So this is up now on Amazon if you search for Nora Kipling, you'll find the full novella (part 1 of a 3 part series), or you can keep reading as I post the chapters. :)

Elizabeth Bennet

Longbourn, Hertfordshire

Many miles away, Elizabeth Bennet lay in a thicket, staring up at the night's stars. Beside her, Jane Bennet was also prone, holding her hands up to the sky, watching the bright dots of lights through her fingers.

"Do you not feel so small?" Elizabeth asked her sister, as they both breathed in the night's air. They had snuck out into the gardens right behind the house, once their parents had both gone to their separate sleeping chambers. Jane had secreted a blanket, and Elizabeth had smuggled a few lone pastries left over from breakfast for them to snack upon. Their midnight meetings had been a tradition between them since they had been just twelve and fourteen, and now at eighteen and twenty, little had changed, excepting everything had. Both out in society, followed quickly by their sisters Mary and Kitty, they were feeling the strain of having not caught a husband yet. Not that there were many young men of the proper rank and elevation to deserve them in the local society, as far as their mother was concerned.

"I feel rather insignificant," Jane commented, cupping her hands together to see how many stars she might catch in the circle her fingers and thumbs made. "It is not an altogether unpleasant feeling, however, and I think it gives one a good perspective on problems, to feel small."

Elizabeth looked over at her sister. She knew what Jane was thinking. Just that very day they'd received a letter from their cousin, a Mr. Collins. Not directly to them, of course, that would have been improper in the height of things, but to their father. Mr. Collins was the one who was set to inherit Longbourn when Mr. Bennet died, a fact that caused stilted conversation and gentle skirting of the issue of his looming mortality.

The reason for Mr. Collins' having written though, had struct chords of discomfort in the hearts of both elder girls.

Mr. Collins was in want of a wife, and soon. He was not an unfair man, he had written, and in fact was quite cognizant of the situation about to befall the Bennet family once their patriarch was gone. He had, then, decided quite generously that he would take a wife from amongst his female cousins in the Bennet family so that the estate would remain with them, and his gentle and tender feminine relatives might find comfort in their own home during the dark days after Mr. Bennet's passing.

"He writes as if I am in the grave already!" Mr. Bennet had barked when Mrs. Bennet had been perhaps a bit to gleeful and delighted at the news. Surely Mrs. Bennet had been the only one excited. Lydia had pouted, for at thirteen was too young, not out, and thus not an eligible potential spouse for Mr. Collins. That getting married for obligation rather than love was quite lost on young Lydia, although it was not missed by the elder of the Bennet sisters.

Surely Mr. Collins would look to Jane, or Elizabeth, as the potential matches for himself first. Only if he found them intolerable would he move onto the bookish and quite serious Mary, and the giddy and almost-too-young Kitty.

No, he would not find a partner in either Mary or Kitty, Elizabeth felt in her heart. He would think of Jane first, because Jane was so lovely it was heartbreaking. She set many a swain's heart on fire as she passed through the fields on the way to Meryton. Elizabeth eyed her sister's delicate profile, lit up by only the starlight, and sighed.

They had both longed for love matches. Mr. Collins would be no such thing, and the tone of his letter gave the impression that he was at best foolish, at worst deliberately manipulative in the worst possible way. He had peppered his missive with double-faced compliments and insults, at once praising Mr. and Mrs. Bennet for the fortitude to have brought five daughters into the world and also the poor judgement to not have had any sons.

As patient and lovely that Jane was, Elizabeth wasn't sure that even her saintly sister would be able to tolerate a gentleman who lacked social graces to such an extreme.

"Perhaps his carriage will overturn," Jane said in the silence, and Elizabeth stared at her in shock.

"Jane!" she hissed, for she had never heard her sister express a single word of malevolence towards anyone. Jane sighed and put her hand across her eyes.

"That was unkind of me," she mumbled and then reached out, grabbing Elizabeth's hand. Their fingers twined together and squeezed. "I am afraid."

"I'm here," Elizabeth answered, "and you need not accept his offer, if you find him… not to your liking."

"Mother will be distressed if I do not. She will shriek, and have vapors," Jane protested, although there was a hint of hope in her voice.

"Let her have vapors. She should have known better than to have girls," Elizabeth said, and then they both laughed softly, sadly. Did their father look at them, and wish one of them was a boy? Certainly they were sure their mother did. Although Elizabeth knew that Jane and little Lydia were exempt from Mrs. Bennet's hard and judging stare, the rest of them were not so lucky.

While Mrs. Bennet had never out and out said that she had wished that Elizabeth was a boy, Lizzy oft wondered if her mother had indeed wished it. They did not find agreement in most subjects, and Mrs. Bennet took exception to Elizabeth's constant wanderings out of doors, and insistence on learning to ride amongst other unladylike pursuits.

"Maybe he will be handsome and kind," Jane said with longing, letting her hands drop to her belly. Elizabeth stared up at the stars, and thought on that for a long moment.

"For you, he had best be. You are the greatest of us, Jane, and deserve only a kind, handsome man for a husband. One who would return all that light you glow with. He must be perfectly incandescent, and capable of elevating you to the highest ranks of society you were born to walk in," Elizabeth said, knowing her tone and words bordered on ridiculous. She did not care. Her sister, in her opinion, had no equal, and any man deserving of her hand had best measure up in looks, intelligence, wit, and kindness.

"He's of the cloth, at least, that must count for something," Jane said, her tone wistful.

"Perhaps, if he is not cut of the moth-eaten cloth," Elizabeth said, and Jane burst into a fit of giggles.

"Oh Lizzy, but think, if I married him, I would be here with you until you-"

"Oy!" a clear, strident voice cut across the back garden of Longbourn. Both girls sat up with a gasp. As they turned, twisting in their seats, they saw the red face of Longbourn's cook, a lantern in her hand, as she approached them. They'd been caught. Lizzy reached for Jane's hand and squeezed it tight. At least they were together. Together, they could face anything, even being caught out of doors well past the hour of their retirement.