Prologue

The night was dark, the sun long since set, though in this long hot summer, the days set late.

Crickets chirped outside.

A young woman of barely eighteen, almost a girl, stood over the cradle where her second daughter, born only a month before, slept.

This young woman, by the name of Frances Bennet, née Gardiner, had been found the day preceding in an act of amorous, conjugal congress with her father's law clerk, Mr. Yates, a man who was decidedly not her husband.

This event was the result of the passions, craven, carnal and foolish, of a variety of persons. You see, Frances Gardiner had been allowed to enter society by her eager mother when she was only fifteen.

Her mother was the sole daughter of a substantial tenant farmer, whose income acquired from labor gave him money enough to give his daughter what was accounted by the standards of this class just below the gentry as a fine rural education. However, in education, breeding and manners, Mrs. Gardiner belonged to a class of people decidedly beneath the family of the successful country lawyer she married.

This was a fact she would never have forgotten, even if her in-laws had been inclined to permit her to do so.

This capable, upwardly marrying woman looked on her daughter with satisfaction as she grew older, for Miss Frances Gardiner was a young girl of unusual beauty, striking blonde features, and a winsome smile. Mrs. Gardiner had been determined from the first time that it struck her that it was not just a mother's fond conceit that placed her daughter as being above the normal course of good looks, that her daughter would continue the ascent of the family into yet higher ranks.

Opportunity came when Mr. Bennet, the master of Longbourn, fortuitously died, and his studious, scholarly son returned from his continuing sojourn at the university to take up his place as the master of the estate.

The new Mr. Bennet was a handsome, fine looking young man of six and twenty, who if he did not have the robust body of a sportsman, dressed smartly, had intelligent eyes, and an extremely clever bent in conversation. He was not well liked amongst his peers as most, correctly, believed him to be mocking them for being less clever and less well informed than he.

However, the new Mr. Bennet was a man of some consequence in the neighborhood, and he directly insulted no one, so his neighbors found Mr. Bennet tolerable, and hardly the worst sort of man, even if none would confess themselves his friend.

Despite his fine education in matters of science, rhetoric, and classical literature, Mr. Bennet was woefully uneducated in the ways of women. During his protracted stay at the university following the acquisition of his baccalaureate, Mr. Bennet had spent most of the money sent down by his father as an allowance for his heir upon books, and he had spent most of his time arguing with the brightest and most capable male minds of the day.

This allowed him neither the money nor the time to keep an expensive mistress, and he had not been inclined towards the acquisition of a cheap one.

As a result, for many years, Mr. Bennet had lived mostly as a monk, subsisting upon the ample feasts of learning and the scraps of poorly cooked food available in the university dining halls, and he lived amongst other men for whom likewise friendly and amiable conversation with the fairer sex was little more than a myth.

When Mr. Bennet had the almost unwanted burden of the estate and its (almost compensatory) income with which he might purchase books placed upon him, he determined that though he did not enjoy balls, nor the round of social obligations, that he would put forth the effort necessary to establish his position in the neighborhood. It was, in the view of this rather misanthropic gentleman, unfortunate that a solid position in the neighborhood required him to participate in the neighborhood, but a philosopher, such as he fancied himself to be, had such resources in himself as to find amusement in the oddities and inconsistencies of his fellow men.

While Mr. Bennet did not eagerly look forward to such social obligations, he did not dread them.

For their part, female inhabitants of the neighborhood eagerly looked forward to Mr. Bennet's participation in these social obligations. Though there were two other families who participated in the neighborhood who were of greater consequence and fortune than the Bennets of Longbourn, Mr. Bennet was in the time following his father's death the single man of largest fortune in the neighborhood. This marked him as the target for the schemes of every grasping, greedy, or merely prudential woman with daughters to marry in the five miles round about Meryton.

