A/N: I once again must thank all of you for the tremendous response. In return, you get three chapters today, but there is a price. These three are pivotal, but expect a surprise.
Looking back on the evening, I had to wonder why I had not perceived more about the woman. Mrs. Collins had been about the parsonage for nearly a year, and had only visited me a few times, with that apparently under duress. Such an action was nearly inconceivable to me, as everyone with my purview typically showed me the respect that was due to my station. I thought her an ill-mannered, probably poorly-bred and poorly-raised specimen, right up until the moment when I could no longer carry that opinion. That moment came upon me quite suddenly and unexpectedly; and it would be quite some time before I really understood what triggered my change of attitude.
My nephew Fitzwilliam Darcy had missed his annual Easter visit to Rosings for understandable enough reasons, but then dillydallied around for most of the rest of the year. When he finally did appear, he may as well have stayed in town for all I saw of him. He came to Rosings on Friday with a look indicating he would just as soon kill someone is have supper, and he was not even as polite to me as he usually was; which was just barely civil. He spared Anne hardly a glance, before retiring to his room, even going so far as to send his valet off before supper, demanding a tray and solitude for the evening. Arriving on foot was the very least of his surprises for the day. Where was his carriage, or at least his horse?
The next two days he wandered around Rosings in a thunderous mood. On Saturday he spent most of the day in the library looking through various legal books left by my late husband, and took all of his meals away from the family; still in as black a humor as I had ever seen. The only time he came out of the library was to call for an express rider, who he instructed for a half-hour before sending him off to town; an act he repeated with three different riders over the course of the following two days.
On Sunday we went to church as usual. The sermon was delivered by the curate assigned by the Bishop, who unlike his predecessor simply delivered the classic sermons in an efficient and workmanlike manner. Darcy again showed himself incapable of holding even the simplest conversation with anybody, although he kept staring at Mrs. Collins in the rector's pew. He then hid himself in his room for the rest of the day, although he did receive express messages in the afternoon, and again early Monday morning, at which point he disappeared entirely again.
By Wednesday evening, I was fed up. I had a suspicion that since he had met Mrs. Collins the year previously, and he seemed to look in her direction frequently in church, he might have reestablished some type of friendship with her; or more likely he was simply performing some type of service, since she was mostly alone and unprotected. He was the consummate gentleman, which meant he would probably see her plight as a duty, and he was not a man to shirk his duty; even if it seemed to pain him more than any casual acquaintance should. It would not particularly explain his mood, or not even close to it, but it would explain his actions. Perhaps that friend of his from trade had done something to Mrs. Collins or one of her apparently numerous sisters. They had been in company the previous winter, and that would leave Darcy to clean up after the man; which would not surprise me.
Mrs. Collins thoroughly astonished me when I accosted her in the parsonage on Wednesday. I had expected her to be ungracious and unfriendly based on our previous lack of interaction, but she disarmed me. She greeted me cordially, with a friendly countenance as if she truly appreciated my attendance. She then proceeded to confuse and befuddle me to the point where I had accepted an invitation to supper, and apparently approved of my nephew calling on her. I must admit that in verbal sparring, I had been thoroughly bested for the first time in years… and I will never admit this to another soul, but I found it refreshing. Nobody else even bothered to try anymore, but Mrs. Collins was not like other young wives.
She even managed to imply that I was incapable of having a simple supper at the parsonage. I had no idea what that would entail, but I assumed it would be bad food, poor company and little conversation. I had seen no evidence of a cook, or any other servants for that matter. She might invite some of her parishioners, or some friends. She even had one of my old servants living in the parsonage with her, and for all I knew she might invite her to dine with us as well.
I was determined that if she was doing all of this to flummox me, she would find herself outfoxed, because I was in no mood to be trifled with myself. As far as I was concerned she could go down to the village, find the first carter, she came to, invite him to table complete with his mule; and I would ask the mule to pass the vegetables. She would find she had engaged a worthier opponent than she assumed.
From a strictly practical standpoint, I actually had no real standing in the parsonage. I was in fact the patroness, but once the appointment had been made, it was made for life. I had almost no say in how the parsonage was run, and only the bishop could remove the sitting rector before his death. The building and its acreage was owned by the church, and part of the living was the remuneration for anything grown on that land. Collins chose to while his time away with mostly ornamental plants, but he would have been well within his rights to farm it or lease it out. I was aware that since Mr. Collins became sick, Mrs. Collins was raising more poultry, growing a larger garden, and otherwise seemingly preparing herself for life after her husband's death. I should not be surprised to find the land under cultivation in the spring.
