She might as well have been Mary for all the mind her mother paid her.
“Is Lord Lumpley to thank for all these pretty baubles, then? As if your beauty didn’t shine brightly enough already. Tonight it shall be blinding!”
Blushing, Jane put a hand to the gold, gemstone-studded choker around her neck. Elizabeth had never seen it before. New, too, were her sister’s earrings and kid gloves and dancing slippers. The gown, though, was one Jane had brought with her from Longbourn (as was, of course, the sword that slightly crumpled the skirt on one side).
“His Lordship let me borrow a few things that his cousin, Lady Wellaway, left behind after her last visit,” Jane explained. “He rather insisted on it, actually.”
Elizabeth didn’t care for the color on her sister’s cheeks or the hint of a curl to her lips, but whatever they might mean, that could wait.
“Jane, was a dreadful loose in the house last night?”
Jane nodded, her face falling. “No one knows how it got inside. It killed one of the servants and a soldier before I, well, I rather split it in two.”
“Oh!” Mrs. Bennet huffed. “Can’t we talk about something else? Who put up your hair, dear? They did simply marvelous work with the curls!”
“Was it a male?” Elizabeth asked. “Fairly fresh?”
“Just the opposite. It was a girl, quite decomposed.”
“And would you just look at those beautiful bangles,” Mrs. Bennet said. “Do they belong to Lady Wellaway, too?”
“A girl? So it wasn’t—”
Elizabeth caught herself just in time.
“So it wasn’t Mr. Smith?” she’d been about to say. She could just imagine explaining “Mr. Smith” to her mother. Mrs. Bennet was desperate for her daughters to meet eligible males, but Elizabeth suspected even she had her standards.
“Have you seen Dr. Keckilpenny this morning?” she asked instead.
“Yes,” Jane said. “I finally met the good doctor at breakfast.”
Elizabeth let out a breath she didn’t even know she’d been holding.
“He didn’t stay to eat with us,” Jane went on. “He simply loaded a plate in the kitchen and went back to the attic. The cook said all he took were pastries and desserts—along with some uncooked kidneys and tripe.” She shook her head. “A strange young man. Nice, of course. But strange.”
“Doctors,” Mrs. Bennet snorted. “They’re all strange, if you ask me. Who’d want to spend all their time around sick people? And I’ve never known a one who had more than four hundred a year. Now, solicitors, there’s a sensible bunch. Or, better yet, barristers. Or—”
“Tell me, Jane,” Elizabeth said, cocking an eyebrow. “Were there any other unwelcome callers in the night?”
For once, Jane looked as if she would have preferred pursuing her mother’s line of conversation.
“Yes . . . in a way . . . but it wasn’t like that.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “The baron’s not as bad as you think, Lizzy.”
“Believe me, Jane: He’s not as good as you think,” Elizabeth replied. “No one is.”
Yet Jane looked unconvinced.
Soon after, Cuthbert Cannon and his Limbs came rolling/striding in, and it was quickly decided that the captain would see to Mrs. Bennet’s entertainment while Elizabeth helped Jane prepare for the ball. It was a somewhat surprising arrangement: Capt. Cannon surely had better things to do, and Mrs. Bennet was passing up the chance to do worse by insinuating herself into the baron’s household or playing Cupid for her daughters. Yet Elizabeth was too grateful to be free of her mother (and the constant danger of shame she posed) to ponder long on the oddness of it all.
She spent the next hours with her sister seeing to various lastminute details on Lord Lumpley’s behalf. Jane had been appointed the baron’s proxy, apparently, and it fell to her to make the final decisions on the placement of the orchestra, the arrangement of the card tables, the tartness of the punch, the ratio of grapes to apples in the fruit bowl, etcetera. In addition to being a great honor, this was a great responsibility. Everything in the ballroom and the drawing room and the long portrait-lined gallery connecting them had to be just so, and one servant after another came to Jane for direction, or simply glared at the upstart girl who dared to play mistress for the day.
Yet through it all Jane remained her usual agreeable, serene self. Elizabeth, however, found each new triviality rubbing her nerves more raw. What should she care about the desperate shortage of oysters or how to keep the Lumbards from mixing with their mortal enemies the Maydestones? Especially when she could look out any of the huge windows in that wing of the house and see soldiers drilling with muskets, hammering boards together into what looked like shields, marching up the road bound for who knew where or what?
“Oh, sod the Cotswold!” she finally snapped when Jane took a little too much time deliberating over the proper arrangement of the cheese plate. “And sod the ruddy Wensleydale, too!”
“Lizzy!”
Elizabeth clapped her hands over her mouth, hardly believing what had just popped from it.
“Oh, Jane. Forgive me, please,” she said when she could finally trust herself to speak again. “It’s just . . . I find myself feeling so . . . so . . .”
Whatever she was feeling, it didn’t come to her in anything so simple as a single word, and she had to get at her meaning another way.
“You’re supposed to be the baron’s bodyguard, not his master of ceremonies. For heaven’s sake, can’t we leave these trifles to Belgrave and the other servants?”
Jane reached out and gently took one of Elizabeth’s hands in her own.
“Don’t think I’m not frustrated, as well, Lizzy. Papa, Master Hawksworth, little Ensign Pratt, LieutenantTindall—they’re all out there in harm’s way so that we might stand here trying to keep the Stilton as far as possible from the Brie. It was our father’s wish that this be so, however, and we can only assume there is some intent behind it, for how often has he made decisions unwisely or without due consideration?”
“You mean other than when he married Mother?”
Jane gave her sister another reproachful look.
“Yes, I know. You’re right, of course,” Elizabeth sighed. “I just wish I knew what Father was up to and why he felt it necessary to be so secretive about it.”
“I suspect we’ll have answers to both those questions soon.” Jane gave Elizabeth’s hand a squeeze, then turned back to the cheese plate. “Now, I’m beginning to incline to your way of thinking on the Cotswold. It’s altogether too bold, isn’t it? Perhaps we could have someone check the larder for a block of Gloucester.”
Presently, Lord Lumpley returned with what proved to be impeccable timing: He came downstairs after all the necessary arrangements had been made and just before the arrival of the first guests. Elizabeth thought he actually looked rather good in his black coat and breeches and silvery silk vest, though he moved with a stiff-backed stiltedness that suggested his corset strings had been pulled especially tight for this night. Mrs. Bennet and Capt. Cannon reappeared then, as well, both of them looking cheery and flushed from their tour of the grounds.
This, then, was the de facto receiving line when Belgrave escorted the Goswicks into the ballroom. Mr. Goswick was actually able to bluff out an almost-convincing show of gratitude to the baron for “assuming patronage of the ball.” But Mrs. Goswick and her daughter Julia—who, like Elizabeth, was to have her coming out that night—looked as though they could barely resist pinching their noses.
“You’ve taken off your scimitars, I see,” Mrs. Goswick sniffed to Elizabeth and Jane. “Well . . . I suppose they would get in the way during the dancing, wouldn’t they?”