The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 10. Narrated by Bingley, from his diary.

Netherfield Park, the 26th of November, near midnight

We are for London in the morning. I did not decide it. Darcy decided it somewhere between the soup and the withdrawal of the cloth, and by the time I had understood that it was decided I found I had agreed to it, and that the horses were ordered for eight, and that Caroline was already glad. I have gone where Darcy pointed ever since I was nineteen, and he hauled me out of a scrape at Cambridge that I have never told the whole of to anyone. He was already then in his mid-twenties, visiting some cousin who was up at Cambridge at the same time, and under no obligation to take notice of a youngster six or seven years his junior. I've never been sorry to follow his advice, and I am not sorry now. I am only very low, and the house is all boxes, and I have been twice to the window that gives on the Longbourn road for no errand I could have named to a magistrate.

Charlotte Lucas is a week in the ground. She was a good, quiet, sensible sort of woman, and was to have been mistress of a parsonage by Christmas, and instead the parson is at Longbourn being grieved over and she is under the sod past the spinney, and I find I mind it a great deal more than I have any right to, having known her chiefly to bow to. Juno frets in a strange house and I am taking her up to town with me, which is no place for a young dog and I know it, and I could no more leave her behind than fly. So there is my whole establishment: a low heart and a restless bitch and a friend who has decided we are going.

Darcy came up to me after the ladies had gone through. He had his travelling face on already.

"You are ready to leave," he said. It was not quite a question.

"I am coming. I only wish I knew what we run from. The year is not so far gone that a week could not be spared."

"There is nothing to keep us. My business in town will not wait on the weather, and yours—" he let that stand a moment "—yours is better done anywhere but at the bottom of a Hertfordshire lane, mooning after a lady who, on the evidence, will bear your absence a good deal more evenly than you are bearing the prospect of hers."

I had no answer to that I cared to give him, because he had said it to me once already, up at the shooting, and I had not been able to knock it down then either. It is a hard thing to be told twice, in a fortnight, that the woman you have been counting on has not been counting on you. I do not believe it. I have decided that I do not believe it. But a thing a man has decided not to believe sits heavier in him than a thing he has never been asked to, and it made the packing easier than it had any business being, and I hate that it did.

I turned him off Jane the only way I know, which is to talk of something worse. I said it was a grim country to be leaving in any case, with the roads what they were and a woman knocked on the head in daylight not two miles from where we sat.

That reached him where nothing else at the table had. He has been strange about Charlotte Lucas since the day we made our call.

"They will lay it to footpads and take no man for it," I said, "though there's talk in Meryton it lay nearer home. The parson, betrothed and bereaved inside a season and headlong to the next Miss Bennet before the first was cold — you have only to say it in the right parlour and watch the heads go."

"It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has facts, Bingley. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, in place of theories to suit facts. Your parson may be the guiltiest man in the county or the most ill-used in it. You have not the grounds to say which, and no more have they."

I said I supposed not, and felt the county's certainty go thin in my hands, as certainties do once Darcy has held them a moment.

"Here is a fact, in place of the local gossip," he said. "She was not robbed."

"She was set upon on the open road—"

"But nothing was taken from her. Her purse was on her when they carried her home; her people had it back with the rest of her things, untouched." He had gone to the window. "A man who kills for a purse takes the purse. That is the curious circumstance, and the whole neighbourhood has walked round it, because footpads are a comfortable thing to be murdered by. They ask nothing of the living but a lock on the door."

I asked how in the world he came to know what was in a dead woman's pockets, and he said he had inquired, as though a gentleman making it his business to find out how a neighbour came to be killed were the most ordinary matter in England.

"I do not like how she died," he said. "I do not mean to let it go into the ground with her. Someone did that on a public road in the afternoon sun and walked home to his dinner, and I will not have it left at footpads because footpads are easier for everyone to bear. But by the same token, the neighbourhood where she died is not perhaps a very wholesome one for outsiders such as yourself."

I said I hoped he might get to the bottom of it, and meant it, and had not the smallest idea what I was wishing him toward. It is like Darcy to take a stranger's death for his own quarrel; he cannot pass a wrong lying in the road any more than he could pass a gate left open. I have envied him a great many things and never once envied him that, for it looks to me like a heavy way to go through the world. But it is the truest thing in him, and I would not have it out if I could.

So we go. I have his word for it that London is the thing, and my own low spirits agreeing with him for reasons of their own, and between the two of them I am carried. Convincing had little to do with it. I would follow him tonight if he told me the moon wanted seeing to.

I have meant, this hour and more, to write a line to Miss Bennet before we go — only that we are called away, that it is nothing of her doing, that I am her servant. The pen is here by me. But I do not know how a man writes even so much to a lady he has been assured, twice now and on good authority, thinks of him with no more than a mild goodwill; and I find I would rather carry it to town unwritten and think on it there than set down the wrong thing tonight and have it go before me on the eight o'clock road. It will keep till London. Most things, it seems, will keep till London.

The horses are at eight. Juno is under the desk with her chin on my foot and will not be moved.