Page 1

CHAPTER 1

Elizabeth Bennet woke with the peculiar sensation that she had done this before.

It is a truth universally acknowledged.

She sat bolt upright, her heart racing. Wait. She had not thought those words. They had simply... appeared. As if someone else had written them into her consciousness.

"No," she whispered to the empty room. "No, that is⁠—"

Absurd, her mind supplied helpfully.

She shut her mouth. The word she had intended was unsettling. She tried it silently; this time it remained her own.

Then came memories of things that had not happened: an assembly that evening, Mr. Bingley arriving with a proud friend, a slight she would overhear. The gentleman had a name, Fitzwilliam Darcy. She had never met him. Yet she seemed to remember disliking him, defending him, and standing beside him in a church.

Elizabeth pushed the bedclothes away. That last prospect was intolerable. A dream might supply a husband; it could scarcely expect her to accept him without an introduction.

She tried to recall where she had heard his name. At dinner? From her aunt? Nothing answered. She reached for yesterday's ribbon on the bedpost and held it while she made herself attend to the familiar room.

The knowledge sat in her mind like unwelcome houseguests who had arrived three days early and brought all their luggage. Napoleon would be exiled to Elba, though he had shown no present inclination to go there. Water froze at thirty-two degrees. Elizabeth Bennet would love Fitzwilliam Darcy. Facts, forecasts, and instructions had arrived in the same parcel, without the courtesy of separate labels. The third item felt more like a threat.

Those impossible recollections returned when she closed her eyes. There was an order to them, but no memory of having lived the days between. She opened her eyes again. She was in her own room; she would begin there.

Yet when she tried to follow a single day from beginning to end, whole stretches vanished. She knew certain speeches as if she had read them over and over, but could not say what Jane would eat for breakfast. Whoever had supplied these glimpses had devoted more care to an insult than to feeding her sister. Elizabeth was not prepared to trust such an authority.

She put her bare foot on the cold floor. The chill was hers, at least. She moved it to the rug and back again, until the absurd little freedom nearly undid her. She thought of Jane warming her sisters' stockings beside the fire on winter mornings. If Jane had woken to thoughts she could not account for, would she be sitting alone with them now, afraid to tell anyone?

"This is madness," she said firmly. "Surely this is madness."

She had announced it quite distinctly. Fortunately, nobody had answered. Elizabeth was not yet prepared to explain madness before breakfast.

Elizabeth pressed her hands to her temples, willing the strange certainty away. Perhaps she was ill. A fever, surely. She had heard of brain fevers that caused people to believe impossible things with utter conviction. She touched her forehead, then her cheek. Neither felt hot. Could an evil spirit have taken hold of her? The thought frightened her enough that she nearly called for Jane. But what evil spirit troubled itself with assemblies and the income of an unmarried gentleman? She could reject neither possibility merely because it offended her understanding.

Hyperaware, her mind supplied.

Elizabeth went still.

She was hyperaware of...

She had never used such a word. Yet its meaning came with it, as readily as if she had learned it years ago. Other expressions followed: narrative, outline, plot points, forced proximity. She tried to remember a lesson, a book, any occasion on which she could have acquired them. There was none.

Enemies to lovers.

A title came with them, set apart from the rest as if stamped upon a cover: Pride and Prejudice. She gripped the bedpost. These were not all her thoughts. Knowing the strange words did not tell her who supplied them; behind them she found no person's memories, no face, no life she could examine.

"I should prefer my own vocabulary," she said under her breath. Nothing answered.

She slid out of bed and moved to her mirror, half expecting to see someone else's reflection staring back at her. But no: there she was. Elizabeth Bennet. Dark hair slightly mussed from sleep. Eyes that were allegedly fine, though she'd never been quite sure what made eyes "fine" as opposed to "adequate" or "present."

Tolerable, her mind whispered, but not handsome enough to tempt me.

She looked away from the mirror. The insult had come before the gentleman who was supposed to speak it. If he did not attend, or said something else, she would have disproved at least one part of this dreadful fancy.

She was a character in a story.

The assertion arrived as the others had. Elizabeth sat on the bed and refused to accept it merely because it sounded certain. She would write down what it predicted. Tonight she could compare the prediction with what actually happened.

She took a breath. Released it. Took another one. The voice supplied its next direction: "Her breath caught."