Bonus Scenes

"You spoil him, Anne."

"If I do it is because you are too hard on him, George."

They had had this argument in a dozen rooms, and it wore the same shape in each of them. George Darcy stood at the window of the London house, watching the grey morning settle over the square, and did not turn around.

"You see how Fitzwilliam is with Wickham—"

"You are blind to that boy's faults." His wife's voice had an edge. "What do you truly know of his character, George? Such tales as I hear from the servants—"

"They are resentful that I did not choose one of their own sons or brothers to favor." He repeated the same, old defense wearily. It had never convinced Anne before, and he doubted she would believe it now.

"Why Wickham?" she pressed. "What has he done to deserve your favor?"

George turned at last. His wife sat very straight upon the settee, her needlework abandoned in her lap, and there was a color in her cheeks he wished he could observe more often. "I will do right by my family, Anne," he said. "Surely you must know this of me."

She held his gaze a moment, then looked down at her idle hands, and he watched her arrange her face back into its accustomed serenity the way another woman might smooth a crumpled ribbon. "I do not like it," she said quietly. "You will make your own son resent you."

"And you," he answered, gentler than he felt, "would raise him so comfortable in his own privilege that he will do the world no good at all. A Darcy must be more than comfortable, Anne. Much more. He must be equal to what he will one day carry."

"There is no master in all of Derbyshire more responsible than you, nor more attentive to those in your care. You are known everywhere for your generosity and your kindness." She lifted her eyes, and there was reproach and love in them. "Which is why I cannot understand how you can be so hard toward your own son. Have you no tenderness left in your heart for your own flesh and blood?"

The question struck deeper than she knew.

He had a great deal of tenderness. That was the trouble. He carried it about like a stone he dared not set down, and he had learned, long ago, that a man in his position could not afford to let it show—not to his tenants, not to his equals, and least of all to a boy who must one day stand where he stood and answer for five hundred souls without flinching. Tenderness had not built Pemberley. Tenderness would not hold it.

He did not say any of this. He did not know how.

"I am going to walk," he said instead, and took his hat.

He did not, in truth, know where he was going. He knew only that the argument would go nowhere, as it always did. His wife would be gentle with him at dinner as though nothing had passed between them, and while George admired her gentleness, he had never been able to trust it completely. Anne did as she was told. She always had. There were days he provoked her on purpose, prodding at her calm like a boy poking a still pond, only to see whether she owned an opinion she had not first inquired whether he shared. This morning was the nearest she had come in years to losing her composure, and she had done it for the sake of their son. He loved her for it so fiercely he had been obliged to leave the room or risk disturbing her peace.

But he could not unsee what he feared. He feared that his boy—clever, dutiful, aching for approval as only a watched child can ache—would grow into a man who did whatever was asked of him by whoever loved him best. And the one who loved him best was Anne. And Anne's dearest sister was Catherine, who spoke already, incessantly, of a match between Fitzwilliam and her own daughter—little Anne de Bourgh, a pale, wilting child who had never in her life contradicted her mother and never would. A wife with no spirit of her own. A wife who would yield to others' opinions, and succumb, and surrender her will, until there was nothing left of either of them but duty.

George would sooner see Pemberley burn than see his son so unhappily settled.

He was still turning it over, grim and unresolved, when he came upon the park, and the shouting.

A gentleman—George used the word loosely, and only because the man's coat had cost more than the object of his fury would see in a lifetime—stood over an old woman and her overturned basket. Loaves of bread scattered in the dirt where he had struck the basket from her hands. Perhaps she had jostled him. Splashed his boots. Some crime of that magnitude. And he was making a performance of it, loud and purpling, for the benefit of the small crowd that stood by and did what crowds do, which is nothing at all.

"—clumsy, insolent creature, do you know the cost of these—get away, get away from me, before I have you taken up—"

George lengthened his stride, hand searching for coins in his pocket. But before he reached the woman, a child got there first.

She could not have been more than eight years old. She wore a good, plain frock and a bonnet knocked askew, and she planted herself between the old woman and the shouting man with her small chin thrust out and her fists balled at her sides, and she said, in a voice that carried across the whole green:

"You have knocked down her bread, sir, and it was not her fault, and now she cannot sell it, and it is you who ought to be ashamed—not her."

The gentleman gaped.

