

"And this is Yates's child." Mr. Bennet inspected the other girl who looked to be about the same age as Georgiana, or a little younger. She smiled back at Mr. Bennet with a mischievousness which gave Darcy a thought of Elizabeth. "You only have the one girl?"

"The Lord saw fit that Mary and Kitty both were taken from us as children."

Mr. Bennet nodded soberly.

And then suddenly, the sounds of their bustling at the entrance to the house having been unnoticed by all in the tension, Bingley and Elizabeth entered the drawing room.

Elizabeth wore a rosy blush. Though he did not like the thought, Darcy interpreted the color in her face as a clear sign. She had been asked, and she had given the happy, for her and for Bingley, reply.

Darcy's heart suddenly hammered wildly, as he waited in terror to hear her loudly announce what her choice had been.

"Hello," Elizabeth glanced around the room and stuck her hand towards the Mrs. Yates, without really looking at her. Darcy knew her well enough by now. Her mind was elsewhere than on these visitors. "It is a delight, I am sure to meet you."

Mrs. Yates took her hand, gazing at her hungrily. Darcy could see that the older woman's heart was in her eyes. "Lord! Yes, it is a delight to see you."

Mr. Bennet sighed. "Lizzy, this is Mrs. Yates."

"Who?" Then Elizabeth's gaze snapped back to the woman. "Oh."

Her face went pale, and she sharply pulled the hand she had extended in greeting away. She studied the woman with the dead stare of a fish. "You mean to communicate that this woman is…"

"Yes, Elizabeth. Your female progenitor."

Elizabeth's countenance was suffused with an angry snarl. She sucked in a sharp breath and took a small step backwards.

Darcy felt something crack in his heart, in pain for her.

"This adulterous thing…" Elizabeth snarled. "The… the… the slut. The whore — why did you not throw her out the instant she called! Why not!"

Mrs. Yates blinked. "You ought not know those words."

"Out, out! Throw, her, out."

"Lizzy… if you wish to avoid your mother completely, that is your choice. But while I yet am master here, you shall not make orders about who may or may not visit. And you must wish to meet your sister, Jane. Also your other sister." Mr. Bennet gestured at the other girl, who was half grinning, as though she could not decide if this whole event was a great joke or something to feel badly about.

Elizabeth's eyes darted wildly.

She looked between her father, Darcy and Bingley. "I do not wish to know her. I do not choose to know her." She looked pleadingly at Darcy. "I don't want to acknowledge her." She pointed at Mrs. Yates. "You are not my mother. I have no mother!"

"Elizabeth," The woman said, with eyes that were shiny with tears. "I am. I am your mother, I held you in my arms as a babe, and I —"

"Not my mother!" Elizabeth clenched and unclenched her fists rhythmically. Elizabeth gasped for breath, and Darcy was frightened for her. Would she faint from the tension? Her hands closing and opening. Closing and opening. Like claws. Elizabeth actually trembled.

Darcy looked at Bingley.

Bingley, bring comfort and support to Elizabeth; if he was going to marry Elizabeth, it was to be his duty to take care of her, whilst she remained in this shocked state.

Bingley gave not the slightest attention to Elizabeth.

Instead Darcy's friend gazed upon the radiant Miss Jane. And without paying the slightest attention to Elizabeth, in what seemed to Darcy to be one of the worst moments in his own life, as he imagined what Elizabeth must feel to watch this, Mr. Bingley walked up to Miss Jane, and with a bow said to Mr. Bennet. "You must introduce me to your guests."

He smiled his most winning smile at Miss Jane, who blushed and looked down, and then back up at him through her pretty eyelashes.

Mr. Bennet frowned.

Elizabeth was hyperventilating.

Mr. Bennet ignored Mr. Bingley and stepped close to Elizabeth. He put his arm around her shoulders. "My dear, my dear. You are overwrought. But these are your sisters, you should make their acquaintance, and you should —"

"I have no sister!" She flinched away from her father and shouted at Jane. "You aren't a sister! You aren't anything but the one who abandoned Papa with the, the, the whore. The slut. The, the, the… not my mother!"

She wrung her hands together violently, and tears streamed down Elizabeth's face. She hugged herself and rocked from side to side and flinched away from her father defensively when he tried to hug her again. "Papa, just… just order them out. Please. Papa."

Her voice was a plaintive wail. Darcy received a pointed reminder that despite Elizabeth's beauty, cleverness, and poise, Miss Bennet was a young miss in merely her twentieth year, and she now was faced by a test different from what she ever had before.

"Lizzy, deal, Lizzy." Mr. Bennet gestured downwards repeatedly, as though he were trying to push Elizabeth's emotions down and away with his hands. "Calm yourself, Lizzy. I beg you."

Mrs. Yates stood in a corner of the room near the bookshelf that kept the Latin poets and historians. Her hand was pressed against her cheeks. She shook her head. "My poor Lizzy is gone with hysterics." Her voice was kindly, but Darcy could a sharp edge of hurt in her. "Happens to many women. Happens I know. She just isn't thinking yet. Just not thinking." Mrs. Yates stared longingly at Elizabeth. "Saw my sister-in-law once like this. When they brought her husband back from the mines, broken and dead. Gave her a good slap to wake her to her senses, I did. Lord! You should shake my poor daughter. Break her out of the hysterics, Mr. Bennet. That's what she needs, not words."

"I'm not your daughter!"

Despite herself Mrs. Yates flinched.

Elizabeth's eyes landed on Darcy. They were pathetic and pleading. "I'm not her daughter. Not in any way that matters. You know that I'm not her daughter."

