Elizabeth could not be so easily comforted. Her father was acting strangely, not just with his recent edicts about their comportment and education, but with his own activities as well. He no longer went for solitary rides—he had asked Jane to accompany him the last three times he’d ridden out. And he drank less wine at dinner, not that he had ever drunk much, and he often looked at her in a way that made her feel eerie, as if someone had stepped over her grave. Jane was not the person to discuss this with—she was determined to see the bright side on every matter and whatever evidence Elizabeth produced, Jane would find a way to explain it away. It was a maddening and endearing quality.

She wished she had someone to talk to, but Jane would not do and Charlotte would usually be her next choice, but she was marrying the ridiculous Mr. Collins soon and busy with preparations for the wedding and leaving her home. Besides that, she had changed, at least in Elizabeth’s eyes. She had made a strange decision, to marry a man she neither respected nor held in any affection. Elizabeth supposed she must be looking at it as a sort of business arrangement—he would provide her a home and she would keep it for him, but she could not approve of so worthy a woman as Charlotte being wasted on so silly a man as Mr. Collins.

For now she would keep her thoughts to herself and hope that all was well with her father.

~

January brought with it a return of Mr. Collins, the heir apparent to Longbourn, for his wedding to Charlotte Lucas. Mrs. Bennet wanted to lament the loss of an eligible suitor, for after all, Mr. Collins had desired to marry a daughter of Longbourn to heal the breach in the family, and her home along with it, but did not. Her husband had commanded a peaceful house and as he was being so kind and attentive and taking such good care of their girls, she wanted to give him what he’d asked for. The three eldest Bennet daughters and their parents attended the very awkward wedding of their dear, sensible friend Charlotte and their annoying, but thankfully distant, bore of a cousin.

At the breakfast afterward, Charlotte asked Elizabeth, her particular friend, if she would come visit her at her new home in Hunsford Village in Kent when Charlotte’s family made the journey in the spring.