Preternatural (adj): Beyond or not conforming to what is natural or according to the regular course of things; strange. Inexplicable by ordinary means.
Synonyms: inexplicable, exceptional, extraordinary, abnormal, uncanny
Note: This is a bit of a mystery. This will be 8-10 short chapters.
How does it go now? Let us see. Oh yes—now I remember. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a wooden spoon is by far the most useful of tools… although, I can see that will not make much sense at this point… so… never mind… I suppose I must go back to the beginning because I am making no sense at all.
I have what would generally be considered an affliction, or at least any sensible person would see it as such. You see, I was born with what could best be described as preternatural hearing—but only in my right ear. I could easily put an owl to shame. Sometimes I think I could hear a mouse squeak from a mile away, but that is probably an exaggeration. The result is that any time I go into company, I must plug my ear with a small earplug I made when I was young. Sometimes though, when I go to sleep, or I am just curious, I remove the plug and see what I can learn.
That is how I came upon Mr Collins talking to himself one night, and the discussion was very much NOT to my liking—not in the least.
Mr Collins is my distant cousin, a vicar, and the heir presumptive to Longbourn. At first, he seemed an oafish but otherwise harmless bit of a bumbling fool. He did speak aloud as he wrote, and I clearly overheard him speak of 'taming' his wife and even managed to mutter to himself how he thought he might go about it. I will neither bore nor frighten you with the details I heard over the next hour. Let us just say that a birch rod was the very least of his planned offences and the most innocuous of his weapons.
Ordinarily, I would have ignored such muttering as just big talk, but something about how he said it made my skin crawl. The fool spoke of the rod as a man should speak of his lover, and I got the distinct impression he was caressing his weapon as we spoke.
I had to know more, so when he was walking the garden endlessly droning on the next day, I searched his room. Sure enough, his trunk had enough tools of abuse to arm a French torture brigade and a journal that nearly made me lose my previous meal. I managed to keep it all down, but it was a near thing. The worst of it—the absolute worst—was clear evidence that he had practised some of what he preached on helpless animals. I will not explain in greater detail, save to give caution that it is for the best.
I studied him extensively over the next few days, which was easy in some ways and hard in others. It was trivial to hear his speech since he never shut up from before sunrise to after sundown. While it was easy enough to hear him, most of what he said made me want to scream at either his stupidity or his cruelty. In company, he was altogether a mixture of pride and obsequiousness, self-importance and humility. He mentioned his noble patroness so often that I thought I might burst, and his description of his home made it seem as if he lived in Rosings, instead of half a mile away in the most ordinary parsonage in the world, doing the standard parson's duties, probably poorly.
In the end, the problem was easy enough to solve definitively, and I was apparently elected to perform the disagreeable task. To paraphrase an ancient expression: If not me, who? If not now, when? With my greater knowledge of his character, I was obliged to accept greater responsibility.
I, along with everyone else, had long observed that the fool shovelled food into his mouth with a voraciousness that indicated he was unlikely to ever inherit or even live past middle age. As if that was insufficient, he even took a snack tray at night, apparently to hold him over until breakfast.
It took no effort at all to enter his room after he was snoring like a grain mill, and you should take me at my word that a sleeping Mr Collins was not something anyone should ever be exposed to without a very strong stomach and a weak sense of smell.
I was not astonished to learn he was sleeping holding the bloodstained birch rod he called his starter kit in his journal—so my course was set. I pulled a good-sized chunk of sausage from my pocket (identical to the one he had as a midnight snack), shoved it down his throat, and held it there with the handle of a wooden spoon.
It took a few seconds for him to start gagging and struggling. I had already plugged my ear, and I may have had to sit on him for a few minutes and cover his ugly face with a pillow. Ere long, he stopped thrashing, discharged one last odiferous contribution to the fetid air of the room, and the deed was done. There was one less cruel man in the world, though they were still common as rats.
I wiped the spoon on his nightshirt and took his journal, weapons, and souvenirs to dispose of at my leisure. There was an abandoned mineshaft on the property that would do nicely. There seemed no point in making his demise any more than it appeared, and certainly no call to excite the local magistrate's admittedly weak sense of curiosity enough to start asking awkward questions.
Back in my bed I fell easily into the dreamless sleep of the just with one last thought:
✓ Lizzy is safe!