I had no idea she had discharged every single servant in the parsonage, and was somewhat amazed that she had done so without me becoming aware of it. Perhaps I was not as well-informed as I once thought. She had been here with Mrs. Hewes for months, with nary another servant. Mrs. Hewes knew her way around a kitchen after all her years downstairs at Rosings, so perhaps she was teaching Mrs. Collins how to survive on her own. I doubted she had learned it at home, as she was almost certainly gently bred in the first place, but that was all supposition.
It was immediately clear when I arrived that Friday evening for supper that there was something beyond simple gentlemanly behavior between my nephew and Mrs. Collins, but I could not hazard to guess what it was. They did not seem to be lovers, not that I would ever suspect Darcy of stepping so far outside the bounds of decency. They may well have been friends, but there was entirely too much tension between them when nobody was watching for that to really be the explanation. In my more panicked moments, I thought perhaps Darcy was simply waiting for Mr. Collins to die so he could stake his claim. I had plans for that boy, but after all of the years of cajoling and encouraging, I was coming to believe he would never marry Anne, regardless of what I did.
Mrs. Collins kept no servants at all, so it was left to her and Fitzwilliam to divest us of our wraps, introduce us to her enormous pack of sisters, and generally keep the assemblage company. Georgianna and one of the middle Bennet sisters seem to hit it off quite well, and one of the younger ones seemed quite enamored with Anne. Both of the young ladies were enjoying themselves enormously. That much was obvious with a single glance, and I was happy to see Anne engaged with someone. I begin to wonder, perhaps for the first time in my life, why it was that two young girls of such enormous advantages would find such simple pleasure in spending an evening in a parsonage with a pack of virtual strangers.
Mrs. Collins set the table herself with a few of her sisters, who had apparently appeared unexpectedly only the previous day. I planned to get to the bottom of that story sooner or later as well. It was peculiar for four sisters to show up so precipitously; perhaps unheard of, and it spoke of something going badly wrong at home.
Mrs. Collins and her sisters certainly seemed to have taken it all in stride, because they all looked as if they had lived here for years. All were unfailingly polite to me, and all of the other members of our party. However, I could see some of the girls splitting off and engaging in what appeared to be either more serious or sillier conversations, so perhaps they were already establishing friendships. It was hard to tell with girls of that age.
Fitzwilliam performed the carving appropriately, as the senior-most male member of the present company; so I did not read anything in particular into that act. The fact that he acted like a footman as well should have sent me in the vapors, but I was finding that I had adjusted to life in the parsonage better than I would have expected to in less than an hour. When I crossed the threshold I left the world of my own authority, and entered the world of another's authority. I would consider it the grossest of improprieties and the worst of manners were someone to come into my home and tell me how to run it. I was now a guest in Mrs. Collins' home, and I would follow her protocols. Good breeding and manners demanded no less, and nobody would ever accuse me of lacking either. When Mrs. Collins came to visit Rosings, and make no mistake, her and her sisters would be attending Rosings before the week was out, then she could bend to my rules.
I had just finished a piece of what I presumed must be one of Mrs. Collins chickens, and had to admit that the cooking was most simple, just chicken and rosemary; but it was well done. Fitzwilliam had graciously left his position at the foot of the table, to go behind me and offer me either wine or water. I was just in the process of choosing the wine that was in his right hand…
CRASH… SHATTER… BANG…
I cannot convey the terror that I felt with the sound using only my quill. It cannot be done. I have a dozen pages sitting in the grate where I made the attempt, but none of them do any better than this.
The door slammed open on the far side of the room, the glass in one of the ornaments near the door smashed and fell on the ground, and in walked a man shouting the most vile, heinous language I had ever heard at the top of his lungs.
"YOU HARLOT! YOU WHORE! YOU ADULTRESS! YOU HEATHEN! YOU MISERABLE WRETCH! WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN MY HOME! BEGONE YE HEATHENS! LET THE WRATH OF GOD SMITE YOU WHERE YOU SIT! LEAVE MY HOME, YE SPAWN OF THE DEVIL!"
There was more… much more, but I will neither write it, nor even remember it. It was bad enough, but nowhere near the worst of it.
Mr. Collins had just entered the room, wearing only a nightshirt. He was drooling all over the front of his shirt, his hair was completely askance if he had been in bed for months, and he had an odor that hit my senses and nearly knocked me over, as if it preceded him into the room as a harbinger of doom.