Mrs. Gardiner, the wife of a successful country lawyer in Meryton, was the fortunate woman upon whose daughter Mr. Bennet's eye lighted when Miss Gardiner entered society, at an assembly ball held two months following the death of Mr. Bennet's father.

Mrs. Gardiner had determined that her oldest daughter must enter society whilst Mr. Bennet yet remained unattached. She had obsessed about Longbourn and the chance that Mr. Bennet's unattached state represented since the day she had heard the welcome news of his father's death.

Half of the lands her father had rented when she was a girl had been from Mr. Bennet's grandfather, and she knew very well the value of those acres. Mrs. Gardiner desperately wanted her daughter to rule the house which had ruled over her father.

She was confident her daughter's beauty would ensnare the young gentleman. Her husband rather thought it would be best if his dear Franny waited until her seventeenth year to enter society, like most of the middling sort did, to save on the expense of society and clothes. Mrs. Gardiner overrode these objections, and when he did not provide enough, she arranged a large loan, of which Mr. Gardiner never learned anything, from the milliner and seamstress so that she could properly accouter her daughter for her gentle hunt.

For the week prior to this ball, which like every young girl about to go to her first ball, Frances Gardiner eagerly awaited, her mother stuffed her ears full of exhortations to be pretty for Mr. Bennet, to think about what he would like, and to play the part of the perfect wife for him.

Mrs. Gardiner planned and pondered upon how best to prey upon Mr. Bennet, and she had noted that many of the girls in the neighborhood, none of whom knew the slightest about the Greek poets or modern scientists who fascinated Mr. Bennet, would try to appeal to him by making a pretense of knowing a great deal about the scholarly subjects that Mr. Bennet was known to have studied obsessively. He always saw through their pretense of knowledge, and made a subtle, laughing mockery of the women's ignorance.

Instead, Mrs. Gardiner ordered her daughter to draw him out, to openly admit her ignorance, and to claim that she wanted to hear everything about those subjects Mr. Bennet cared deeply for.

During the week previous to this ball, Mrs. Gardiner made Miss Gardiner stand before her and practice saying, with the sweetest and most appealing eyes, "Mr. Bennet, I am just an ignorant girl, but I want to learn about these matters you care so much about. Tell me about your favorite poets and scientists."

And then she made Miss Gardiner to also practice saying, while placing a shy hand upon the arm, "Mr. Bennet, normally such topics would bore me, but you make them sound so completely interesting. I do dearly wish to hear more from you."

Miss Gardiner thought that her mother's scheme was decidedly excessive, but she was a mostly dutiful daughter, who rolled her eyes, and exclaimed, "Heavens, what a tiresome bore you are, Mama!", but she practiced the simpering voice and innocent and appealing expression when ordered to. And she was not opposed to the idea of pursuing Mr. Bennet. While she had not seen the fine landowner from close up, Mr. Bennet made a trim and respectable figure on his horse when he rode through town and he was one of only three gentlemen who regularly passed through Meryton who had the use of a handsome coach and four.

Also Miss Gardiner knew the only reason she was to go to a ball and be dressed with so many nice ribbons and such fine silk at all was because her mother wanted her to marry Mr. Bennet, and so she knew she could show no sign of rebelliousness towards that aim if she wanted her mother to continue buying her pretty clothes.

The night of the fateful ball, as soon as they had walked to the assembly hall from the ample two-storied timber and frame house several blocks down the street in the town which served both as her husband's law offices and their living quarters, Mrs. Gardiner firmly pinched the cheeks of her daughter to bring a cheery red blush to them. Then they entered the stuffy room.

For his part, Mr. Bennet was instantly fascinated by the pretty and angelic Miss Gardiner. Mr. Bingley many years later would describe her daughter Jane, who had much the same features, in the same way as Mr. Bennet thought of the mother the first time he saw her as a young woman.

A perfect angel, and a more beautiful girl he had never seen.

