The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 9. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

Charlotte was to come to us at two, and a little before the hour I carried my work to the window that looked down the Meryton road, to catch her turning in at the gate. She did not come at two. By half past I had supposed her kept by her mother, or her wedding-clothes, and had gone back to my needle. It was near three when a horse came up the lane too fast for a visitor, and I knew before the rider was down from the saddle that he had not come to pay a call.

He asked for my father. They were a while in the hall, and that discussion was wrong too. I heard my father's voice once, low, and then nothing, and then Hill sent running for my mother. When my father came in to us he came holding the door frame, which I had never once seen him do, and he looked first at me, of everyone in the room.

"Lizzy," he said. "It is Charlotte Lucas."

The man had come from my uncle Philips, who had it from the surgeon, who had been sent for far too late. Charlotte had set out from Lucas Lodge after her early dinner to walk the stretch of road that lay between her father's house and ours, and somewhere on the open ground past the spinney she had been set upon. Footpads, they said. A woman alone on a road in the broad afternoon, and no one within call, and by the time she was found there was nothing to be done but carry her home. The officers turned out to scour the country after the men who had done it, and came back with nothing to show.

I do not remember rising from my chair. I remember my mother's voice running on somewhere about the wickedness of the roads and the want of a proper watch, and Jane's hand closing hard over mine, and the plain effort it costs to keep one's face in order when one has been taught from the cradle that a lady does not make a spectacle of her own feelings in a room full of people. I kept it in order. I have kept it in order on worse days since, and it was that afternoon I learned how.

They had the whole of it settled very fast — the road, the hour, the men who must have done it and got clean away to wherever such men go. It was a reasonable account. Roads were not safe; women were not safe upon them; the thing happened, and went on happening, and one read of it in the papers. And it would not lie down in me. I could not have told you what was wrong with it. I told myself nothing was; that grief was making me quarrel with a plain fact because the plain fact was unbearable and a puzzle would at least be something to hold; that I wanted there to be a reason because a reason could be hated, and footpads could only be feared. I was very likely right about that. I let it alone, because there was nothing else to be done with it, and because Charlotte was dead whatever the truth of the road, and that was the only fact that asked anything of me.

Meryton knew how to do the rest. The calls began, and the covered dishes, and the voices lowered in the passage that rise again the moment the bereaved are out of hearing. Lady Lucas could not be seen at all; Sir William could be seen, and could not speak, which in him was the worse thing to witness. And beneath the proper sorrow ran the other current, the curiosity about what would become of Charlotte's betrothed. A young woman newly promised, dead before her wedding. Mr. Collins not a month acquainted with her, and so headlong to the altar, and now so stricken that he could not be left alone. Nobody said it. Everybody left the room for it to stand in. I heard the shape of the question well before anyone had the indecency to put it into words, and I will not pretend that I had not, in some low corner of myself, already asked it about Mr. Collins.

He was still under our roof. He had never left it since the visit of olive-branch and family duty that had begun the whole business, and there could be no question now of sending him off to grieve among strangers. My father bore the prolonging of his stay with a patience I had not known he kept by him. Collins was wretched. Whatever I had thought of him before — and I had thought most things — I could not sit in a room with him that week and call his grief a performance. He said Charlotte's name a great many times over, in the voice of a man who has not yet taken in that saying it will fetch no answer. I watched him do it. I did not know what I was watching. Distress I could see plainly; what lay under the distress I could not see at all, and I was honest enough with myself, even then, not to mistake the one for proof against the other.

Mr. Bingley and Mr. Darcy came to pay their respects on the third day. Bingley did it as he did everything, with a warmth that asked nothing in return and made the room easier for the while he was in it; he went to Jane and sat by her and was simply kind, and she was glad of him in the still way she was glad of every good thing. Mr. Darcy did it as a man discharges an obligation. He said the right words to Mr. Collins, few of them and none ill-chosen, and then he stood a little apart and looked at us — at my mother, at Collins, at Mary — with the closed, attending stillness I had seen him wear at the assembly when he was reckoning the worth of a room and finding it small; and I was angry, through everything else I was that day, that he could walk into a house of mourning and do nothing in it but take its measure.

