Book Two, Chapter Six

Things start heating up between the cousins.

The next morning, Mary Elizabeth found herself victim to the Bennet family affliction of rattled nerves. There was but one option for self-medication; you guessed it, reader–it was walk o’clock. Muscling past the indignity of dressing herself without a housemaid, Emmy donned a simple dress, a shawl, and a pair of moisture-wicking socks. She was applying a thick layer of chapstick when she looked out the window and was startled to behold the perambulator's great enemy: wind.

Wind, Emmy considered, was not wholly bad. Wind was merely God’s attempt to add a little funk to omnipresence. What good was being everywhere-all-the-time if everywhere-all-the-time didn’t get the chance to groove, baby, groove? She was certain she had read that somewhere– though, like many such theological meditations, she couldn't say be sure of its provenance; whether it had originated from one Mary’s sermons, or one of Mr. Collins’s letters or, she flattered herself, from her own heart.

“Either way,” she thought, “wind be wind, and wind be now.”

Below, the wind continued being. Gusts of English air volleyed pedestrians back and forth across the road, killing them. To continue the earlier metaphor of wind being a sort of divine jazz solo, God’s virtuosity had outgrown His audience’s enthusiasm for improvisation; Emmy was tired of jazz. Resigned, she changed into a lighter-weight pair of socks and considered hunkering down with an un-annotated Bible (her cousin's marginalia had proven too stimulating to be entirely proper).

Emmy settled in with a nice, non-erotic passage from her travel Bible (2 Kings 6:28-29, two moms eat their kids) but she continued to be tested; even without feasting her eyes on the carnage outside, her focus was drawn to it by the additional sounds of horse and wheel, annotated once again by her cousin. Mr. Collins, watching through the window in his study downstairs, loudly announced the model and make of every carriage to enter the windy fray. His declarations (“Phaeton incoming! 1805-ish? Looks Welsh to me!”) rang through the house like a church bell. Emmy strained to hear what reply Charlotte had to offer on the subject–and she could not decide if it was for better or worse that she heard none.

“Now, now, Big Dog⁴,” she chided herself, “we mustn’t fret over every exchange between newlyweds.” She resumed her readings, until:

“Cousin Mary Elizabeth–come quickly! You must see this!”

The thrill of being ordered by a cousin who was also host thrust Emmy out of her seat like a cat in heat. She zoomied to the entrance of Mr. Collins’ study, hungry to obey his passion.

For a moment she lingered in the corridor, wondering if crossing the sacred threshold to Collins’s private study constituted an adulterous act. The little voice inside her head which Emmy always assumed to be her conscience said–

“Get it, girl⁵.”

Holding her breath, Emmy waded in gingerly, and found her cousin absolutely gagging at the sight of a carriage outside.

“The Barouche!” he explained breathlessly, “Lady Catherine’s Barouche! By gum, it’s a carriage from Rosings!”