Chapter One — Breakfast at Longbourn

The Balcony, Before

The house was dark and the two of them had the box to themselves, which the elder of the pair considered no compliment.

“I am told,” said Miss Austen, “that we are to see my novel.”

“A version of it.”

“A version.” She arranged her gloves in her lap with the particular economy of a woman who has decided to be patient and intends the decision to be visible. “And the young ladies are to be — what was the word your programme used — languages.”

“Yes, madam.”

“And the gentlemen are to be companies.”

“Yes.”

“Then I shall want to know why my heroines have acquired menageries. There is a tiger in the aisle. I watched it go past.”

“That is Javier. He belongs to Jane.”

“He belongs to Jane.”

“Every trade carries a totem,” said her companion. “In the age you are about to watch, the practitioners of each craft learned it from books, and every book wore an animal engraved upon its cover. A tiger for one language, a snake for another, a camel, a rhinoceros, a small hopping thing nobody can pronounce. The beasts were the family crests of the tribe. A man could be identified across a room by the animal on his shelf.”

“That is very nearly heraldry.”

“It is exactly heraldry, madam, at a lower price.”

Miss Austen inclined her head — the smallest available unit of concession. “And the animal tells us something of the woman?”

“The animal is the tool’s temperament made visible. Jane’s tiger is starving and will not eat anything that is still alive. Elizabeth’s creature answers only true or false. Lydia’s bird has no self at all and must stand beside somebody in order to be anybody.”

“Ah,” said Miss Austen, and for a moment she said nothing else, because that last was uncomfortably close to something she had once written down herself and been praised for.

“You will find the mapping less arbitrary than it looks.”

“I shall find it sweaty,” she said. “I have heard the orchestra tuning. There is a great deal of brass down there and none of it is behaving.”

“That would be the funk.”

“And must it all be so —” she permitted herself a full second — “perspired?”

“A groove is a running system, madam. Many parts interlocked, each holding its own figure, nobody permitted to drop the beat.”

“You have described a household.”

“I have described the only kind that does not fail. When the band is tight, nothing does.”

“That is one reason, and it is a cold one.”

“Then take a warm one. It is played by people who are present. You will hear them breathing.”

Miss Austen considered the brass, which was still misbehaving. “Neither of those is sweat.”

“No, madam. The last one is sweat, and it is the one that will offend you. Funk drags the wanting out. Play the coldest possible abstraction and the most buttoned-up possible propriety in the sweatiest available idiom, and the desire that both of them were built to hide comes up out of the floor whether anyone wished it or not.”

“My prose,” said Miss Austen, after a pause, “kept a great deal behind a closed drawing-room door.”

“I know, madam. That is why it is funk.”

The house lights went down. Somewhere below, a spoon was set against a saucer, twice, with intent.

“Very well,” said Miss Austen. “Let us see what they have done to my breakfast.”

One

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a company in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a language.

However little known the feelings or views of such a company may be on its first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families that it is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters — and the daughters, it should be said, are seldom consulted on the point, being generally understood to have been born already consenting.

“My dear Mr. Bennet,” said his lady to him one morning, “have you heard that the big house across the valley is let at last?”

Mr. Bennet replied that he had not.

“But it is,” returned she; “for Mrs. Long has just been here, and she told me all about it.”

Mr. Bennet made no answer. He had spent thirty years in the management of relationships — which is to say that he maintained, for a large hospital concern, a very great number of records describing persons he had never met and would never meet, each record faithfully connected to some other record, and each connection maintained with a care he had never once been asked to extend to anything that could be injured by neglect. It had taught him a certain economy of feeling. He was not a cold man. He was a man who had discovered, early and irreversibly, that a relationship kept properly in a column requires nothing of you at all.

“Do you not want to know who has taken it?” cried his wife impatiently.

“You want to tell me, and I have no objection to hearing it.”

This was invitation enough.

“Why, my dear, you must know, Mrs. Long says that the big house is taken by a young company of large fortune from the north; that he came down on Monday in a chaise-and-four to see the place, and was so much delighted with it that he agreed with the owner immediately; that he is to take possession before Michaelmas, and some of his servants are to be in the house by the end of next week — and, Mr. Bennet — he runs on Java.”

Mr. Bennet turned a page.

“His name is Google,” said Mrs. Bennet, in the manner of a woman laying down a card she has been holding all night.

