Kitty Bennet’s life will never be the same.

Mr. Collins is engaged to Charlotte Lucas which means Longbourn will eventually no longer be theirs. Mr. Bingley has left Netherfield without proposing to Jane.

When Jane leaves for London, Lizzy to Kent, and Lydia to Brighton, Kitty feels left behind. Even her love life has come to naught.

And a greater crisis is still to come, one that could devastate the family.

But this is Kitty’s journey, and she will weather the storms, emerging stronger than she ever believed she could.

---

Purchase
Kindle ♥ Smashwords ♥ Nook ♥ Apple ♥ Google Play ♥ Kobo ♥ PRINT

Release Date: June 18, 2024
Genre: Historical | Regency

~ A Pink Satin Romance ~

---

Excerpt

Chapter One

Shock!

That was the word that described every single one of us as we sat there and looked up at Sir William Lucas.

Except Elizabeth, who merely looked uneasily at Mama.

“I’m sorry,” Mama countered, leaning forward in her chair, “but you just said that Mr. Collins is engaged to Charlotte?”

“Yes,” Sir William Lucas confirmed, still trying to keep his congenial composure. “And our families are now united. Is this news not the most delightful thing?”

“Sir,” Mama cried. “You must be entirely mistaken! I wonder how you came to believe such a thing?”

“Good Lord!” Lydia exclaimed, boisterously. “Sir William, how can you tell such a story? Do not you know that Mr. Collins wants to marry Lizzy?”

“Precisely! Only a couple days ago, Mr. Collins made an offer to Elizabeth and would have been accepted by her, if he could have been.”

Sir William stuttered a bit and then he regained his composure.

“While it is inadmissible to ever contradict a lady,” Sir William continued, bearing through it all with fortitude, “I beg you all would believe me. Early this morning, Mr. Collins paid a visit to Lucas Lodge and proposed to my little Charlotte. Upon her acceptance, they both appealed to Lady Lucas and me. We both heartily gave our consent. I promise that I am positive as to the truth of my information. Mr. Collins left our home with encouragement, and I see that he did not inform you about it. I am sorry if the news has come as such a shock to you. But, as I understand, Charlotte did not wish for him to inform you all, because she felt it was more proper for us to inform you instead.”

“I can confirm his announcement, Mama,” Elizabeth interjected, finally speaking up. “It is incumbent on me to corroborate his joyous news. When Charlotte came but half an hour ago, it was to inform me of this recent development. She desired that Mr. Collins would not tell us this delightful news, because she felt it more delicate to unfold all to me first.”

“This is really happening?” Lydia questioned.

“Yes,” I added, “this is very shocking, isn’t it?”

Elizabeth stood up, facing Sir William.

“Sir William,” she announced, “from my heart, I sincerely congratulate you for Charlotte’s finding her joy through our relation, and you must be the happiest father in England!”

“Yes,” Jane added, “Charlotte is a sweet and steady girl who deserves such a worthy match, and I believe they both will be very happy. For Mr. Collins’s manners and style of living will suit her well.”

“Also,” Elizabeth added, “Charlotte’s sensible nature will augment his and, from a prudential light, Mr. Collins could not have found a better wife.”

“Even more,” Jane finalized, “you must find it delightful that Charlotte will reside near Hertfordshire. For, the convenient distance of Hunsford from London makes it so that you do not have to worry of not seeing her for lengthy amounts of time. It is always wonderful when one is close enough to visit one’s family. As we all know, family is important to us all. So yes, we wish Charlotte joy.”

All I could do was sit there and wonder at what just unfolded. Yesterday, Mr. Collins was a single man who had experienced a rejection. Now today, he was engaged to a whole different woman.

Fickleness, thy name is Collins!

Sir William breathed a sigh of relief when Jane and Elizabeth finished their congratulations.