Mr. Bennet danced the second set of the night with her, and Miss Gardiner for her part, after so much build up in expectation as to what she would think or feel for Mr. Bennet, found she liked his appearance even more up close. He had excellent eyes, vibrant dark hair, a finely shaped mouth, and he danced decently well.

Mr. Bennet was yet in the prime of his youth.

Miss Gardiner made the practiced question, as they stood across from each other in the line, waiting for the dance to start. "Mr. Bennet, I have heard you are such a clever scholar, but I know nothing about such matters," she said looking him into the eyes in a way she had never looked into the eyes of any other man, and seductively biting her lips as she had practiced for her mother, "I am just an ignorant girl." She looked down innocently, as if confessing a shameful secret. "I want to know more about these matters that you are said to care so much about."

There was a moment of confusion for Mr. Bennet. His heart thumped wildly with an attraction he was not used to feeling, as his entire mind and body oriented towards impressing this girl. He asked, almost stutteringly, which scholarly matters the pretty Miss Gardiner would care to hear about, but, he added honestly, he feared the girl would find them all very dull indeed.

Miss Gardiner at this point was unprepared, for Mrs. Gardiner had in truth no more notion of what scholarly matters interested Mr. Bennet than she did as to the nature of the civilizations that were hypothesized to live on the dark side of the moon, or even whether the moon was, as had been conjectured by the occasional wag, made of cheese.

However, the young woman improvised, and she smiled encouragingly at Mr. Bennet. "Oh, tell me what matter you care most about, for I am sure that shall be the most interesting. I promise not to find it in the slightest dull. I do."

With a little more prompting Mr. Bennet did begin to talk about his love for the philosophy of Greece, his opinions upon the poetics and metaphysics of Aristotle, the perfection of Cicero's speeches and letters, and from there he dived into a description of the experiments of Lavoisier that disproved the notion that the existence of phlogiston caused substances to burn.

In truth Miss Gardiner found most of what Mr. Bennet said exceedingly dull, and she entertained herself by admiring Mr. Bennet's fine clothes. But importantly she did not look bored, as Mrs. Gardiner had anticipated that her daughter would find the discourse she encouraged from Mr. Bennet extremely tiresome, and had therefore spent several hours reading to Miss Gardiner from one of her husband's law books while slapping her daughter every time her pretense of rapt attention slipped.

Thus Mr. Bennet had no notion that he was being baldly lied to when after the dance, once he had escorted the beautiful Miss Gardiner to the punch table, and procured for her a drink, and made repeated comments of concern for her wellbeing, she placed her hand with practiced shyness and hesitation on his forearm and said looking first into his eyes, and then shyly down, "Mr. Bennet, normally such topics bore me, but you make them so completely interesting. I dearly want to hear more from you."

It would have taken a sterner sort of man than Mr. Bennet to avoid this trap.

Mr. Darcy would not have been taken in, but Mr. Darcy's position in society had pressed him deeper into society from a younger age, and his father and mother had both taken pains to ensure he was no stranger to the dangers posed by unworthy women wishing to wed the Darcy name.

He was used to fawning women desperate to adopt any pretense to appeal to him.

Mr. Bennet had no such training, and he had spent the prior ten years, as already stated, in a mostly monkish state surrounded by books and young men as obsessed with argument, debate, and a clever turn of phrase as he was.

As for Miss Gardiner, she did feel the matter of this courtship strange. There was a sense of unreality to it, and though she liked Mr. Bennet, she felt nothing like the love that appeared in the circulating library novels she liked to read.

But he was handsome, he was wealthy, and he was devoted to her.

Above all, every girl of Miss Gardiner's acquaintance was either admiringly or spitefully jealous of the attention she received from Mr. Bennet. The thought of not marrying him crossed her mind, but to refuse a gentleman whose attentions raised her status amongst her peers so much, and further to refuse a gentleman who she had been so thoroughly trained by her mother to pursue, was beyond the abilities of our fifteen-year-old Miss Gardiner.

