Read Expectations: The Transformation of Miss Anne de Bourgh (Pride and Prejudice Continued), Volume 1 Page 15

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  By the evening before the scheduled departure, Lady Catherine had become a stony victim of the entire affair. She refused to travel to Ramsgate with the party to see her daughter off. Dinner that night, which should have been a jovial Twelfth Night feast as well as a send-off celebration, instead took on a funereal tone. The Fairfax family wisely sent their regrets to avoid any stray hostility, and also missing was Dr. Minton, who had gone on ahead to the port to confirm all the passage arrangements. With no one else to share the lady’s woes, the unlucky last-minute dinner guests turned out to be the Reverend and Mrs. Collins. Lady Catherine spent the entire blustery evening detailing every possible misfortune that could befall the group and ruing the day that she had been cajoled into such a ridiculous scheme.

  Had Anne not been fighting for her life, she might have repented and changed her plans. Instead, she listened in sullen silence to her mother’s moaning and the reverend’s endless sympathies. Even the entirely blameless Mrs. Collins, with her silent complicity in the others’ litanies of misery, provoked Anne. They could make her wretched, but they could not make her cancel her trip. She heaped guilt on herself for feeling this way, but she had to do this. To save her life, she had to go. The only one who did not fray her nerves was Harriet, who had come to stay at Rosings two days earlier so she and Anne could become acquainted before the expedition departed. Perhaps Anne’s initial fears about her new companion had been in error, as the high-spirited but sensible Harriet demonstrated good judgment at dinner by observing the gloom and drama while making no effort to console the inconsolable mother or defend the indefensible daughter.

  So it was that early on the morrow, with weather than matched her dampened spirits, Anne and her patched-together entourage set forth from Rosings in a cold rain for the trip across the Channel.