No mother. She had no mother. Not her mother.

Good heavens. That woman had looked like her mother would have, if she had had a mother.

If she had a mother.

Despite the cold wind which blew through her wool dress, Elizabeth kept her pelisse folded, swinging side to side on her arm as she walked back and forth under a line of trees with a woodsman's path cut through them that belonged to Longbourn. In the summer Elizabeth often read under these trees, walking as she read, as she delighted being surrounded by the profusion of growth and all the smells of spring.

She wanted a familiar, secure surrounding.

Her body felt sore and tense as the sensation which meant she needed to leave the room slowly left her blood. She had sweated through the dress under her armpits, and if that woman ever left, she would have a proper bath drawn tonight for her, and sit in the big tub they owned, luxuriating for at least forty five minutes.

The wind made her shiver, but she ignored such sensations.

Papa would permit that woman to return, and live out of Longbourn with that pretend sister who was much too beautiful and who Bingley stared at. And Longbourn would no longer remain her house, and she would have no place to go, because she belonged to no one but Papa, and she refused to have any truck, barter or exchange with that woman.

Rapid walking, back and forth.

The path she agitatedly followed was a hundred yards long, and she occasionally tripped in her current furor over the roots of the trees. Her ankles and knees ached from her uncomfortable and cramped stride.

Not mine. Not mine. Not mine.

Not my mother.

And when she spun on her foot and turned once more, she saw Mr. Darcy there. He sat on the hard ground against a tree, facing slightly away from the corridor she walked along, and he had held a small book which he made a pretence of reading.

Elizabeth was sensible of her strong affection and gratitude for Mr. Darcy, with his long legs spread out before him, his thick curly hair, and his serious face.

She slowly rambled near to him and settled herself on the rocky ground beside him.

He glanced at her and smiled slightly, but he said nothing. Elizabeth put her arms around her knees for several minutes. She became calmer and easier with him here. The perturbed state of mind she had been in began to recede. She could think once more.

She had never imagined she would meet that woman. The venom in her thoughts had lessened, but the face in her memory, the countenance of Mrs. Yates, still angered her. Elizabeth had determined that she wanted nothing to do with the woman who had betrayed her father. And then that woman had decided she wanted something to do with her.

It was simple.

Elizabeth should just politely and calmly say that she would have no todo with her, and then the matter would be over. After all, Mrs. Yates… that woman… Mrs. Yates was not truly her mother. Not in any way that mattered.

So why hadn't she?

The fallen leaves had piled up high on the ground. The dark brown wrinkled and edged bark of the oak trees. The nest of a bird high above them. The big stump of a tree that had been removed to create the path through the woods. She sometimes sat on that stump and looked up at the sky.

She looked up at the sky.

It was very blue, with a few white fluffy clouds high up. A bright cheery day. But a cold wind blew across everything, making a lie of the clear shining sun.

Perhaps Mrs. Yates had looked out the window of her carriage as she trundled up the road from Meryton to Longbourn, and she had noticed the sun, and perhaps the beauty of a circling hawk, noble and high in its freedom, and decided that such a fine day was an excellent omen.

The Romans had been fools to trust omens.

She was cold and starting to shiver, so Elizabeth stood up again so she could fit on her pelisse, though it didn't really warm her up yet, now that she had gotten cold in the first place. She reseated herself upon the grassy ground and noticed Darcy's eyes on her.

She smiled at him, weakly.

He cautiously smiled back at her.

"But as concerning motherhood," Elizabeth said in a Socratic matter, "what is it?"

Darcy smiled at her. "And what do you see motherhood as principally containing?"

"It cannot simply be that the woman bore me from her womb. For say, had Papa remarried, and if I had come to love my step mother, and to see her as having raised me, and if I had called her mother, then she would be far more truly my mother than that woman.'

Darcy pursed his lips, sensibly thinking through what he thought on the matter before making a reply. It was a fine specimen of the way he thought, and what made Elizabeth to admire him so fully.

"Thus," Elizabeth went on without waiting for Darcy to speak, "The connection of a parent to a child in flesh, that connection of body, that cannot be a correct definition of motherhood."

Mr. Darcy's smile was now rather sad. Elizabeth saw how she must appear to him, speaking Plato's lines, not to gain the consolation of philosophy, but simply so she could distance herself from that raw hurt in her stomach.

"You cannot… her sins do not… suppose one has wronged another." Darcy did not look at her as he spoke. But he picked up a rock and tossed it lightly against a tree trunk. "That does not in general modify the fundamental relations that stand betwixt them. A man who is a great criminal, he remains yet an Englishman, he remains yet a human, and he remains yet a child of his parents."

So Darcy disagreed with her.

Darcy was like Papa, he thought she should at least talk to that woman. Well she wouldn't. And not because she couldn't face her. Mrs. Yates was not really her mother. "Should a man betray his king, then he ceases to be an Englishman. For example, once the rebellion was carried out to success, the inhabitants of the colonies ceased to be English subjects, and they became members of their new nation."

"So by analogy?" Darcy asked.

"Yes, by analogy, my moth — that woman's crime was such that she betrayed the notion of motherhood."

Darcy sighed. He put the book he'd been reading back in his pocket. "And which crime was that?"

Elizabeth suddenly remembered what he had told her. This meant something to him too. "Not your mother's crime," she replied, "But the other one. Where she…"

"Where she abandoned you? But have you not always declared that you are happy she did so?"