Thus after a courtship lasting a little more than a month, the passionately infatuated Mr. Bennet asked Francis Gardiner if she would make him the happiest man in England, etc, etc. And she accepted his hand, to her mother's deep, profound, and tragically impermanent delight.

Three weeks later, merely two weeks after Miss Gardiner's sixteenth birthday, the happy couple was wed.

For Mr. Bennet the gleam rubbed off his prize quickly.

It was possible for a young girl never spending more than two, or at the most three, hours of time in Mr. Bennet's company — periods that would be broken up by other concerns — to keep up the pretense that she enjoyed listening to Mr. Bennet's stream of rambling about the matters of philosophy and science that he enjoyed speaking upon — rambling that at the time of his marriage he was entirely convinced his wife loved to hear.

It was an entirely different matter for her to keep up the pretense of interest when she would wake up during the honeymoon next to him in bed, and he would expect her to want to listen to him. And then Mr. Bennet expected the new Mrs. Bennet to take her own interest in reading the books he did, instead of using her time in a rational manner such as reading a light romantic or a heavy gothic novel, or with embroidery, sewing clothes for the poor box, playing cards, or making modifications to her dresses, bonnets and other fripperies.

Mr. Bennet was deeply enthused by the married state at first, and as he felt in his heart a great affection for what he had been led to expect Miss Gardiner's character was, it took him most of a whole three months before he fully admitted to himself that his wife truly cared nothing about the matters he had enjoyed speaking to her about during their courtship.

Mr. Bennet greeted the news that Mrs. Bennet was increasing with his first child — sure to be a son, everyone predicted — in this bewildered state where he knew something had changed about his wife's nature since they had been married, but he had no notion how it happened.

As for Mrs. Bennet, she wanted affection. She wanted excitement. She wanted to continue to explore the world and see what it was like. She was just an eager and enthusiastic girl.

And Mr. Bennet gave her none of the attention, affection, or amusement a young girl needed.

Mr. Bennet continued, as he always had been, to be obsessed with his scholarship and learning. He always would keep this obsession, though in his later life he learned to balance it with the concerns and the duties required to care for the welfare of his beloved daughter.

During their courtship Mr. Bennet shared his love of learning and reading with her, but as it became clear to him that Mrs. Bennet had no continuing interest in these matters, he focused once more upon them, with occasional bitter thoughts towards the stupidity and ignorance of women.

He had a sense that he had been rather ill-used.

Mr. Bennet had truly hoped that his wife would grow into a useful companion, like the men he knew in Oxford, but sweeter, softer, and more awed by his cleverness, the way she had pretended to be during their courtship.

When this did not happen Mr. Bennet grew sarcastic, and he made fun of Mrs. Bennet's childish enthusiasms, he made fun of how she worried about the way her friends saw her, he made fun of her when she displayed her ample ignorance, and he made fun of her when she trusted the physicians that Mr. Bennet, correctly, knew to be quacks during her pregnancy.

Had matters been left to their own course, Mr. Bennet's treatment of Mrs. Bennet would in time have grown softer, kinder, and even affectionate, though always he would have remained dismissive of her. But as it happened, matters were not left to their own course.

Mrs. Bennet, later Mrs. Yates, would never forget the day she entered her father's office in Meryton a few months after her confinement for the birth of her daughter Jane. She was disoriented for a moment in the dark, stuffy, musty interior after the beating of the midday summer sun outside. And then she found herself suddenly eye to eye with Mr. Yates, her father's new clerk.

Frederick Yates was only nineteen, just two years older than Mrs. Bennet, and he was not by general accounting so handsome as Mr. Bennet. He wore a plain heavy broadcloth wool coat that had been patched in a few places, and which did not have the fine sheen of Mr. Bennet's coats, or the signs of the meticulous care that their servants gave to their clothes. He had ruddy cheeks, and he had a small popped pimple on his left cheek.

