The Question He Asked

A Pride and Prejudice Variation

By: Charlotte Ashbury

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Mr. Darcy has come to Hunsford with something unsaid.

Elizabeth Bennet knows it. Charlotte knows it. Even the air in the parsonage seems to know it.

For days, Darcy has called, walked, paused, and left too much unspoken. Elizabeth can feel the wrong proposal gathering around them: proud, certain, and badly timed. She is prepared to refuse it. She is not prepared to wonder whether refusing him will answer all the questions his presence has begun to raise.

Then the moment is interrupted.

A young housemaid from Rosings has been dismissed without a character. Lady Catherine’s brooch is missing. Annie Pratt was near enough to be blamed and powerless enough to be discarded. No one has asked the right questions, because no one has thought her worth asking.

Elizabeth does.

And Darcy, who begins with rank, influence, and the wrong solution, is forced to listen. To change course. To become useful in the specific way the situation requires.

By the time the brooch is found and a character is written, the proposal he meant to make no longer fits the man he is trying to become. So Mr. Darcy does something Elizabeth did not expect.

He asks.

A clean and tender Pride and Prejudice short variation, The Question He Asked is Book Four of The Roads Before Pemberley — a five-part series of quiet, unrecorded moments that change the way Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy see one another before the road to Derbyshire begins.