The inevitable day came when Jane Hawdry returned hopeless and husbandless to that home in whose four brick walls she was born. The day was cloudy, windy, and cold, with splashing showers that lashed the frosty windows and turned the roads soft.
Elizabeth bestirred herself out into the wild cold with Papa and Mama in a warm violet pelisse perfect for this late autumn, when the trees were almost entirely, but not yet wholly, bare. Sister. She would greet her sister and her unknown nieces. The sound of the bright Bennet carriage, returned from retrieving Jane, ground up the way.
The ample chaise pulled in front of the house, and the driver with a pull on the reins and a clicking sound brought the two horses to a stop. The grooms and the Bennet footman came around to open the gaily painted carriage door. Elizabeth noted that the back of the carriage was piled high with trunks. The detritus of a life in Downling ended now.
And Jane.
Yellow haired, pale, not the slightest color in her face, and something distant in her eyes.
She looked awful.
Elizabeth's heart went out to Jane, seizing up. Jane. Oh poor Jane.
Jane looked as beautiful and young as she ever had: black dress, fringed with black lace, and a dyed black hat. Elizabeth had fallen out of being used to how beautiful her sister was, and she knew that she had lost far more of her youthful bloom than Jane had.
Our heroine considered it unfair that Jane could still be so beautiful when she'd betrayed her own sister.
The one girl was of five, and she jumped out of the carriage to be caught by the footman, and she ran up to Mr. Bennet. "Grandpapa! Grandpapa!"
"Tiny little Lavinia." Papa smiled sweetly at her and picked the small creature up, swinging her into his arms and around.
The girl then exclaimed, while held high in the air, "Papa died!" And she gripped Papa's cravat and cried into his chest.
Jane stepped down from the carriage, letting the footman support her with his hand. She held in her arms her younger daughter, a girl of almost two years, who was sleeping. However the girl woke up from the movement of the descent and begged to be put down.
Instead Mrs. Bennet took her from Jane's arms. "My little Frances! How is my littlest girl?" Mama cooed at the child.
The little girl struggled with her grandmother and started to cry. Mrs. Bennet smothered her with kisses and promised cake.
"Lizzy!" Jane turned to Elizabeth. "Lizzy! Lord! You — you look… you look so well. Oh, my dear Lizzy, how I have missed you!"
Jane threw her arms around Elizabeth.
Elizabeth found she could not. She simply could not, no matter how much Jane grieved, she could not pretend to be happy to see her sister. She could not bring herself to embrace her back, and Elizabeth knew that as a forgiving Christian woman, she was shamed by this inability to act as she ought. As a good Christian would.
Elizabeth simply stood stiff, and let Jane embrace her.
Her sister slowly loosened her grip, sadly. She stepped away, her half dead eyes clouded with pain. "Oh, Lizzy! You do blame me."
Elizabeth could say nothing, to deny Jane's accusation would be to lie and to comfort, neither of which Elizabeth wished to do. To reply would be to accuse an already injured woman of crime. So she said nothing, and in the harsh, perhaps warranted silence, Elizabeth realized refusal to speak was as hard and harsh as any accusation would have been.
The group entered the house, and they retired to the drawing room to talk. Mrs. Bennet sat next to Jane, embracing her repeatedly, and saying, "Oh, but my poor Jane! My poor Jane! And your poor Mr. Hawdry."
Elizabeth watched how her sister reacted to Mr. Hawdry's name. It was not with a deepening of the grief. Just the same sort of deadness, as if some light that had been in Jane was no longer fully there. Killed with the grief of it.
The children, Lavinia and Frances, were kept in the room, rather than sent up to the nursery, even though Mrs. Bennet had engaged a nurse for them, and had been talking about how when Lavinia was another two years older they should hire a governess.
Seemingly she was more concerned for the details of her granddaughter's education than she had been for theirs.
There were questions from Mrs. Bennet about those who she knew from Jane's letters to her in the neighborhood around Downling parsonage. Mr. Bennet asked a few questions as well.
Elizabeth said nothing.
Jane would look at her, almost longingly, from time to time, and Elizabeth looked back, not sure if she was cold or hurt, and she resisted the urge to cuttingly turn her face aside.