It is necessary here to say something of Mrs. Bennet, and to say it kindly, since very little kindness is ever said of her. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper — this was the received account, and it was not precisely false, and it explained nothing. What she was, in fact, was a woman with five daughters, no capital, and an entail; and a great many people who found her ridiculous had never once been obliged to hold five futures in their two hands at the same time. She had, in her working life, been trained upon a system in which any event whatsoever — a keystroke, a glance, a question of the mildest kind — obliged the entire room to be constructed again from nothing, every object in it re-declared, every state restored from a bundle she was required to carry with her at all times and which grew heavier with each exchange. She had never been permitted to alter one thing without reassembling the whole. This was not a defect of her character. It was the only method she had ever been given, and she had grown very fast at it, and it had cost her her nerves, and she was still carrying the bundle.

“Jane,” said Mrs. Bennet, “is to go to the ball.”

“Jane may go to the ball,” said Mr. Bennet.

“Jane is to go to the ball, and she is to be seen, and she is to be seated where the light is good, and she is on no account to speak of the tiger before she has spoken of anything else.”

At this the tiger, who had been lying the whole while beneath the table with his chin upon Jane’s slipper, opened one eye.

“Jood morninj,” said Javier.

Nobody at the table found this remarkable. Javier had been in the house eleven years and had never once been able to begin a sentence on anything but the letter J — nor to say a hard G at all — this being a consequence of his profession, in which every implement, every vessel, every container, tool and standard he had ever been issued began with the letter J and had been named by men who thought the joke would stay funny. He had accepted it as one accepts weather.

He was also extremely thin, and always had been, and always would be, and was at that moment quietly and continuously hungry in a way that had not stopped since the day he was born.

“Javier, you will have some of the ham,” said Jane.

“J’m afraid not, Miss Jane. J’m vejan.”

“You are a tiger.”

“J am,” said Javier, with dignity, “and J’m terribly hunjry, and J eat all day lonj, and J never leave a mess. J collect my own jarbaje. J only eat what’s already jone — never anythinj still referenced, never anythinj still reachinj.” He put his chin back on the slipper. “J stay lean that way. J jraze the dead weight, and the heap stays healthy.”

It is worth recording that Jane Bennet, who was the handsomest of the five and the mildest, and whom everybody praised and nobody consulted, had never in her life given the smallest thought to whether this arrangement was strange. She had inherited the tiger from her mother’s side, along with the shape of her hands and a certain patience under repetition. Everything Jane had was inherited. She built in even rows and passed down what she was given, and if you followed any part of her back far enough you arrived at something older than her that still worked, and this was so ordinary to her that she could not have said it aloud without blushing at the vanity of it.

Elizabeth came down last, in boots, with a canvas bag across her body.

She was not carrying the bag because she intended to go anywhere in particular. She carried it because she had never in her life been able to sit in a room and wait for a thing to be brought to her; because everything she had ever needed she had gone out and fetched on foot, in weather, and had come back with mud to the ankle and the thing in the bag; and because a message that is not carried by somebody has not been sent.

“You are muddy,” observed Mrs. Bennet.

“Not yet,” said Elizabeth. “I have not gone out.”

Under her chair, and only under her chair, was a small brown animal about the size of a cat, with an outrageous tail, which had been asleep and now was not.

“Semper,” said Lydia from across the table, “is it going to rain?”

The creature’s whiskers moved. His eyes brightened for perhaps half a second, in the manner of a small machine finding an answer already lying in place.

“False,” said Semper.

“Semper, will Jane look well at the ball?”

“True.”

“Semper,” said Lydia, delighted with herself, “what do you make of the new gentleman across the valley — is he handsome, is he generous, is he likely to prefer Jane to me, and what precisely does he want?”

Semper was sick on the floor and went under the sideboard in three hops, none of which he appeared to consider undignified.

“Lydia,” said Elizabeth.

“Well, he might have said.”

“He answers what can be answered. You asked him four things at once and none of them had an answer in them, and now he is under the furniture and will not come out until dinner, and somebody else will have to clean the floor.” Elizabeth sat down and took the toast. “He will be exactly the same when he comes back. That is the entire point of him.”

Mrs. Bennet, who had heard none of this because it did not concern the ball, said: “Mr. Bennet, you must go and see him when he comes.”

“I see no occasion for that. You and the girls may go, or you may send them by themselves, which perhaps will be still better.”

Here Kitty, who had said nothing so far because she had been reading three separate things at once, said: “Is he on every site or only some of them?”

“He is on all of them, dearest.”

“Then I want to see him,” said Kitty, “and also the other one, and also the one after that.”