And, Mr. Yates had a twinkle in his eye when he looked at Mrs. Bennet. He always had that twinkle for her.

The young man who had just started his clerkship with Mr. Gardiner greeted his employer's daughter kindly, and in the fifteen minutes while the young man sorted the contracts he had been ordered to organize by his new master, the two struck up a quick and easy friendship.

There was something about the smiles, and the encouragement to talk about her interests, and her cares and worries that was a balm to the soul of a lonely young girl who was in truth deeply hurt by the contempt of her husband, and the way she could ask for no sympathy from any of her friends, all of whom were convinced she was the happiest woman imaginable with a husband who was both handsome and rich.

After that, to her father's bemusement, as little Frances had never shown the slightest inclination to interest in the law or his business before, she would visit his offices daily, or at least every other day.

Matters proceeded slowly and shyly between the two.

Mr. Yates was a man who had a religious disposition, and he was by no means eager to violate the sanctity of the marriage of the woman he fell in love with almost instantaneously, and Mrs. Bennet did not even consciously know at first that she could violate the sanctity of marriage.

It took no more than two weeks of regular meetings for Mrs. Bennet to know she was passionately and desperately in love with her father's clerk. And she knew this, though she had never even fancied herself to be in love before.

Her first infidelity was when she began to imagine, when her husband came to her to exercise his marital rights, that it was Mr. Yates — young, occasionally pimpled and square-faced Mr. Yates, and not her finely featured husband. She began to imagine the man in her bed was the one man she knew who saw her and who wanted her.

After several months an accidental touch upon the hand revealed to further to Mrs. Bennet how much she wanted Mr. Yates.

The next time the two were alone, she confessed to him that she loved him. By this time Mr. Yates long since had understood from their intimate conversations that this perfect and sweet woman was not loved by her terrible tyrannical husband, and that she, in turn, no longer loved him.

At this point, it was still a matter of a few days before their compunctions, scruples and fears were overcome. But naturally, overcome they were.

Unlike Mr. Bennet, Mr. Yates was a virgin at the time of their first amorous encounter, hidden behind the heavy grey millstone in an old abandoned mill building along the river that ran a half mile away from Meryton. Also, unlike Mr. Bennet, he had, rather ironically, been trained as a lover by a book with much fascinating text and a collection of illustrations titled The School of Venus which his older brother gave him before he went south for his apprenticeship in the law.

His brother had clapped the young man on the shoulder, and whispered to him quietly as he snuck it into Mr. Yates's bag, "Don't tell Mum anything 'bout that book. Our secret. Read it carefully though, just in case. But only in your rooms, don't look at it on the stagecoach, or the like. In private."

This book was framed as a dialogue between a virgin and her experienced and happily married aunt. Mr. Yates found the text compelling and read it often.

Many times after he met Frances Bennet, before he had any idea that these hopes might one day be fulfilled, he read the book, and thought about doing the things described therein with his employer's married daughter, and he then ignored the injunctions of the medical community against Onanism. And this book gave him a confidence and knowledge such that when he had the woman he already loved before him, he knew what to do, and he knew how to do it well enough to satisfy her in a way Mr. Bennet had never tried to satisfy her.

Mrs. Bennet had her first, and second, and seventh orgasm that leisurely Sunday afternoon, as Mr. Bennet sat placidly in his study and tapped his desk to the rhythm of a popular song while he read about recent electrical experiments, and then read half of one of the three plays by Shakespeare he had never opened, before deciding that the first half of the play gave ample reason for King John's lack of reputation.

He then opened Macbeth, as Mrs. Bennet stifled a scream, happier than she had ever been before in her life, but anxious about a curious wanderer hearing, and as she did Mr. Bennet whispered dragging his finger along the text, "Look like the time. Bear welcome in your eye, Your hand, your tongue. Look like th' innocent flower, But be the serpent under't."