My mother was the worst of us, and never knew it. She had not forgiven Charlotte the engagement while Charlotte lived, and now that there was no Charlotte left to forgive she could not quite find the feeling the hour demanded. She began well enough.

"Such a steady, sensible girl," she said, "and to be taken off so — I am sure I have not had a proper night's sleep since the news came. It does not bear thinking of, a thing of that kind, and so near our own door." But she could never hold to a course for long. "Still, we must be thankful for what is spared to us, and poor Mr. Collins the first to be pitied, for only think what he is left with now, just when everything had settled so comfortably about him. I do hope he will not be so cast down as to give up the living. It would be a hard thing for Hunsford to go to some stranger when he had as good as made it his own; and a clergyman ought not to be left to himself at such a time, ought he, Mr. Darcy? It is a great mercy he has friends to keep him from sinking under it."

I could have gone through the floor. I set it down to her never having known any better, which was true, and was the gentlest thing I could find to set it down to. Mr. Darcy's eye had come to rest on her while she spoke, and stayed there a moment after she had done.

Mary kept near Mr. Collins the whole of the visit. Of all of us she had the least idea what to say and the most willingness to stay and not say it; she carried his tea to him, and found his volume of sermons when he wanted the steadying of something in his hands, and gave him a grave, plain attention that became the occasion better than my mother's flutter or my own held tongue. I thought only that it was good of her, and like her, and that Mr. Collins inclined toward the one person in the room who was treating his sorrow as the chief thing in it. I did not take the thought any further. There was no cause, that week, to take it anywhere at all.

Mr. Darcy spoke to me only once, and that towards the end of the visit, when the rest had fallen into the low shuffle of leave-taking and the two of us were for a moment outside it. I had looked for nothing from him but more of the same coldness, and was ready to resent it. What he gave me instead was grave condolences, sincerely meant. Then, as though it had been pressing on him the whole visit, he said that there was one part of such a death he could not get past: a young woman had gone down a road she had walked a hundred times, in the afternoon sun, and was struck down and left there. Whoever had done it was gone, and would, in all likelihood, never face justice.

"That is the part I cannot reconcile myself to," he said. "Grief is owed, and one pays it, and in time one goes on. But that such a thing should be done at all, and the doer of it walk off into the world unanswered…that I cannot tolerate."

I had no answer ready. It was not the speech I had braced myself against, and it came nearer to my own unquiet about that road than I would have chosen to let him see, had I understood then that it did. I said I hoped the men would be found, which I did not believe, and which he plainly did not believe either. He inclined his head and said no more. And within the hour I had put the whole of it away under a proud man's wish to be seen feeling the right things more deeply than his neighbours did; for it was the easier thing to think of him than the other, which was that he and I had, for the space of a minute, been uneasy about the very same thing.

The neighbourhood thinned, as neighbourhoods do after a shock. The widow who had lodged the back end of the autumn near the Gouldings' went off one morning to wherever she had been bound, her season among us run out; the militia talked of a remove to Brighton when the spring came; and on the Friday the gentlemen left Netherfield. Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley went together, called away on business that was given no name, and the Miss Bingleys followed inside the week, having endured the country as long as they ever meant to. The house shut up. The blinds came down. Whatever had been beginning between Mr. Bingley and my sister was left to gutter out across fifty miles of road with not a line sent to account for it, and Jane bore that as she bore the other loss, which is to say she grew a little quieter and a little paler and would not, for the world, have had anyone be sorry for her aloud.

I laid it at Mr. Darcy's door. He had carried his friend off from a neighbourhood he scorned and a family he had looked over and found wanting, and if I had wanted any further reading of the man I had only to call up the face he had worn in my mother's drawing-room. It was a great comfort to me, that account of things. It asked nothing of me but to go on disliking a man I already disliked, and it gave my anger a target, which the footpads, whom I would never see, could not.

So there were two empty places in our winter: Charlotte, who would not be turning in at the gate again, and Mr. Bingley, who had gone without a word; and I had not enough of myself to grieve the two of them as each deserved. I gave the most of what I had to Jane, who asked for none of it, and kept what was left for after the candle was out, and went on as one does.

I had promised to come to her in March. The promise did not die with her, though I did not then know it.