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“There is nothing weak about me. I may never be as healthy as most other women, but I am not the sickly person who cannot fend for herself that you have tried drugging into a stupor. So yes, Lady Catherine, regardless of how you have attempted to steal my estate from me, I will be the mistress here just as my late father wanted me to be. You have failed. However, I must thank you for one thing,” Anne added.

Seeing the confused look on Lady Catherine’s face, Anne smiled and looked at Mr Collins. “Even if you did not mean to do so, you chose the best possible replacement for Mr Belvedere.” Anne paused. “By the by, it was Mr Collins who took my letter to Bishop Lankershim. The bishop sent it to Uncle Reggie. I had a strong suspicion that the landlord of the Black Bull Inn was one of your lackeys.”

“You call yourself a parson! You lied to me when I spoke to you before appointing you,” Lady Catherine spat out.

“No, Lady Catherine, I did not,” William Collins contradicted. “You heard what you wanted to hear. If you remember, my exact words were: ‘I am very good at following instructions that are helpful, and I will always be open to hearing what my patroness has to say.’ Not one word was a prevarication. I am good at following valid and lawful instructions, and I was open to listening. I never said I would follow said ridiculous pronouncements, did I?”

She opened and closed her mouth a few times but was unable to refute what the parson said. Between this man and her daughter, she had been played for the fool. Lady Catherine remembered her brother’s words. “What do you mean, you may send me to Bedlam?”

“What you attempted with your daughter and the letter you wrote to the bishop were not the actions of a woman who has command of all her faculties. When Elaine, my sons, and I return to London, you will be with us so that you may be evaluated by physicians who will decide if you need to be committed to an asylum.” Seeing that his sister was about to protest, Matlock raised his hand. “Before you attempt to place the blame elsewhere, everything that you will reap now has been sown by your own hand.”

It suddenly struck Lady Catherine that all her plans had come to nought. All of the fight went out of her as she hung her head and seemed to age before everyone’s eyes.

Two Matlock footmen assisted the former mistress of the estate to her chambers. One man would stand guard until the family’s departure to Town.

“The process will not be easy, but we need to rid the estate of all Lady Catherine’s sycophants,” Anne mused. “Uncle Reggie, I know you have the Lords and your own estate, so you cannot remain here indefinitely.

“Annie, I have leave from the army and will request more. When William is free, he can join us here, and we will assist you,” Fitzwilliam offered.

“Your aunt, Andrew, and I will be here for a few more days also,” Matlock added.

“I will work with Anne to teach her the true duties of a mistress of a manor house on an estate,” Lady Elaine volunteered. “Anne, dear, if you need me to return from London for more assistance, please write to me at Matlock House.”

Knowing that she would have help to begin to sort through all the problems her mother had caused at the estate allowed Anne to relax.

Chapter 6

On their return from the manor house, William Collins welcomed Bishop Lankershim as a guest for the night. The latter had been convinced to remain at the parsonage rather than returning to Westerham the same day.

“I am pleased that Lord Matlock’s removal of Lady Catherine has made my need to take the living from Rosings Park’s advowson unnecessary. It is always preferred to find a solution that does not require us to do that,” Lankershim mused as the two men sat in the sitting room, each with a small glass of port.

“It is hard to fathom the depths to which Lady Catherine sank in order to attempt to steal her daughter’s inheritance.” Collins shook his head.

“As the Apostle Paul said, as reported in 1 Timothy 6:10, ‘for the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil’ and never truer words spoken. Everything Lady Catherine did was driven by avarice,” Lankershim pointed out. “Look what her worship of worldly goods drove her to do, to harm and, effectively, imprison her own daughter. I thank God you took charge of this parish, and you were here to assist her.”

“To borrow from Cowper, ‘God works in mysterious ways,’ does He not?” William responded.

“Indeed, He does, young Collins, indeed, He does.”

~~~~~~~/~~~~~~~

Elizabeth Bennet was doing what she enjoyed, walking out on her father’s estate and being away from the commotion created at Longbourn by her mother and her two youngest sisters.

Walking in nature gave her a sense of peace which was impossible to attain when her mother was screeching about her favourite topic of being thrown into the hedgerows to starve as soon as Papa went to his eternal reward. The fact that her father was fit and healthy and was not yet fifty, far from his dotage, did not factor into Mamma’s thoughts when she allowed herself to succumb to one of her supposed attacks of nerves. When this occurred, as it had this day, it was left up to angelic, serene Jane to calm Mamma.

At three and twenty, Jane was as yet single. In and of itself that was surprising, given her beauty. That is, until one factored in Mamma’s way of helping Jane when the former sniffed out a possible suitor in the area. Jane had begun to be courted by three men. One of them had written her verses of poetry—the poorest attempt Elizabeth had ever read. Thanks to Mamma’s vulgar and mercenary effusions, coupled with the way she praised Jane to the skies while denigrating her other daughters’ looks, she managed to cause the suitors to turn tail and run. Each of the three men, one when Jane was fifteen, another when she was eighteen, and the last a year past, all escaped as fast as they were able thanks to Fanny Bennet’s machinations.

It was not only her own unfavoured daughters her mother insulted, other ladies in the neighbourhood did not escape Mamma’s insulting tongue, especially Charlotte Lucas, a best friend to the two eldest Bennet sisters, who Mamma called plain and on the shelf.

It did not help that Kitty and Lydia, who were almost seventeen and fifteen, respectively, were as loud and vulgar as their mother. This gave the men more reasons to make their escapes. Even though Mary, who would turn nineteen in July, behaved far better than the two youngest Bennets, she too had her quirks. She would bang away at the pianoforte for hours each day. Her playing was not bad, though it was pedantic and had no feeling infused into it. Also, she was enamoured of Fordyce’s Sermons and worked quotes from them into her speech as much as she could, regardless of how much her family did not want to hear her “pearls of wisdom.”

Nor did it help that rather than check his wife and daughters, Papa found amusement in their actions. Rather than correct them, he teased and laughed, calling Kitty and Lydia two of the silliest girls in the kingdom. One time, after noticing Jane’s sorrow at losing another suitor, Elizabeth asked her father why he did not step in. He told her that it was good for a girl to be crossed in love now and again.

In Elizabeth’s opinion, if the men allowed Mamma and her sisters to cause them to bolt, then they obviously had not loved Jane enough to see that Jane had more worth than her weight in gold. That being true, then perhaps it was Jane who made a fortuitous escape.

As much as Elizabeth decried Mamma’s lack of decorum, she did understand that her mother had not been raised as a gentlewoman and did not know better. As she was her father’s favourite, she excluded him from the criticism that he had never insisted his wife learn the ways of the gentry. Also, Elizabeth was well aware that thanks to the war with the little Corsican tyrant, there was a dearth of eligible men in the area around Meryton. She did not like the way her mother behaved and even joined Papa in making fun of her at times. However, Elizabeth had to admit that her mother was driven by the fear of losing her home when Papa was called home. Also, Mamma was scared of being saddled with unmarried daughters that she would have to support on the two hundred pounds per annum her dowry earned in the funds.

Like she often times did, when the frenetic behaviour of her mother and younger sisters got to be too much, Elizabeth made her way to Oakham Mount and took the gently rising path to the summit. Rather than sit below the oaks in the stand on the top of the low hill, Elizabeth sat on a flattened boulder, one she often used when coming to watch the sunrise.