And so matters continued for another year.

Though in her heart she recoiled from his touch, out of fear of discovery, Mrs. Bennet never refused Mr. Bennet his marital rights, which he continued to exercise frequently, as he considered that the one benefit, modest as it was to a man of learning, of his marriage. Even here Mr. Bennet was generally dissatisfied. Mrs. Bennet was an exquisitely beautiful woman, but she was neither passionate nor a reactive woman, and their conjugal congress was not as he had imagined it would be.

At least there was no chance of gaining venereal disease from his own wife who no one else could sleep with.

When Mrs. Bennet began to increase once more, she hoped in her heart that the child was from Mr. Yates and conceived in love, rather than Mr. Bennet's and conceived in that contemptuous feeling her husband held towards her.

However the appearance of the child, a girl named Elizabeth, at her birth did not settle the matter for Mrs. Bennet. The young babe and both men had similar dark hair color, while hers and Jane's were wheat blonde. However she liked to imagine she could trace in the baby's face features that more resembled those of Mr. Yates than Mr. Bennet.

For his part, Mr. Bennet had not the slightest doubts about Elizabeth.

From the very day she was born, the very first time he picked her up and held her, this daughter was his favorite.

He made faces at little Lizzy, he held her when she giggled and when she cried and wailed, he watched the wet nurse attentively to ensure that his Lizzy was well nourished, he happily bounced her to burp the gas, and to Mrs. Bennet's bemused shock, he would keep the infant's cradle in his study and read to her aloud from his dull and dead foreign poets.

It was entirely different from how Mr. Bennet treated Jane, who he paid some attention to but not a great deal, not even now that she had begun to toddle about.

And then one summer day, an accident placed Mr. Bennet in such a location that he heard the sounds of a couple moaning together inside the fallen stone walls of one of the ruined abbeys which that improver of the picturesque landscape, Henry VIII, had liberally decorated England's countryside with.

Mr. Bennet had recently developed an affection for some of those poets who extol the virtues of nature, and he had begun a habit, which he later would teach to Elizabeth, of regular long walks through nature which did not pay any great attention to the course of paths or the presence of fences.

Mr. Bennet paused on his walk at the unmistakable sound of flesh slapping against flesh and the inarticulate, lust inducing, moans of a woman, and he felt a sort of angry jealousy.

Much as he might wish a more passionate wife, Mrs. Bennet only endured his touch, and she still claimed the date was too early after the birth of his dear Elizabeth to begin again.

She would never gasp out a man's moaned name like the woman hidden behind the wall gasped out her lover's name.

Mr. Bennet shrugged, and started to walk forward again with a wry smile. He had married her without proper consideration and in the grip of a powerful infatuation, and such a wife was the proper and deserved punishment for such rank stupidity.

But then he paused, his foot lifted from the ground.

The man's voice had said in a hush Mr. Bennet could barely understand, "Shhh, I heard footsteps."

And Mr. Bennet realized he recognized the man's voice.

He frowned.

Mr. Yates, his father-in-law's clerk.

Several thoughts passed through Mr. Bennet's mind simultaneously: It could not be the clerk of his father-in-law who attended church service every week and read the scriptures regularly; Mr. Yates spent a great deal of time with Mrs. Bennet; there was something familiar about the timber and tone of the woman's moans.

And thus stuck in place by a suspicion which he could not yet name to himself, Mr. Bennet listened intently without moving.

A few birds chirped. The sun filtered through the thick trees in thin speckled beams.

High above, through the branches he could see vivid blue cluttered with patches of snowy white. All was green and peaceful.

The sound of flesh slapping against flesh began again.

And after a further little wait, a string of oohs started, emitted from the woman's mouth, growing louder and more desperate as the pace of the flesh slapping increased, at a desperate rhythm. And then, the man let out a great groan, and the woman cried out, "Oh, Freddy." And the sounds stopped, as the loving whispers that occurred both in reality and in Mr. Bennet's imagination were too quiet to carry through or over the stout stone walls built by the Benedictine order.