“Thank you, Miss Bennet and Miss Elizabeth,” he commented, “you have always been very good friends to our family and now I rejoice in our families becoming closer than ever. Miss Elizabeth, you are Charlotte’s dear friend. To hear you wish her all the good fortune in the world is not below notice, but only reinforces your generosity and candor. Charlotte will always regard you as very dear to her.”

He looked around at us all.

“Well, you ladies perhaps have many other engagements and I do not wish to take up any more of your time talking on and on, about the joys of the upcoming nuptials of my eldest daughter. But just think, if you all had not invited Mr. Collins to come here, things would not have turned out this way. What a stroke of good fortune that you did so, because it has led to Charlotte’s happiness! And to think, it all could have turned out differently. Thank goodness it was the reverse.”

His last words must’ve felt like knives being lodged in Mama’s bosom, and every word stabbed. At last, Sir William took his leave.

“Good day, sir,” was all that Mama could muster up. We curtsied and bid him farewell.

 

* * *

 

When we were finally alone, Mama could release all the anxiety that ensued from being so overcome in such a sudden way.

“This cannot be true!” she shouted, jumping up and beginning to pace back and forth. “In the first place, nay, I cannot believe it. This report cannot be true in the slightest. Unless there has been some sort of trickery. Yes, that is it! I am very sure that Mr. Collins has been taken in. He was drawn in by stealthy cunningness. Can you all believe this?”

“It is true,” Mary voiced, “for I doubt Sir William would be mistaken.”

“Especially since Elizabeth has been told such solid proof of this by Charlotte herself,” Jane voiced.

“And...” I added, “it would account for some things. It would explain why Mr. Collins was behaving so oddly the other day. And Charlotte and he did appear as being friendly before they left.”

“I noticed as much as well and should have deduced this earlier,” Elizabeth asserted, “for, when reflecting on the events of the last three days, all evidence does support this conclusion. I do not believe this event has occurred through Mr. Collins being taken in, but rather he walked into this with open eyes.”

“Oh, I wish you had never befriended Charlotte!” Mama protested. “For look what she has done, Elizabeth? She has quite betrayed you and has shown herself to be a deceitful creature. What craft she has created to bring this about shows a furtive maliciousness. Well, this indicates that they will be very unhappy together. For Mr. Collins is a man who has been taken in—but he walks into it with open eyes, which shows that he has fooled himself. And since Charlotte has proven herself to be viciously ambitious, they will both plague and torment the other, proving to be the most ill-suited pair in England. It’s a doomed marriage. A very doomed one!”

She stopped pacing and a look of revelation fell across her features.

“Unless...”

“Unless what, Mama?” Lydia asked.

“Unless the match might be broken off. Yes, that is possible. Very possible! Not all engagements lead to marriage. Half of the ones that I have seen ended up with one of the two parties coming to their senses and breaking it off. There is the chance that Mr. Collins will comprehend that he has made a mistake and revoke his offer.”

“If he did so, that would be ungenerous and unfeeling of him,” Elizabeth countered. “We should not hope for such.”

“Indeed,” Jane supported, “Mama, such a thought is unkind of us.”

Mama suddenly looked embittered.

“But there is one thing that I do know, and this is fact.” She looked at Elizabeth. “It is plainly deduced from the whole. Elizabeth, you are the real cause of all this mischief. If you had only accepted Mr. Collins, then this tragedy would never befall us. But it has, and I have been barbarously misused by everyone. I will never recover from this, never!”

 

* * *

 

Of course, it was inevitable that Father had to be told of the matter. He was given ample opportunity, because Mama was not silent on her vexations. Rather, she spent the whole day ranting and raving about how betrayed she felt by everyone around her, and thoroughly ignoring Lizzy or chastising her.

Father, of course, had the exact opposite reaction.

“I know that you wish for me to be as roused as you are, my dear,” Father told her when she unfolded everything to him. “On the contrary, this news is a most agreeable sort of acknowledgement.”

“Agreeable?” Mama scoffed. “And what, pray tell, is agreeable about this recent development?”