"My father is a gentleman," the child went on, remorseless, "and he says a gentleman is known by how he treats those who cannot answer him back. So I know exactly what sort you are." She crouched, then—in her good frock, in the dirt—and began gathering the fallen loaves back into the basket, brushing each one with grave care, and she looked up at the crowd with blazing scorn. "And I should think," she added, to all of them, "that someone might help her, instead of watching."

Someone did. Two people did, one of them offering to purchase the dirty loaves.

The "gentleman," robbed of his audience and outmaneuvered by a child of eight, discovered pressing business elsewhere and took it there at speed.

George Darcy stood rooted to the path and felt something turn over in his chest that had been still for a very long time.

There, he thought. There it is.

Not the temper—tempers were common. It was the reasoning that undid him. She had not merely felt that the gentleman's behavior was wrong; she had known why, had named the principle, had held a grown man to a standard he had abandoned and then stooped, in the same breath, to do the humble work herself. She had a spine and a conscience and a mind, and she had put them to good use without a thought for who watched or what it cost her.

A girl like that would not wither under Society's criticism. A girl like that would grow into a woman who could not be made to back down from what is right—not by a mother's tears, not by a husband's pride, not by anyone. A woman who would hold whatever man she married to the highest standard she knew, and love him too well to let him become less than himself.

A lady like her would be the making of his son.

"George?" His wife had followed him, as she sometimes did accompanied by her maid, unwilling to let a quarrel end on a cold word. She came to his side and followed his gaze to the child, who had got the old woman laughing now over the pretty profit she had turned for soiled loaves. "What is it? What are you staring at so?"

"That girl," said George. "Do you know her?"

Anne studied the little scene, a smile spreading over her face when her gaze landed on a couple nearby. "I know the woman with her, and so do you."

George looked away from the girl to the young couple grinning at her not two paces away. "Madeline… what is her married name?"

"Gardiner."

Mrs. Gardiner was originally from Lambton, from a good family. Honest people, though they were in trade. George frowned. "Is she a relative?"

"I believe the child is a niece. On the husband's side. A Bennet."

Bennet. George turned the name over.

"Is her father a gentleman?" he asked.

"I believe so. A small estate. Hertfordshire, I think Madeline said." Anne looked at him, and the old wariness crept back into her eyes. "George. Why do you ask?"

But George Darcy was watching a small girl in a dirty frock set an old woman's basket to rights, and in his mind he was already at Pemberley, with a will unwritten before him and a son who deserved—whatever else George had failed to give him—a fighting chance at a life worth living, and a wife strong enough to insist he live it.

"No reason, my dear," he said, and offered her his arm, and steered her gently home. "No reason at all. Only—I find I should like to know a little more about these Bennets of Hertfordshire."

He would come to be sorry for a great many things, in the years that followed. He would not, to the last hour of his life, be sorry for this.

It was Elizabeth who brought him the box, on the third night of their marriage, when the house was quiet and the fire had burned low. She set it in his lap without a word—a plain deal box, the kind a child might keep treasures in—and inside were twelve letters, folded and refolded until the creases had gone soft as cloth, most of them addressed, in a changing hand, to Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy.

"You have already read the first," she said. "You may as well read the rest. They are yours. They were always yours—I simply had no way to send them."

He read them in order. She watched his face while he did, and did not once look away.

Dear Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy,

I hope this letter finds you in good health. I am Elizabeth Bennet, and I believe you know of the arrangement our fathers have made concerning our futures.

I am a great deal older now than when I last wrote to you, and considerably more sensible, and I have been thinking very seriously about our situation. I believe I have hit upon a solution that would answer for us both. Since neither of us chose this, and since I am quite certain you would rather marry someone you actually know and like—as would I—perhaps we might come to a different sort of understanding.

Here is my proposal. I shall study very hard and learn everything there is to know about the management of an estate—I am already exceedingly good with figures, and Papa says I have a head for business better than most men grown. In exchange, when we come of age, you might release me from the contract and engage me instead as your steward. In this way your father's wishes are honored—you shall have all my assistance—and yet we should both be left free to marry for affection.

I am aware you may think me too young to propose such things. I assure you I have considered the matter from every side. I do not wish to be a burden to you, nor to be married for an obligation, and I cannot think you wish it either. Surely two persons of sense can contrive a better arrangement between them than one made for them by others when they were in the nursery.

I shall await your reply with great interest.

Most respectfully yours, Elizabeth Bennet

P.S.—I promise you I am not so silly as most girls, and I would work very hard to prove my worth.

Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy,

Though we have never met, your name has shaped the whole course of my life for eight years now. I write with no expectation of an answer—I know that a gentleman of your station does not correspond with a lady to whom he has not been introduced—but because I must say these things to someone, and there is no one else in all the world I may say them to. So I say them to paper, and to you, who will never read them.

I am no longer the child who believed we might simply rewrite the terms of our fathers' agreement between us, as though it were a sum done wrong. I understand now that you likely know nothing of me beyond what serves the contract, and that my feelings upon the matter are of consequence to no one but myself.

And yet I cannot make myself content. I cannot accept that my whole future—whom I shall marry, where I shall live, how I shall spend the one life I am given—was settled when I was eight years old, by men thinking of partnerships and profits and advantageous connections. Surely you, who were bred up to be a gentleman, must feel as I do that a true partnership can be built on nothing but mutual respect, freely given?

I have spent these years making myself useful, so that I might never be a burden to anyone. I can run an estate and keep its books. I speak French and Italian, and I have lately begun upon German and a very little Latin, for I am determined to be idle in nothing. But I have spent these years hoping, too—hoping that when at last the time comes, you will prove a man of honor who does not wish for a wife delivered to him like goods against an invoice.

If ever you should read this, then you are not the cold creature I sometimes imagine on my worst nights. And if you are not—then perhaps there is hope yet that we might one day meet as equals, and not as a burden and an obligation bound together.

I remain, uncertainly yours, Elizabeth Bennet

Mr. Darcy,

Today I am eighteen years of age, which means that, by the terms of our fathers' contract, I am now your property in all things but the ceremony. It seems only fair that you should know what you have acquired.

You have gained a woman who has increased her father's yields by fifteen percent in three years, and done it herself, with her own hands and her own head. Who speaks four languages, keeps faultless accounts, and can drive a harder bargain with a grain merchant than any steward in the county. Who has read every book on husbandry and drainage and estate management that she could beg, borrow, or bully out of a lending library.

You have also gained a woman who has come to despise the very sight of your name upon a page. Who has given a decade of her life to preparing for a future she never once chose. Who will walk into your house a stranger, to be wed to a stranger, for the profit of a bargain struck over brandy by two men who never thought to ask her whether she consented to be spent.

I wonder—could you write down my Christian name, this moment, without consulting the contract to find it? Do you know that I would sooner rise at dawn than lie abed till noon; that I would rather walk five miles in the rain than sit idle five minutes in the sun; that I believe with my whole heart that a person's worth is measured by what they do, and not one whit by the name they were born to?

Of course you do not. Why should you? I am the solution to an arithmetic problem. As useful, and as impersonal, and as easily traded, as a well-broke horse.

I suppose I ought to be grateful. Other women in my position are handed to wastrels and brutes, and I am told you are neither. But gratitude is a bitter enough meal, sir, when it is the only dish one is ever permitted to eat.

The woman you are to marry, in name if in nothing else, Elizabeth Bennet

My dearest—

I have begun this a dozen ways and crossed out every name. Mr. Darcy is a stranger I resented for ten years. Robbie is the man I fell in love with over a ledger. Fitzwilliam belongs to your father, and to the boy he wrote out of a will. And yet every one of you made my tea exactly as I liked it without being told, and split my father's firewood, and promised me that once I stopped fighting the water, it would hold me. So I shall simply write to you, and trust you know by now who that is—for I find I love the whole of you at once.

Do you remember the child of eight who swore she would sooner not marry at all than marry a stranger she had never so much as talked to? You told me her reasons were remarkably sound. They were. She only had the shape of it wrong—for in the end she did not marry a stranger at all. She married the man she had talked to for hours across a cramped study, the man with an ax in his hands and no name to give her—and she never once suspected he was the very obligation she had spent her whole life dreading. The stranger and the beloved were the same man. I could weep at how nearly I missed it.

I chose you. Of everything I was never permitted to choose, I chose you—and I would do it again with the whole ledger laid open and every column showing the cost.

Yours—freely, and at last by my own hand— Elizabeth

When he finished he was quiet for a long while. He folded it along its soft creases and set it upon his knee and looked at her. The careful, guarded composure she had spent a lifetime trying to breach was simply gone, and there was nothing behind it but Robbie, and Fitzwilliam, and the whole of the man at once.

"You kept these under a floorboard," he said, roughly.