Mr. Bennet knew the voice, and knew he was a horned cuckold.

And thus Mrs. Bennet found herself the next night, young and crying over her younger daughter as she slept peaceful in the crib.

Mr. Yates had been summarily dismissed from his position by her father, and told to never be seen in town again. Mr. Bennet had been icily silent, thinking thoughts she could not guess, as he dragged her home after slapping Mr. Yates.

For the rest of yesterday, and half of today, he had not said a single word to her.

But when he found her in the nursery, holding Elizabeth in her arms and tearily smiling at Jane as the toddler ran about holding a finely carved doll, Mr. Bennet angrily strode across the room, and held out his arms for Elizabeth. When she handed the girl over to him, he said, not to her, but to the nurse who sat sewing placidly in her chair, her life not ruined and made miserable forever by the events of the past day, "Mrs. Bennet is to be given no further access to the children. I shudder to imagine what the morals of a woman raised by such a creature would be. My daughters shall not be contaminated by her."

The nurse had nodded her head, as if it were an entirely reasonable thing for a man to order that a loving mother have no access to her children, and the nurse promised that she would do as Mr. Bennet had ordered.

"If she is a problem," Mr. Bennet added, "call the footman, and drag her away by main force."

Then, softly rocking Elizabeth in his arms, Mr. Bennet left the room.

Mrs. Bennet followed him, "Sir! Sir! My dear. Mr. Bennet. You cannot mean to keep me from my own children."

"Mrs. Bennet," he replied severely, "I have been most kind to you so far. I have not beaten you with a stick, though it would be my right to do so. I have not expelled you from the grounds of my house, though it would be my right to do so. I have not sought to ruin your father's practice, though it would be my right to do so. I have done nothing to hurt you, though you have betrayed me in the most disgusting manner in which any woman could betray her husband. But on this, I will not be moved."

Mr. Bennet hugged, carefully so he did not squeeze her, Elizabeth against his body. "Not my children. You'll not touch my Elizabeth's mind and soul."

And that was that. Perhaps had Mrs. Bennet pled and argued, she could have changed Mr. Bennet's mind. It did not occur to her to try.

She stared out of the house at the wilderness park that her mother had cooed over and praised her for obtaining for the family upon her marriage. She despised her mother, and the stupid, sinful, deceitful, and disgusting greed of her former self. How wrong and vile and wicked had she been to choose to marry without a love in her heart.

Everything was ruined.

She would never see Frederick Yates again.

That is what they all told her.

And now Mr. Bennet would not permit her to raise her children. To care for them. What was the point of living? Whatever sins she had committed were amply repaid by this. She would rather die than live without him. Her future looked like a hollow, endless, unfaceable chasm.

Mrs. Bennet seriously considered throwing herself into the river and drowning.

That night, after all in the house were asleep, Mr. Yates snuck into Mrs. Bennet's room, through the window she had left open out of a vague hope he would do such a thing.

Mrs. Bennet squeezed him tight and tearily told him that she could not live without him. And he replied in a whisper that he could not live without her, and that was why he was here. A friend of his had a carriage waiting for them, at the edge of Longbourn's property, and they were to run.

"I can't leave my children. My girls."

"We will bring them with us. And then we'll run, and we'll run until Mr. Bennet ceases to look, and then we'll settle somewhere, somewhere near my family, my brothers will help us, and we will be a happy family, the four of us, and I hope more after."

Tears glistened in the young girl's eyes at this. "You promise? You promise?"

"I swear. In my heart I am married to you. Before God, before the true God, the God who sees the spirit and soul, it is you and I who are married, not you and Mr. Bennet. And I have felt this way since that day we first kissed, and we first consummated our marriage."