"She shouldn't have left at all."

Darcy sighed and ran his hand through his thick dark hair. "She had little choice. I gained that much knowledge from what I heard."

"She had a choice. She had a choice to not… not… not act like a decadent Roman woman with that law clerk."

"And then we are back to the claim that it was the sin my mother committed. But this is hardly a correct notion," Darcy spoke with the words from a Socratic dialogue, but Elizabeth could tell from the tone of his voice that there was nothing cold or detached about his feelings. "For a crime against the husband of a woman cannot be a betrayal of the child she conceives through that crime. Your first argument established that my father was yet the father, or at least a father of my sister. My argument here establishes that my mother was yet my sister's mother and my mother. This betrayal of my father, of her wedding vows… it was not a repudiation of me."

"My mother did repudiate me!"

Elizabeth's voice startled a small flock of birds who rose into the air, flapping their wings. And before her eyes, a hawk circling high in the sky saw one of the small songbirds she had startled, and swooped down to it, striking it from the air, and then rising again, the massive wings flapping, with the dying animal in its grasp.

Darcy watched that scene somberly. He then turned towards her. "She did not wish to leave you, and she was in a painful position."

"It… it does not matter."

"What is the nature of crime? Are there degrees to crime? When a person, who has everything steals, do we not consider that as wronger than when a person who sees no —"

"Enough! Maybe I am not a good philosopher, but I beg you, say what you mean in plain English."

Darcy replied drily, with that tiny quirked smile of his, "You were the first to use the Socratic manner of speaking."

Unexpected to herself Elizabeth started laughing. And then she began to cry.

And then, hesitantly, but after a moment firmly, Mr. Darcy held her and let her cry against his shoulder. And he then handed her his handkerchief so that she could blow her nose in it, and she gratefully did.

Elizabeth stared down at the handkerchief. There was some embroidery on it, but she could not see the difference between the color of the embroidered threads and the handkerchief itself. "Which is red and which is green," she asked. "The initials or the cloth?"

"The cloth is red." Darcy replied with a slight smile. "I confess I'd half forgotten that you suffer from Daltonism."

Elizabeth nodded with a sad smile. She still looked at the cloth. "Odd, I hate her so, when her crime is so modest." She sighed and put the handkerchief on her lap and looked up at him. "I have been reading Suetonius. The sort of immoralities and obscenities enjoyed by the emperors of Rome. My mother is nothing next to them."

"No, she is merely a woman, a woman did very wrongly to your father, and who admits the injustice of her behavior herself."

Elizabeth sighed. She could not determine any longer which emotion was predominate in her. It no longer was anger. Mayhap fatigue. "What advice might your reason offer upon how I ought relate to my mother?"

"It is not my place to tell you. You must decide yourself. But…"

"And presently," Elizabeth smiled at his clean shaven face and deep eyes, "you shall present me with advice nonetheless."

Darcy laughed. "That is the way such things go. But I simply give advice to myself, that may be relevant to your case. If I could speak yet again to my mother, to inquire of her why… the bond, even as tenuous as it is betwixt you and your mother, that bond which ties a child and a parent, it is not a light thing to be cast aside."

Elizabeth sighed and shifted to stand. Darcy rose to his feet with her.

"I shall take," Elizabeth said, "what you say under consideration."

"You are wise and sensible, you can trust yourself to make a worthy choice whether it is the one I would make or not."

"Can I?"

Darcy touched her on the arm, and it felt natural to have his fingers briefly upon her. "Why do you doubt yourself?"

"What if I am like her? — It has always been in my mind. I have… I do not always wish to do the Christian thing, the proper thing."

"No?"

"I always have had this sense, this sense that my entire life, my entire way of behavior is something I must choose. You recall Aristotle's notion, that a man is like a charioteer drawn by two horses, one his irrational impulses, and the other his reason, and that his fate depends on which he gives free rein to."

"I know the story."

"I feel as though I am such a charioteer, except the one horse, the one I must let run free is the education and influence I receive from my father, whilst the other is the possibility I will become sinful, deceitful and selfish like my mother." She looked at him, begging him in her heart to understand. "I am sensible it mayhap is nonsense, but my anxiety is that I shall become the same as my mother."

"Elizabeth, you… your mother is no irrational horse pulling you. She is your mother."

Something about his tone of voice made her giggle.

"From what I heard her to say, I do not believe she is today any longer… sinful and selfish, as you think of her. She is not who you think her to be. She has learned a clear lesson from her past. At least she gives such appearance. But that matters not. What matters is that you are you, and your life, your fate, it shall be defined by the choices you make. You need not fear your mother's influence."

Elizabeth nibbled upon her lips, and smoothed her hair over her ear again and again. She knew that Darcy said this to help her. But she did not want to see Mrs. Yates yet. She was not ready to face that chance. But she liked very much that he believed in her.

She looked through the woods to the rose bushes that mostly hid the house, with just the chimney visible peeking above them. "I cannot meet her again, not this day." She smiled at him softly. "No matter what you say. But I think I will, one day. Please, would you return inside, and inform me if she yet remains?"

Darcy nodded to her, and stepped away quickly through the trees, and as Elizabeth watched him, admiring the lithe firm movements of his long stride, it struck her that she was falling in love with Mr. Darcy.