"For ten years. I had no way to send them."

"And now?"

"Now—" Elizabeth lifted the box from his lap, set it on the floor, and moved into the space where it had been—"I find I have your direction after all."

Elizabeth had attended precisely four musical evenings since becoming Mrs. Darcy, and she had already learned that the true entertainment at such affairs was never the music.

It was the watching.

Lady Matlock's drawing room glittered with more candles than Longbourn burned in a season, and beneath them sat the very people who, not a twelvemonth ago, had pronounced Elizabeth a most unfortunate match for their nephew. It was remarkable what a wedding, a fortune restored, and a countess determined to save face could accomplish.

Lady Matlock had taken it upon herself to present the Bennet sisters to society this season, and if her motives were not entirely tender, Elizabeth found she did not much mind. Kindness offered for the wrong reasons still warmed the same hands.

Beside her, Robbie leaned close. "You are counting them," he murmured.

"I am cataloguing them," she corrected. "There is a difference. That is the third lady this evening to tell me how brave I am. I begin to think I have survived a shipwreck."

His mouth twitched—that small, private motion she had once spent whole afternoons trying to provoke across a cramped study. "You did marry me."

"So I did. And how I have suffered," she teased.

Across the room, Jane sat like something carved for a cathedral, luminous and serene. The young gentlemen of the party arranged themselves about her at flattering angles. Jane received their attentions with a gracious tilt of her head. She had learned, this past year, to smile as though she meant it.

Elizabeth, who knew the cost of that lesson, loved her the more for the effort it still plainly required.

And in the corner, half hidden by a spray of hothouse lilies, sat Mary.

She had refused the ostrich plume their mother pressed upon her and worn her hair simply. Mary looked, Elizabeth thought, exactly like herself: plain, composed, and entirely elsewhere. If only she would smile. Mary had a beautiful smile.

Her fingers moved against her knee in silent phrases. Elizabeth hoped Lady Matlock would call her forward soon. Mary was never nervous at a pianoforte. It was the one place in all the world where she knew, without vanity and without doubt, precisely what she was worth.

Finally, Lady Matlock motioned for her, presenting her to the gathered audience. A ripple of polite, albeit indifferent, applause passed through the room. Another country miss. Another sonatina murdered for the sport of it. Elizabeth saw two fashionable ladies exchange the particular glance that says let us endure this, and felt her own spine straighten in answer.

Mary sat. She flexed her fingers once, the way she always did—warming them, greeting the keys like old friends—and she began.

The first notes fell like a door thrown open in a quiet house.

Elizabeth had heard her sister play the Beethoven piece a hundred times in Longbourn's music room, and still it took her by the throat. This was no drawing-room trifle chosen to display a white wrist. This was thunder and grief and defiance, hammered out by a plain girl in an unassuming gown who had disappeared, utterly, into the storm of it.

The condescension drained from the room note by note. The two fashionable ladies forgot to whisper. Somewhere a fan stopped moving.

When the last chord fell and the silence rushed in behind it, no one breathed.

Then the room broke—not into the mannered patter of society, but into real applause, startled out of people who had come expecting nothing and been given something they would speak about for weeks.

Mary rose, inclined her head with that grave little dignity of hers, and returned to her lilies as though she had done nothing more remarkable than pour the tea.

She had, of course, done a great deal more.

Elizabeth became aware of the young man before she understood why. He stood near the instrument, quite still, in the manner of a person who has forgotten he can be observed. He was perhaps five-and-twenty, fair, and dressed with a quiet excellence that Elizabeth had come to recognize as the plumage of very great consequence. He was looking at Mary as though she had rearranged the contents of his heart.

"Who," Elizabeth asked her husband, "is that gentleman who appears to have been struck by lightning?"

Robbie followed her gaze, and something rare crossed his face—surprise, and then a slow, dawning amusement. "That," he said, "is the Duke of Thigsberry."

"A duke."

"Newly come into it. His mother played." Robbie paused. "She died two winters ago. I do not think he has cared for music since."

Elizabeth looked again at the young duke, at the naked wonder on his face, and felt something in her chest go soft and fierce all at once. Oh, she thought. He does not see a plain girl at all. He sees the only person in the room who told the truth.

