The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 34. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

We changed horses at Barnet, and Lydia's wedding had already improved twice.

When she was telling the story at our first halt, there had been eleven people in the church, which was true, for I had been one of them and had counted. By the second there were rather more, and the Colonel's regimentals had acquired a sword-knot given him by a general. By Barnet the wedding had a bishop in it. My father listened to each version with the gravity he reserved for exceptionally ridiculous developments, and said nothing. Every now and again, he looked at his new son-in-law over the top of it all with the expression he usually kept for a tradesman's bill that had come in lower than expected and must therefore contain an error somewhere.

"And Denny will be sick as a cat when he hears," said Lydia, "for he always said colonels were too old to be worth having, and now I am Mrs. Fitzwilliam and shall go into dinners ahead of half the county. I shall write and tell him so on the new paper, for we have ordered everything from the stationer's with the crest on it — it is a very good crest, isn't it Fitzwilliam?"

"It has a griffin on it," said the Colonel. "You will find the griffin does most of the work of the letter."

"A griffin." Lydia sat back, satisfied, as though she had ordered one from a warehouse and it had come. "Kitty may have my blue bonnet, and the spotted muslin too, for I am to have everything new in town — Fitzwilliam says I may fit out the whole of Bond Street if I will only do it by degrees. Kitty will die."

She was exactly as she had always been: the same volume, the same total want of proportion, the wedding and the griffin and Denny's discomfiture all weighed in the same scale. And yet twice on that road I caught hints of what she had become.

The first time was the bracelet. "…and when George said we must wait for the money before we could dine anywhere fit to be seen, I took my coral bracelet down to the man at the corner myself. George offered to carry it for me and I told him no, for I had seen what he got for his own watch, and I knew I could do better. And I did. Nine shillings better."

"Nine and six," said the Colonel, without looking up from the window. "She does herself an injustice. Tell your father about the man's dog."

He had heard it before, then. He had heard it, kept the figure, and wanted it told again. A man does not ask twice for a story about a pawnbroker's dog unless he has decided the story's owner is worth collecting. I had come into that carriage prepared to pity Colonel Fitzwilliam, and I spent the journey changing my mind.

The second time came past Hatfield, in a lull, when the griffin had been exhausted and the horses were tired. Lydia looked out the window and said, to the hedgerows more than to us: "The last week was not such good fun. George was out a great deal, and the woman of the house would keep locking the street door." And then, before anyone could make anything of it: "Fitzwilliam, when we are at Longbourn you must not let Mamma seat you next to Mary, for she will improve you, and you are not to be improved until I have shown you off."

"I shall cling to my faults," said the Colonel, "for your sake."

I looked at my youngest sister and found I had nothing to say that would not have been a door better left shut. She had gone into that house at Brighton a silly girl and come out of the other one still silly, and somewhere between the two she had pawned her own bracelet at a better price than George Wickham could get for a watch, and had noticed a locked door and kept her head about it.

My father spoke perhaps four times in as many hours. Once, somewhere past the turnpike, he said: "You have barely known my daughter a fortnight, Colonel. What sort of woman do you imagine you have married?"

Lydia protested the question. The Colonel considered it.

"A woman who got nine and six above the fair price out of a Cheapside pawnbroker," he said, "in the worst week of her life. I expect to be very well looked after, sir."

"Hm," said my father, and returned to the window. He only went on watching, with the patience of a judge who has decided that the evidence is not yet all in. I thought that my father did his best work in exactly that posture, and had simply never before had anything worth doing it on.

Longbourn came up the way it always came up, paddock first, then the chimneys, and Jane was out on the steps before the carriage had properly stopped, and for a moment everything was arms and bonnets and Kitty shrieking from the doorway about the griffin, the moment Lydia mentioned it.

"Jane, you must go down lower now," said Lydia, embracing her, "for I am a married woman, and I take your place. Lord, how strange it is!"

"You are very welcome to it," said Jane, laughing, and took her in under her arm, and looked over her shoulder at me with all the questions she was too kind to ask in the drive. I gave her a look which meant that I would tell her as soon as I was able.