At some point the conversation went to matters of money, and Mrs. Bennet said Mr. Bennet would give Jane something to purchase new dresses once her mourning had passed, as all of Jane's modest selection of clothes at present had been dyed black.
Jane had taken the younger girl, Fanny, back, and seated her on her lap.
"Is there — forgive me for asking at such a time." Elizabeth spoke for the first time since they had reentered the house, her voice cracking. She was aware of the formal tone that she kept with a woman who she used to hide under the covers in bed together with laughing and speaking as sweetly as possible. "Can you expect any support from Mr. Hawdry's family for the girls? Anything towards their dowries? Was any money left over?"
Jane looked at her hands. "Nothing. Not which I have awareness of."
She was subdued. All in black, and her long blond ringlets falling over. Nearly thirty and somehow more beautiful than at twenty — she could serve as the depressed blond muse who could inspire an artist or a poet before their untimely death of tuberculosis. She was the very image of a bereft angel. Even Elizabeth had a little of that inspired desire to try to find a situation and character to match the image Jane presented at this moment.
Jane smiled fitfully at Mama and Papa. "I am a charge upon your goodness again."
"After I thought we were done with you all." Mr. Bennet frowned rather annoyedly. "Mr. Hawdry ought have done a better job of providing for you and the children. No use speaking ill of the dead. No use. Though I dare say, in the general the dead deserve more of censure than the rest of us."
"No use. No." Jane's eyes seemed about to cloud with tears again, and she clutched little Fanny tighter to her, until the little person squealed, "Mama!"
"And," Elizabeth asked, as a woman who had been quite willing to speak ill of Mr. Hawdry while alive, and who had not lost that willingness simply due to the shuffling off of the gentleman's mortal coil, "you then have no plans? No expectations? No fortune?"
Jane looked at Elizabeth with a blank face, somehow drained of animation, and the more perfect for it. She lacked her habitual serene smile, and now had a distant look of devastation.
"Lord! You need worry for nothing!" Mrs. Bennet exclaimed. "You are home! Safe and home. We shall take care of you, and your lovely, lovely girls." Mama kissed the top of the head of Lavinia. "We'll see you festooned in ribbons and pretty things, as soon as you leave mourning. And do you want a cake and some honey?"
"Yes, yes," Mr. Bennet said, softly, "I shall be very happy to see you here again, Jane. You are welcome to stay, so long as I live."
"Oh, Papa! You really do not mind?" Jane started to cry, and Mama embraced her and both girls at once, while Papa got up and awkwardly patted Jane on the shoulder.
Elizabeth sat, stiff, stoic and aghast.
She would be the only one who could do something in the end — they would save nothing, do nothing. Mama's own fortune ran to two hundred pounds in a year, and Elizabeth was now — though who knew if such would end in the next quarter — earning more than three hundred per annum. Papa would die. It would fall to her to support Jane and her children, and Mama, and everyone else.
She would never be able to depend on anyone. She would never be allowed to make a mistake. Every book would need to sell, there would be no margin to make a significant mistake in business matters, or they would starve in the hedgerows — or perhaps slip into something worse than genteel poverty.
She should cease to spend what little she did spend from the profits of her writing on her own interests, subscriptions, friends, and the like.
They could depend on her — she would let them depend on her. But she could not depend on them.
Our heroine in miserable mood left the house and walked outside in the now freezing evening rain, turning endless circles near Longbourn. Round and round in the wilderness, her feet crunching on the pebbles and grasses.
The cold wind helped her think clearer.
The accounts could not sum.
No one made enough from writing to be able to support her mother and her sister, and her sister's daughters as gentlewomen. Five women, inclusive of herself. She could support herself happily and comfortably. Several of her literary friends had offered her places to stay, and without the need to remain socially acceptable, Elizabeth was quite willing to let all appearances go.
For an author the outside environment didn't matter so much.
She needed a room of her own, pen, paper, and coffee. The occasional chocolate and taste of rum or a hot punch would be nice, but not required.
That was it.
All she needed for a happy life. And her friends, but writers and poets, assumed their friends would be short on money, and making shift as they must. Dresses dyed into a new color, clothes stitched back together, living in some attic garret that froze in the winter and sweated in the summer — they were almost points to brag upon.
