The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 16. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

He was at the park gate before me, and he had been there some time; the dew was off the rail where his gloved hand had rested.

I had come out early to be alone with the letter I was writing Jane in my head, and my walk along the plantation edge had one virtue above all others in Kent, which was that nobody knew of it. Somebody had known of it. He stood away from the gate as I came up, and did not pretend, as a smaller man would have, that the meeting was fortune.

"Miss Bennet. I ask for a quarter of an hour. I am aware that I have no claim to it, and that this meeting might cause you some embarrassment if it is observed; I have chosen the hour and the place with that in mind. A quarter of an hour, and I will not trouble you again."

I granted it with a civility I did not trouble to warm, and we walked. He had chosen, I saw, the one stretch of the lane the plantation screened from every window in the county, and I understood that the ground had been arranged with the same care as whatever speech was coming. The thought arrived with an edge of comedy even through everything else: refused at sunset, and by breakfast he had surveyed the terrain. He did not make me wait for the speech.

"Two subjects, and then I have done. Nothing I say this morning renews anything I said yesterday evening; you gave your answer, and it is not my purpose to dispute it. But you laid two charges against my character, and a man may accept his sentence and still ask to correct the record. That is the whole of my errand."

"You have a quarter of an hour of my record, sir. Spend it as you like."

"Your sister first." He looked ahead, down the lane, and gave it in order, as I had known by then he gave everything. "I told you yesterday there were circumstances I was not at liberty to explain, and you put a construction on that which I had earned. It was unfair as I delivered it, and I will deliver it better. When I observed your sister with Bingley, I watched for signs of affection on her part, and I did not find it. She received his attentions with pleasure — and with a composure so even that I could not satisfy myself her heart was engaged. I concluded it was not. If I concluded wrongly, then the worst injury in this business is hers, and it is mine to own. That is the first thing. The second is this: a man advising his friend weighs the connection entire, and the neighbourhood was at that time — I must say it plainly and you will dislike it — a place where a young woman had been murdered on an open road within the month, the matter unresolved, no one taken, the affair hanging over every family in the district and your own among them. To bind my friend, at such a moment, into such a situation, was more than I could in conscience leave alone. You may call that pride. It will bear the name."

"It will bear it very comfortably," I said. "A man of fortune cannot be too careful what counties he loves in. My sister's heart against the credit of the map — I am glad to know the exchange rate at last, Mr. Darcy. Did it weigh more heavily with you than my family's flaws?"

"There my liberty ends, Miss Bennet. I will not lie to you, so I will not say yes; and I cannot say more."

"Cannot, or will not?"

"In this case they are the same word." He let that stand exactly as long as it needed to, and then: "The second charge. Mr. Wickham."

I had been waiting for it, and I had my colours nailed up. I am obliged to record that he took no notice of the flag.

He gave me Mr. Wickham the way he had given me his objections the evening before, in good order, from the beginning: the son of his father's steward, a godson loved on the father's side and watched on the son's; a living held in reserve for him, which Mr. Wickham, having no intention of taking orders, resigned in exchange for three thousand pounds, with the stated design of studying the law; the law lasting as long as the money, and no longer; the applications renewed when both ran out, and refused; the resentment dating, in its public form, from the refusal. Debts in every town Wickham's dissipation had touched, paid twice over by a man who had loved his father's memory and then no more. It was a smaller and shabbier story than the one I had been given over my aunt's negus, and the very smallness of it troubled me, for the story I knew was a better story: it had a villain of consequence in it, and an injury worth resenting. I had a sudden unwelcome view of which kind of story is more often true.

"That is the history," he said. "It would not, by itself, justify what I said of him at the Phillipses' party, and you would be right to tell me so. What follows justifies it. I ask you to hear it through, because I will only manage it once. I am…acquainted with the family in this story, and became involved by chance in helping them resolve the matter."

We had stopped walking. I did not decide to stop; my feet had made some arrangement with his.