“Because it is pleasant to discover that Charlotte Lucas, whom I have been used to think tolerably sensible, is as foolish as my wife, and more foolish than our daughter!”

“And you find that to be of a consolation? Mr. Bennet, have you no heart? No care about the future? Do you see nothing past your own cynical amusement?”

“No, my dear, I don’t.”

This sent Mama into more hysterics.

“I cannot stand any more of this. My nerves are suffering. I will be ill, and I feel it coming on now. I must take to my room, for I feel as if I am about to die on the spot!”

With that, she left the room and called for Betsy and Hill to tend to her.

Father looked at all of us as we sat there.

“Lydia,” Father asked, opening the newspaper, “what do you feel about this all?”

“I find Charlotte to have sealed her own death warrant,” Lydia replied. “To be marrying a clergyman.”

“What do you think about this sad business, Kitty?” he asked me, putting on his spectacles.

“I...” I began, “well, better her than me, I daresay. But I wish that it could have all ended differently.”

“That was wiser than expected. And you, Mary, what do you think of this all?”

“Well,” Mary began, “as far as prudence goes, it is a most eligible match.”

“Very eligible indeed,” Father said, “what say you, Elizabeth?”

“I say the action is done,” Elizabeth responded, “and all we can do is accept the matter, by and by.”

“Very practical. And what of you, Jane? What do you think?”

“I confess that I am a little surprised at the match,” Jane acknowledged, “but despite my astonishment, I hope they will be very happy.”

“I do not suspect such,” Elizabeth countered. “I know that you shall not believe me, but I feel that domestic joy is highly unlikely in their case. Despite her choice, Charlotte is aware of the sort of man that she has engaged herself to, and I doubt that married life will improve his nature.”

“I am far from envying Charlotte, for my part,” Lydia added, “for Mr. Collins is only a clergyman.”

“Just think,” I said to Lydia, “what the neighbors will say when they find this out.”

“You mean...when we tell them?”

She gave me a knowing look and I knew what she was referring to.

“Bet I can spread the news first,” Lydia challenged.

“Good luck with that,” I retaliated. “I am as fast a runner and talker as you! Well, at least one good thing will come out of this situation. This gives us news to tell.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I sat there and spied Mary. She didn’t speak much and just seemed to be introspective. As the day progressed, she went upstairs to change for dinner. I got dressed first and visited her in her room.

Since her hair hadn’t changed at all, and she had already got her gown on, she was only left to put on her slippers and clean her spectacles.

When I entered, she looked at me quickly and then went back to scrutinizing her appearance in the mirror.

“What is it?” she asked. “Is Mama asking about me?”

“No, she still has taken to her room. I came because I was curious.”

“About what?”

I cocked my head to the side.

“Are you going to be elusive?”

“No, I promise that I won’t be,” she assured me, “you can ask me anything and I will try to tell you the truth. Unless it hurts a little too much to talk about just yet.”

I closed the door behind me, crossed to her bed and sat down.

“How has this news really affected you?”

“I had a feeling that you were going to ask about that.” Mary turned to me. “Would you believe that I am not affected by this news?”

“How can I believe it? Mary, by your will or not, you did have a tender feeling for Mr. Collins—albeit it was very brief.”

“Brief is the perfect word for it. But perhaps, an even better word for it would be ‘flimsy’. Kitty, you know very well that my feelings for Mr. Collins were done out of a sense of duty and desire to swing my affections away from Mr. Darcy. Mr. Collins was, for lack of a better term for it, a substitute. I was being foolish.”

“No, you just were feeling that painful thing.”

“What painful thing?”

“Emotion. It’s not easy to govern, believe me.”

“Why are you better at it than I am?”

“I’ve had more time to deal with it. This is all, perhaps, still very new to you. Also, your emotions had a desired end to them. I am not circumspect when I deduce that your initial motive was to lead to matrimony?”

Mary didn’t say anything, but she nodded.