Elizabeth had set nearly a thousand aside in the consols from the profits of her books. She had too much money already to ever be properly praised for poetic poverty.
But her family, yet having hopes outside of their own imagination, they needed more.
She wished… she wished she could throw this burden on someone else.
The rain had ceased, and there was a glint of sunlight, reddish in the distance, as the sun rapidly sank beneath the horizon. Like she always did, Elizabeth had taken her notebook bound in a waterproof binding.
She sat on a white wooden bench, the paint peeling, in the corner of their garden. She had a need to write again, as a way to forget and ignore her own troubles. It had always been that way. She had only truly begun to write after Jane's correspondence was denied to her, as a way of letting go of her angry emotions.
Even after it became too dark to see the page before her, Elizabeth sat and scribbled, writing, and writing, quickly and confidently, and for that time she did not think at all of Jane, or her fears for the future, or anything at all.
Her hands became stiff from the falling cold, and a light rain, quickly becoming stronger, started up once more. Elizabeth closed the notebook and reentered the house by the back door. She quietly went up to her warm room, set more logs in the stove, and stirred it into a pleasant blaze. Elizabeth sat before the fine china inlaid rosewood desk which Papa had bought for her.
A pretty desk, perfectly sized for her form, and she liked it very much.
Elizabeth looked again through the sheaf of notes she'd taken for the scheme of the story.
In the end, the heroine would, after she had fallen in love with a noble and good man, be prevented from marrying him. His high family expected more from him, and he must do as he was required, honor and duty required he marry another woman. It was impossible for anything else to happen.
But… at this moment… Elizabeth did not wish to write a story that ended unhappily.
She wanted them to fall into each other's arms.
It was like her desire to cry about Jane, and about how she could not ignore the rest of the world, and abandon her family to their fates.
Elizabeth placed a thick piece of paper before her. She began to write a scene from the end of the book. Where the man arrived and told her that his family now required he marry the heiress, to save the estate, and to protect the honor of their ancient name.
Except instead of Elizabeth's own voice sounding for the words of the man, suddenly he spoke in Mr. Darcy's sharp tones. And suddenly he demanded the right and he claimed the need to care for her.
His speech began when he claimed there was nothing he could do. No chance to escape these bounds with honor. But he ended desperately begging her to marry him, to no longer shoulder her own burdens, to say that though they both would be hurt by others, that he chose her. He chose her beyond family, beyond name, beyond duty. Beyond every concern.
She would no longer need to bear all the weight of her own life on her own back. That was what he promised.
And then, as Elizabeth wrote almost unwillingly, the woman, this character she identified with more closely than any heroine she had written since Miss Bretton in Fashion Exposed:
She looked bleak eyed at Mr. Hamilton, and she said in mournful tones, "Sir, I thank you. I thank you, sir, exceedingly for the great honor of your request. And I am most sensible — But… oh. Oh, I wish not to cause any painful heartache in you. But it is entirely impossible for me to make an acceptance of your request to me. For in these past months, I have learned that others cannot be trusted. That no man can be relied upon, and neither a woman. I am alone, I shall remain alone, and I alone these burdens will bear. I need no other support than my own character."
And Miss Honorius raised her hand to stop Mr. Hamilton's reply. "In this matter I am settled and decided, beyond any chance of modification. You know you must not marry me for your own sake, and for my own sake, I do not wish it. I beg you, sir, I beg you as you claim you love me leave me now, and do not speak upon this matter anymore. As you respect me, go and let me alone as I must remain."
And with his sad sight on her, he tilted his head to her in gesture of parting, and with sodden slow step, stepped out into the sad September air.
Miss Honorius collapsed onto the divan once the door doomed them both with its dead closing thud.
"Come back," she whispered at the dead door. "I meant it not. Please come back."
With a puff of air the spell of writing left Elizabeth and she pushed the paper away.
She touched her cheeks, they were wet.
This was not the only time she had cried unknowingly while writing. But this was the first time she had ever written a heroine to wish rationally for a gentleman.
What was wrong with her?
Elizabeth's chest was tense with the passion from the writing of the scene. She stood, and paced twice back and forth, before opening the door. Another walk. She needed another walk, even though it was already completely dark.
At least, Elizabeth thought, her audience would probably like the mournful scene.