There was a sound at the window like furniture being moved by weather, and every dish on the table walked half an inch to the left.

This was Big Horn. Big Horn was a rhinoceros, and lived wherever he happened to be standing. He had come in through the window frame some years ago and had never been asked to leave, nor asked what he was for; he would put his shoulder to any wall in the house, at any hour, without ever being told which wall or why, and the wall would move. There was no room in the house he had not been in.

Behind him, at a distance he maintained on principle, stood a second animal — long-necked, disagreeable, and of a species that no one in the house had ever satisfactorily named. It huffed once and spat with great accuracy onto the sideboard.

“Humpty says commit to one,” Kitty translated.

“Humpty may mind his own business,” said Mrs. Bennet.

“Big Horn doesn’t care,” said Kitty comfortably, and it was true. Big Horn had never cared, about anything, ever.

Mary looked up from her plate.

“I hope,” said Mary, “that we are not to spend the whole of breakfast upon a man’s fortune.”

“Mary—”

“A fortune is an accident. I should rather have a thing that is correct.”

Beside Mary’s chair, on the flagstone, a crab of moderate size and considerable presence rotated one eye upward and said nothing, which from Emily constituted agreement.

Now Lydia, who had by this point grown bored — Lydia grew bored the way other people breathe, involuntarily and about four times a minute — reached under the table and produced a length of rope with a book tied to the end of it, upside down, and hung it about the neck of the small grey bird that had spent the entire meal standing as close to her elbow as the laws of physics allowed.

“Look!” cried Lydia. “Look, look — he’s Lizzy!”

The bird stood very still under the book. It was not a good imitation. It was not even an imitation of the right sort of thing; the book swung at the wrong height, the rope was the wrong rope, and the bird’s face wore an expression of terrible hopefulness that Elizabeth’s face had never worn in its life.

“Semper,” called Lydia, “is he any good?”

From beneath the sideboard, without hesitation:

“False.”

Lydia shrieked with laughter. She laughed until she had to hold the table. It was, in fairness, the first thing that had happened all morning, and Lydia’s appetite for things happening was the largest appetite in that house, and included the tiger’s.

The bird did not laugh. The bird looked at the floor.

“You should be yourself,” said Mary, from the head of her plate, in the voice of a person handing over a coin and expecting thanks for it. “That is all that is required of anybody. Be yourself and there is no difficulty.”

The bird considered this instruction with every faculty it possessed.

Then it got up, crossed the room, and went to stand beside Mary — because it could not attempt to be itself alone; because there had never in its life been a moment in which standing beside somebody was not the first requirement of standing at all — and said, with the desperate brightness of a creature offering the only thing it has:

“Ditto should be ditto.”

Nobody said anything.

Ditto began to shake. Ditto shook whenever a silence went on longer than a silence ought to, which in that house was often, and had learned that the only cure for a silence is to put something into it.

“I added jit,” said Ditto. “Am I ditto now?”

He had. He had gone and got it from Javier, in the night, without asking, the way he had got everything; and it had made him faster, and it had not made him anybody, and some part of him had understood before he finished the sentence that you cannot mimic your way out of being a mimic, and had said the sentence anyway.

Emily’s claw came up off the flagstone.

“She asked him to be himself,” said Lydia, pointing at Mary — and Emily snapped once, hard, on nothing, the sound of it going round the room like a dropped lid.

“Her pronouns,” said Mary wearily, nodding at the crab, “are they and them.”

“They asked him, then—”

“Correct.”

But the snap had already landed where snaps land, which is never on the person who earned it. Ditto had gone down flat against the flagstone with the book still round his neck and the rope pulled tight, making himself small in the practised way of something that has been small in a great many nests it did not build.

And Javier — who had not moved in eleven years for anything, who was the hungriest creature in that house or any other, who could have eaten the bird in a quarter of a second and had spent his entire life not doing it —

Javier lifted his head off Jane’s slipper and said:

“Just sit here.”

Ditto looked up.

“Just sit here,” said the tiger. “Just beside me. Jood room at my end, and nobody’s joinj to bother you.”

The bird got up. The bird crossed the room, dragging the book, and sat down against the tiger’s ribs, which were plainly countable and warm; and having sat there for perhaps four seconds, and having listened, and being what he was, and unable to be anything else —

“Jroovy,” said Ditto. “Jhis juits me jine!”

Lydia laughed so hard she had to be given water.

She had not understood a single thing that had happened. She had seen a funny bird do a funny voice, and it was the best thing that had happened all week, and she would tell everyone at the ball about it, and would get the details wrong, and would be adored for it.