“Well,” I said, “most of my passing bits of enchantment have never gone passed me just looking on it as an... experience. Attraction comes and goes. For you, you wished for it to stay. So, I had to ask…”

“If I was unsettled by this all?”

“Yes.”

“I can promise you that I am not,” Mary assured me. “This is not me hiding from you or pretending that I am stronger than what I am. I was shocked when I discovered that he was engaged to Charlotte, but not imposed on, or affected by. The shock was simply due to the engagement happening so soon after Mr. Collins proposed to Elizabeth. How can a man swing from one woman to the other in so quick a fashion?”

“I don’t think it did. I think Mr. Collins did this, not because he feels anything real, but he wants to rebound in some way where he looks victorious, in the end.”

“I know! That’s what I felt. I don’t think he loves Charlotte. And I don’t believe that she loves him. I think...they both married out of desperation. One needed a husband because that is our fate. And the other needed a wife because Lady Catherine told him to, and he didn’t want to leave here looking defeated.”

“Do you think he also did this to triumph over us? As if it was the only way to get revenge on us?”

“I cannot believe that he is like that,” Mary said. “Whatever are his faults or actions, Mr. Collins is not vicious.”

“You really think him above harboring any natural resentment of any kind?”

“I want to believe that he is better than that. Perhaps, his actions came from a place of wounded pride. But no more than that. And perhaps,” she said, with a lift of her brows, “he was embarrassed, and that led to him wishing for relief from another quarter.

“Think about it, Kitty. He proposed to Elizabeth. She rejected him. And we all knew about it. Naturally, he must have possibly felt humiliated since his shame was known. If it were hidden, and only he and Elizabeth were made aware of it, maybe he would have acted in a different way. But I have found that we humans don’t like to dwell in our public failures. We want to recover from them as quickly as possible and be strong again. By proposing to Charlotte so quickly, knowing that she would probably say yes, this was his way of fortifying himself.”

“Is that you being deductive? Because if it’s not, and it’s just you quoting someone else—”

“Oh, come now,” she said, rolling her eyes, “I do say my own words every now and again. This really is me just theorizing as I think. Give me credit on that score.”

“Very well. Maybe, there is some truth in that. We all have the right to rise above humiliation. But I still cannot feel any empathy for him. As evil as that may sound, I do not care.”

“We must still treat him like family, but I will not force anything on you.”

“You really are not affected at all by this, internally?”

She chuckled a little. “Yes, I swear it. What can I say that you would believe me? My affection for him clearly was an idle inclination, so I could never have been really in love at all. It was just a passing bit of fancy, perhaps was acted upon by an act of vanity.”

“You own to a moment of vanity?” I was awed. “Now that is something.”

“Oh!” Mary threw me a frustrated look and covered her face with her hands.

 

* * *

 

That night, before bed, I wrote down in my diary:

This soon will be news that will spread over all Meryton. I confess to being curious to see how everyone will react to it. And soon, I will have to go to Lucas Lodge, and Maria and I will have to face each other. That will be a strange moment for both of us.

But as for Mr. Collins and Charlotte being engaged, I still am recovering from the surprise of it. But it is not like our mother’s shock, which is somewhat vehement and hysterical—she was upset about it all during dinner. Rather, it is simply that it was an engagement that was so sudden and unexpected.

After all, how could two people flirt with each other for a day and then decide that they wanted to get married? Yes, Mr. Collins was here for a fortnight and he and Charlotte did become acquainted, but it was never enough to base any sort of foundation on.

And Charlotte knew that Mr. Collins had proposed to Lizzy the day before. It was just all so very strange. I cannot understand it at all.

Could they really be happy? And as for Sir William and Lady Lucas, they clearly were overjoyed at the prospect of this match. A match that was secured by two people who knew little to nothing about each other, outside of a day’s courtship.

A part of me froze over: Mama was similar to Lady Lucas, desirous to secure our hand to any man of five thousand a year—or steady enough income. How happy our parents were...to see us daughters off their hands.

This is what we were to them.

 

↑ Return to Top ↑