Page 2 of Artificially Yours

She waited. Her breathing continued normally. So the direction was not invariably obeyed. She was about to congratulate herself when the next breath stopped short.

Elizabeth caught the bedpost again. It passed, but the interruption had frightened her more than the words.

Her heart hammered in her chest.

"A very industrious heart," she whispered. "I should be obliged if it would leave the furniture alone."

The feeble joke helped her stand. It did not make her willing to endure another instruction.

She fetched her writing things. Whatever had taken possession of her thoughts had been careless enough to leave her a pen. She meant to make use of it.

She found paper at her correspondence desk and began to write:

Unaccountable Occurrences To Be Tested:

1. Uninvited thoughts appearing in my consciousness ("It is a truth universally acknowledged")

2. Knowledge of future events I should not possess

3. Intrusive narration of my own physical responses

4. Words I have never learned, whose meanings I nevertheless understand

She paused, pen hovering.

She wrote illness in the margin, then a story, leaving room beneath each.

The ink spread beneath her stationary pen. She lifted it too late and blotted a black island across the word illness. Her fingers had begun to shake. Insult was easier to manage than terror. For the moment, she reached for the sand.

Jane had risen early and gone down before her. Elizabeth wanted very much to ask whether anything similar had happened to her. She also wanted to ask without frightening her sister.

The sheet looked alarmingly sensible. Her lists of ribbons and errands had never frightened her by being easy to complete. She laid a letter beside it, ready to cover the page if Jane came in. She wanted a chance to explain before Jane read it.

She wrote one plain test beneath the list: I shall try to remain at home tonight. If nothing prevented her, she could tear up this foolish sheet before anyone saw it.

A tap at their door made her jump.

"Lizzy!" Jane's voice carried its usual gentle warmth. "Mama says we must dress quickly. We are to attend the assembly this evening, and she wishes to discuss our gowns."

The assembly. Of course. The Meryton assembly. Where her entire plot would begin whether she liked it or not. Elizabeth looked down at her paper and added:

5. Uninvited bodily instructions: several. Counting them precisely is proving less useful than objecting.

"Lizzy?" Jane called again. "Are you well?"

"I am not quite myself this morning," Elizabeth called back. "But I shall be down directly."

"What, dear?"

"I slept oddly. Do you ever wake with words in your head which seem to belong to somebody else?"

"When I have been reading too late," Jane said. "Was it a disagreeable book?"

Elizabeth could not answer that. Jane appeared to be suffering from nothing worse than concern for a sister who had begun the morning with a very odd question.

She stared at her list. The nature of existence would have to wait. First she must discover whether she could decline an assembly, a modest ambition likely to encounter considerable opposition from her mother.

Elizabeth dressed quickly, rehearsing her refusal. She would be calm. Rational. Firm. She would simply say no, and then... She descended the stairs with firm purpose.