Worse yet, Mr. Collins had a fire poker in his hand, and he was swinging it left and right with all of his might. The sound of the shattering glass had been something destroyed by the poker, and he was advancing inexorably on the table swinging the poker as quickly as he could, indiscriminately as he came. He advanced on the other side of the table so fast nobody could move, everybody was frozen like a hare staring at a hawk… Everybody that is, except for my Anne. She had heard him come in, barely had time to crank her head around so fast I could hardly see it move, and without any apparent conscious thought, she shoved Georgianna on the shoulder so hard she tipped her over directly on top of the middle Bennet sister, Miss Mary.
I saw Georgianna fall over as I let out a very unladylike scream, and it took me a moment to get myself back into regulation. The fire iron, with an end looking as if it'd been sharpened with a whetstone, then dipped in offal, sailed past the exact spot where I am certain Georgianna's head had been only a moment before. Absent Anne's very fast… surprisingly fast… astoundingly fast… reaction, Georgianna Darcy would now be dead.
Unfortunately, the fire iron then proceeded to land directly on Anne's arm, right above the right elbow, and scraped all the way up her arm from elbow to shoulder, before coming out and taking just a slight nip out of her head near the temple.
Surprisingly not screaming in pain, Anne fell backwards on her chair and rolled over, flat on the ground and began bleeding profusely. Perhaps she was not screaming because she had been bled enough times to be familiar with the process, or perhaps she was completely in shock, but I could see that there was no time to waste in getting that bleeding stopped.
All of this happened in such a short sweep of time that all I had managed to do thus far was push my chair back a little bit. I heard almost instantly the crash of the wine and water jugs that Darcy had been carrying, just about the time I saw Mr. Collins sweeping the fire iron back directly at Mary Bennett who had been sitting beside Georgianna, but had started to stand when the assault began. He was well on his way to doing possibly killing her when she was quickly shoved aside by her sister Mrs. Collins, who had run from the head of the table the second Collins came into the room.
Now my screams were joined with everybody else in the rooms as the fire iron slid all the way up Mrs. Collins arm from wrist practically to shoulder, dragging a line of fire along its wake, and then the sharp tip came up and wrapped her very smartly just above the ear, taking out what looked like a large piece of her skull with the sharp edge, and cracking your head with the noise that sounded as if it could be nothing short of fatal.
Right about the time Mr. Collins had started that swing, at almost exactly the same time I heard the carafes that Darcy had been holding crash on the table directly above me, although I would not notice the wine spilled all over me for some time. The destruction of the carafes was followed so quickly you could not even distinguish the two sounds, by Darcy's boots landing in the middle of the table. By the time Collins fire iron had reached Mrs. Collins' arm, Darcy had taken one step across the table and jumped over the heads of his sister and Miss Mary. By the time the fire iron hit Elizabeth on the head, Darcy's fist connected with the man with the force of offended god bent on wrath and destruction. If that strike did not kill the man, I did not know what would because Darcy was absolutely livid, and in a murderous rage to the point where he could barely restrain himself from hitting the man again and again and again.
Darcy moved fast… He moved preternaturally fast, but he had started on the entirely wrong side of the table. It could not have taken him more than three or four seconds to accost the man, but in that time two ladies had been cut down. I would later reflect on how Darcy must feel about his supposed lack of protection, and reckoned my nephew would be chastising himself for years; but I truly thought it more likely a man like Collins should be thought of like a fire or a plague. Nobody could have prepared for this. Who would have believed four physicians of so misjudging a man's condition? I would enjoy seeing the Collins neck in a noose one day, if he lived that long; which did not seem likely with my other nephew in the room.
Darcy looked over at Anne quickly, just as I started running from my own chair towards hers, and noticed that her eyes were open, she was staring at him intently, and she nodded her head distinctly. She must have been in tremendous pain, but she knew what needed to be done; and was giving Darcy instructions as clear as if she had berated him for a full half hour. His duty lay on the floor at his feet, and he was not to be distracted with trifles. I had never been prouder of my Anne than at that very moment. For the second time that night, with no time to think on it, she had done what was right.
The very next second, almost as if no time at all transpired between thought and action, Darcy was on his knees examining Mrs. Collins head injuries. I knew Darcy had extensive experience with this sort of thing from all of the work they did in the more remote reaches of Derbyshire. Short of a doctor, or possibly Richard's battle experience, Fitzwilliam probably had more first-hand knowledge of what needed to be done than anybody.
Fitzwilliam very quickly examined Mrs. Collins' head, and her arm, and prepared to do what he could to save the woman. I was not very sanguine about her chances, as her wound was the worst I'd ever seen or even heard about, and when I finally got a look at Richard's face, it showed grave concern. He had seen wounds before, and he was not optimistic about her chances either.
I rushed over to my daughter, and was proud, relieved and very surprised with what I found.