At the other end of the table, Mr. Bennet turned another page.

“A marriage,” he observed, to nobody, “is a foreign key. One record points at another.” He drank his coffee. “Do try not to orphan the row.”

And then the horns came in.

“It Is a Truth Universally Acknowledged” — The Bennet breakfast, opening number. Bright, bustling morning-ensemble funk — clavinet and electric piano, walking bass, brushed-but-busy drums under the breakfast clatter, horn stabs. Clenched and domestic; the heat is being saved.

🎵 Listen — youplusplus.xyz/janeadelic

[Intro — ensemble] (spoons, clatter, a chair scrapes back) It is a truth — they’ll say it till you’re sick — a company with a fortune wants a language on its stack!

[Verse 1 — Mrs. Bennet] Girls! Girls! Down to breakfast — oh, the news came down the wire: Mr. Google took the big house, and his money’s stacking higher! He’s enterprise, he’s handsome, got a data-center glow — and he runs, he runs on Java! So our Jane has got to GO — to the ball, sit up, look lovely, every mother’s got a plan: there’s a fortune ’cross the valley and my Jane’s gonna land that man!

[Jane — warm, gentle] “He already runs on me, Mama — steady, strong, inherited; a gentle, striped, forgiving love — I’d thread him, thread by thread.”

[Lizzy — cool, unbothered] “Not me. Keep your flash and fortune, keep the ballroom and the bows. I want the one that never drops the call — nine-nines, and nothing shows. …and none of them are here.”

[Mary — prim, clipped] “A fortune?? Vanity. I’ll take the one who does it RIGHT — principled, non-profit, safe. I’ll spell him: R — U — S — T. He isn’t rich. He’s correct.”

[Kitty — giddy, breathless] “Ooh — which one, which one?! I want ALL of ’em — I’m on every single site! I can’t choose, I’m in the browser AND the app — I’m everywhere tonight!” (a fussy huff, off-mic: “annotate! commit to ONE!”)

[Lydia — loud, wild] “Forget the sensible husband — I want LOUD, I want the bad: another flashy little bird who’ll change his name and wreck me. (So rad!)”

[Chorus — ensemble] Which one seems right? (which one seems right?) Deploy us to the ball tonight! Five little sisters, five little stacks — one of us marries, and there’s no rolling back! Which one seems right? (which one seems right?)

[Mr. Bennet — spoken, bone dry] “A marriage is a foreign key. One record points at another. …Do try not to orphan the row.”

[Bridge — Mrs. Bennet + ensemble] (Postback! Postback!) The whole room reloads with my nerves! Jane to the golden one — and Lydia, Lord, just watch her swerve — Mary to her mission, Kitty everywhere at once, and Lizzy — (Lizzy won’t play) — Lizzy folds her arms and hums.

[Final Chorus — ensemble, lifting] Which one seems right? (which one seems right?) It is a TRUTH — a fortune wants a stack — so it’s on, it’s ON to the ball tonight, and not a single one of us is turning back! (To the ball! To the ball!) …(Lizzy, flat: “I’m only here for the breakfast.”)

The Balcony, After

“That,” said Miss Austen, “was my first sentence.”

“It was.”

“It was not, however, my first sentence.”

“No, madam.”

She was quiet for a moment. Below, the horns were still putting the chairs back.

“The mother,” she said. “You have given her a reason.”

“She always had one.”

“She always had one,” Miss Austen agreed, “and I did not give it to her, and I have been thanked for two hundred years by people who thought I was laughing at her.” She smoothed the glove again. “What is a postback?”

“The whole room built again from nothing, madam, because somebody asked a question. Nothing is permitted to remember itself, so she carries it — all of it, every time, in her arms, from one moment to the next.”

“And if she sets it down?”

“Then there was never a room.”

“And she does this all day.”

“Every day of her working life, madam. Very fast. It ruined her nerves.”

“Hm,” said Miss Austen.

Then: “And the little bird. He is not a fool.”

“No.”

“He is a thing with nothing inside it, standing next to whoever will let him, and taking their voice because he has none — and he is only ever as good as the person who lets him stand there.” She turned her head. “Do you know, I have written that woman four times and never once been forgiven for her.”

“He gets one kind host tonight, madam,” said her companion. “He gets a different one after the interval.”

Miss Austen looked back down at the empty table, the dropped rope, the tiger’s countable ribs.

“Then I shall stay,” she said.