Darcy felt helpless. He had no words to help her. No more than Mr. Bennet did.

And then Elizabeth ran from the room. Hard footsteps pounding on the ground, and then the front door slammed.

Mrs. Yates sadly shook her head. "Poor girl. I deserve it. I do. I never wanted to leave her. Had no choice… Lord! Had no choice. Oh! If only. If only I could have taken my little Elizabeth with me!"

Bingley looked fixedly upon the door Elizabeth had run through, wide eyed and pale.

Damn you, man, follow after her, make sure Elizabeth is aright. You claim to love her.

"You, madam, were an adulterer," Mr. Bennet said sharply. "You had no business raising any child, especially not my Elizabeth."

Mrs. Yates had also been staring at the door, with tears leaking around her eyes.

"Pshaw." She wiped away the tears, and flapped her hand dismissively. "Lord, from this display I am not at all sure you gave so fine an education to my Elizabeth as I thought you had."

Mr. Bennet muttered something irritable in reply, that Darcy did not catch. He stared at the door for a long moment, and then Mr. Bennet sighed. "I'll not be able to catch her if she does not want to speak. She rather thinks poorly of you. More poorly, I dare say, than even you deserve. And you deserve a full load of scorn."

"And now you no longer scruple to say what you think!" Mrs. Yates laughed loudly in a way that Darcy thought was unsettled, "Heavens! We both of us are fortunate I did not remain your wife. One of us would have driven the other to jump through a wall. Admit it. Admit it, Mr. Bennet, you hated the marital state."

"The mode in which I conducted myself as your husband, It is not a matter I am not proud of, but…" Mr. Bennet tightened his jaw. "I made a serious error of judgement when I married you. But your behavior… your crime was worse than mine."

"No. Was not. I know the text of the marriage ceremony by heart: Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honour, and keep her." She grinned at Mr. Bennet, as though she struck an irrefutable blow against him. "Lord! You violated your vows at least as greatly as I violated mine. I'll not let you claim the less objectionable character when I broke one vow out of love and you broke many out of contempt."

"Fanny, you presented a false character to me prior to our marriage. I once had the whole story out of your father. Your mother making you to practice listening to the dullest speeches possible while you practiced a pretence of interest. You claimed to care for those matters I cared for. You lied to me. That I reneged on the terms of our marital contract after I found I had been sold a false load of goods — I had some moral excuse to not continue to comfort and honour you once I learned you were entirely different in reality from the woman I imagined that I was marrying when I spoke those words."

Mrs. Yates giggled agitatedly. "Lord! I forgot that. Twenty years now, and — I confess it — I have thought with disgust on your behavior towards me, I am not so lost to society that I feel no compunctions. But never once did I remember until today that nonsense practicing Mama made me to do."

"Your lies were not nonsense, Mrs. Yates." Mr. Bennet replied severely. "Certainly not to me."

"No." The woman replied soberly. "They were not. You have some excuse in that for the way you treated me. You ought to remarry — at least risk the state. Very few women are such as I was at that age."

Mr. Bennet appeared rather taken aback by her agreement. He said nothing for a period of several breaths. Then he shrugged. "You did very wrong by me."

"Lord! I did. In many ways. I'll not blame my mother, she had her due of blame, but I knew it was wrong to marry you. Heavens, though. We'll go nowhere if we gnaw the past forever. And the end was fortunate, favorable for both of us — but it doesn't change that you are right. Lord! I was sixteen when I married you. Eighteen when I fell in love with my Mr. Yates, and nineteen when you threw me out of the house, and away from my daughter, who you raised to hate me."

"I did not." Mr. Bennet replied severely. "I neither threw you from the house, nor raised Elizabeth to hate you. You often misremember the past to serve your sense that you did less evil than you did."

"You as good as threw me from the house. You said I'd never be able to see my daughters!"

"And would you have stayed if I hadn't?"

Mrs. Yates shrugged. "Lord, I suppose I would not have — And I ought not have stayed. I would have done a far greater wrong, a wrong to us both, if I had stayed. You deserved a chance to marry a woman who actually liked the nonsense about Greek you liked to spout on, and I was for the twenty years of my marriage with Mr. Yates the happiest woman in England."

"Then, in that case, do not blame Elizabeth for disliking you for leaving your marital duties."

Moment by moment a frantic pressure built in Darcy. Someone must go after Elizabeth. He knew why Mr. Bennet did not. She had just chosen to run from his attempt to comfort her.

But beyond anything else, Darcy felt deep in his soul that she should not be entirely alone at this moment. Sufficiently alone to be with her own thoughts. But not so alone that she could imagine herself friendless.

Why hadn't Bingley run after her immediately?

As Darcy thought that, Mr. Bingley spoke to Miss Jane once more, now that the conversation had quieted, and with his smiling bow he said, "Enough of arguments and disputes. I despise them. I am very pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Jane, I believe? I heard you hail from Newcastle? Lot of coal up there, but you look as fresh and pretty as an angel, none of the soot in your skin."

The young woman giggled in reply. "That is because we bathe in the north. Do you also bathe here in the south?"

Bingley laughed loudly in reply, and his look at Miss Jane was, to Darcy's eyes completely smitten.

What Fitzwilliam Darcy felt in that instant was an entirely new sensation. He had never before, not even when Wickham had nearly eloped with Georgiana, wished to bash in the head of a fellow man.

Without word to either his host or to the other guests, Darcy left the room, and left the building to look for Elizabeth.