What followed unfolded with the stately correctness of a minuet. His Grace did not approach Mary—he would no more have accosted an unintroduced young lady than he would have juggled the candlesticks. He sought out Lady Matlock. Lady Matlock, scenting a triumph that would be recounted in her drawing room for a decade, presented him to Robbie, and Robbie to Mary, in the proper order and the proper form, while Mrs. Bennet gripped Elizabeth's arm hard enough to leave marks.

The Duke of Thigsberry bowed to Mary Bennet as though she were a sovereign. He asked—haltingly, all his rank deserting him—whether she might tell him the name of the piece she had played, for he had heard it only once before, from hands now lost to him, and had never learned to ask. And Mary, who could reduce a room to silence with a sonata but had never once been asked a question as though her answer mattered, told him.

They spoke of music for eleven minutes. Elizabeth timed it. By the ninth turn of the long hand, the duke had requested—of Mr. Bennet, who was still obliged to accompany his wife to all the occasions she deemed of import to their estate and family—the very great honor of being permitted to call at Longbourn.

It was not, however, the duke's admiration that undid Elizabeth. It was Lady Matlock's parting announcement, delivered hours later with the air of a woman laying down a winning hand: word of Miss Mary Bennet's performance had reached certain quarters. His Royal Highness the Prince Regent, whose devotion to music was well known, had expressed a desire to hear the young lady play. Miss Bennet was to be invited to Carlton House.

Mama made a sound Elizabeth had never before heard a human throat produce.

"Carlton House," she breathed, when she recovered the power of speech. "The palace. Lizzy. Lizzy, your sister is to play for the Prince, and a duke is to sit upon my chaise—" She pressed her handkerchief to her mouth. "I must go home. I must go home to Meryton this instant and tell Lady Lucas before she hears it from anyone else. A duke, Lizzy. Upon my chaise." She was already, Elizabeth could see, composing the sentence.

Through all of it, Jane sat very still.

Elizabeth crossed to her, and for a moment the two eldest Bennet sisters watched their middle sister be gently, disbelievingly congratulated by half a peerage. Elizabeth waited for it—the tightening at the corner of Jane's mouth, the old, cold superiority. Jane, who had been the beauty of four counties. Jane, who had turned away a good man for the crime of being born to trade. Jane, who had spent a lifetime first in every room she entered, and who had just watched a duke walk past her as though she were a very fine piece of furniture, to fall at the feet of the sister no one had ever thought to look at twice.

Elizabeth saw the struggle. She would not insult Jane by pretending it was not there.

But she saw, too, the moment Jane set it down.

Her sister drew a breath, and let it go, and something eased in her lovely face that had been clenched for the better part of a year. When she rose, it was to go to Mary. She took their sister's hands—Mary, who stiffened, braced for correction, for the old competition—and Jane said, low and only for the three of them:

"You cannot wear that comb to Carlton House." A pause, and then, with the ghost of her true self shining through: "You will wear mine. The pearl. And I will dress your hair myself—I am the only one of us with any skill at it, and I mean to make you look as remarkable as you sound. The handsome duke shall have no excuse to look anywhere but at you."

Mary blinked. "You wish to—"

"I wish," said Jane, and her voice did not quite hold steady, "to be a better sister than I have been. Let me begin with your hair. It is a smaller apology than I owe, but it is a beginning."

Elizabeth turned away, ostensibly to find her husband, and pressed her knuckles briefly to her lips.

She had spent so many years holding her family together by main force—balancing its accounts, hiding its troubles, standing between her sisters and the consequences of their own natures—that she had half forgotten to hope they might one day learn to hold one another. And here it was: Mary, unafraid at last to be seen; Jane, laying down the one thing she had always believed was hers alone; the two of them bent together over a pearl comb, arguing amiably about ringlets.

Robbie appeared at her elbow with two glasses of lemonade, looking as pleased as Elizabeth felt.

"She will do very well," he said quietly, nodding at Mary. "Thigsberry is a good sort. He does not love her for her face, or her fortune, or her family."

"No," Elizabeth agreed, and took his arm, and thought of a bearded stranger who had once chopped wood in her father's yard rather than let her love a name instead of a man. "He loves her for exactly what she is."

"A fine start."

"The best."

"I could not agree more, my love." He tugged on her arm. "Now, if you would be so kind as to squelch a rumor Lady Bilberry has been attempting to spread?"

Elizabeth looked up at him, intrigued.

"Apparently, you are secretly in love with a fellow named Robbie."

"Oh, but I am! Madly in love." Clutching her husband's arm with renewed glee, they crossed the room.