Mr. Yates and Mrs. Bennet had engaged in like talk before. But Mr. Yates saying this now meant more. Mr. Yates now had made the promise to always take care of her, as though they were married before the church like they were married in truth. For the young couple considered their state to be that of marriage. The young woman kissed her lover fiercely, and suddenly in her mind some matter of identity changed, and whatever the law claimed, she began to think of herself as Mrs. Yates, and not as Mrs. Bennet.

She gathered what clothes and items were of either monetary or sentimental value from her room. She briefly looked around. She did not expect to ever see the lands where she had grown up again.

Mr. Yates climbed back out the window, and down to the ground. He gathered all her things in a bag and carried them to the carriage, while she went deep into the house, to retrieve her children.

This was a matter that frightened her. Both children slept in the same nursery, and Elizabeth's wet nurse slept on a mat that could be hidden behind the boxes of toys during the day, so that she would be available to feed Elizabeth as soon as she woke crying for food.

The young woman — was she Mrs. Yates or Mrs. Bennet? — paused on the threshold before remembering that if the nurse was awake, it would not reveal her scheme to say that she had been desperate just to see the children.

But then the nurse would send her away, for she had been ordered to do so by Mr. Bennet.

However, the nurse was asleep in her corner, snoring lightly. She stirred at the sound of the door opening, but did not move otherwise.

Both girls slept sweetly in their separate cribs. Jane, beautiful as a sweet toddling angel. And Elizabeth. Her tiny, tiny Elizabeth.

Mrs. Bennet first picked up and woke Jane. She set the toddler on the ground, and in a very low whisper, putting one finger over her mouth, begged the girl to stay quiet. Then she went to the crib to pick up Elizabeth.

And then she imagined Mr. Bennet the next morning finding Elizabeth gone.

She did not understand the connection between the two. But she knew it was real. If she took Jane, Mr. Bennet would send pursuit after her, and bother her and Mr. Yates for the return of his daughter. But in the end he would let matters go. But if she took Elizabeth, he would come himself, and use every resource of Longbourn at his disposal to find her, and he would bring the law down upon them both.

But it was not that consideration which stopped Mrs. Bennet from picking up Elizabeth and taking her.

Instead it was Elizabeth's wet nurse stirring before with an inarticulate murmur she fell back into a deeper sleep.

Elizabeth needed a wet nurse, and they could not take hers along.

Like a fool, Mrs. Bennet had listened to the advice of her friends and her mother, who talked endlessly about how unhealthful feeding from the breast was, and how it was entirely and completely superior to hire one of the peasants to feed the child. Mrs. Bennet was yet a woman who rather preferred to be on the correct side of fashion in as many matters as possible, even if that choice had led her astray in the matter of marrying Mr. Bennet.

There was no milk in Mrs. Bennet's breasts to give her daughter. And they could not expect to find a suitable wet nurse upon the road.

And it was then that Frances née Gardiner began crying.

She had to leave her daughter behind, and though she firmly believed that Mr. Bennet would be a good father for her — at least so long as he still believed Elizabeth to be his own issue — she would never see her little girl again. And that knowing ate at the nearly Mrs. Yates.

The wet nurse stirred once more, disturbed by the sounds of Jane pulling at her mother's skirt.

No more time.

The former Mrs. Bennet pulled off the necklace she wore, a pretty amber cross that had been the first gift she ever received from Mr. Yates. She placed it next to Elizabeth's hand in the crib, hoping desperately that Mr. Bennet would let her daughter keep the token of her love.

And then she kissed Elizabeth a last time on the forehead.

As silent tears ran down her face, Mrs. Bennet picked up Jane and left the room in a few steps, and then with a few more steps she was out into the warm and pollen laden summer night.

Hey, the usual story, this is available on KU and in Amazon, and at some point, probably in late 2020, I'll remove it from KU and publish it here. Also, until April 15th Mr. Bennet's Daughter is on sale on Amazon, so get it cheap if you want to buy it.