"Not a year ago, a young woman — very young, fifteen, in the care of a paid companion at a watering-place — was persuaded by Mr. Wickham to consent to an elopement. He had got at the companion first; the thing was thoroughly built. On the first evening of their escape together, the young woman confessed to Mr. Wickham that her fortune, which was considerable, and which was the whole of his object, could not be touched without the consent of her guardians and trustees, married or not, until she came of age. He had hoped to live comfortably off the annual interest from thirty thousand pounds. He could expect a lump sum of perhaps two or three thousand pounds, as a bribe to leave the young lady alone. He did not take the loss philosophically."

He was looking down the lane; his voice had gone very level, and I knew that tone was the opposite of what it sounded like.

He went on. "She was taken ill that night. Violently ill. The companion was gone by morning, and Mr. Wickham with her. The physician who attended the lady found indications which he was, at first, reluctant to name, and which I will name, since I have come this far. She had been poisoned. Whether from spite, or to cover the flight, or because a dead heiress tells no tales a living jilted one might — I have never settled it, and I have had some months to try. She lived. I found her at the first town beyond the watering-place, two days on — I was in a position to trace the road they had taken, through circumstances I need not give — and Mr. Wickham was by then gone into the next county, and from there, in time, into a militia regiment, and into Hertfordshire, and into your aunt's parlour, where you found his manners so happy."

The word sat in the lane between us. Poisoned. I had spent an evening — I had spent a winter — defending Wickham on the strength of a sorrowful voice and a pair of fine eyes turned on me as though I alone in the room were worth the truth. The man in front of me, whom I had refused with insults sixteen hours before, stood in the open lane counting off the days and towns from the start of the elopement to his discovery of the young woman in the case.

By chance, Darcy had said, presenting himself as a family friend who had happened to be on hand, with no stake in it worth the naming. But I am my father's daughter, and not a fool. Darcy would not have brought out all that icy self-control for a story that had happened among some acquaintances he valued as much as he did, say, the Bingleys. This was a hidden scandal within his own family, perhaps involving one of Fitzwilliam's younger sisters.

I looked at the question. I was, that morning, a woman with no instrument left to measure men by — I had calibrated everything against Wickham's candour and Darcy's arrogance, and one of those weights was now known to be false, and I could no longer swear to the other — and I had not the hardihood to open one more door in a morning that had already opened too many. I let it lie. I have wondered since what he would have said if I had asked for the identity of the young heiress.

"You have no proof of any of this," I said instead. "No name, no witness, nothing but your word — the word of a man with every reason to hate him."

"That is correct," said Mr. Darcy. "The persons who could speak to it are persons I will not bring into this or any conversation, at any price. Even for the sake of your good opinion. You have his account, and mine, and your own judgment. I can leave you nothing else."

He moved away from me. "I have had my quarter-hour. We leave Kent on Saturday. I wish you every possible happiness, Miss Bennet."

I began to see the absurd side of this conversation again. "You said as much yesterday, sir, by way of an angry goodbye."

"This morning, it serves as a different kind of goodbye." He bowed, and went up the lane toward the great house, and did not look back; and I stood by the plantation until I was cold, holding two histories of one man, written in incompatible hands, and I could discard neither.

They left on the Saturday, as he had said. There was a formal leave-taking at the parsonage — Mr. Collins at his fullest stretch, her ladyship's opinions on the journey, the roads, and the ingratitude of nephews who would not stay a third week — and Colonel Fitzwilliam pressed my hand and said the spring had been the pleasantest he could remember, and meant it, and knew nothing, and I let him go on knowing nothing. Mr. Darcy bowed to me exactly as a man bows to the cousin of the vicar of his host's parish. I curtseyed exactly as a woman curtseys to a departing guest. The carriage took them off down the avenue.

That night I began the argument that was to keep me company for a great many weeks: Wickham's words at my aunt's house against Darcy's words in the lane, item against item, with no judge to decide between them but my own thoughts. Much against my will, I found myself inclining towards Darcy's account. I looked into my memories of Wickham and found no positive act of good in him beyond his easy courtesy. I looked into my memories of Darcy, and found a man coolly defending my walks and my reading against the insinuations of Caroline Bingley, a man quietly enraged by the murder of my friend, a man who sought to protect his friend from the encroachments of my mother. For reasons of discretion, Darcy had not told me the whole story of Wickham's greatest crime, and I would later realize he had softened his objections to my family for the same reason.