The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 18. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

"Lizzy."

"I am here." I put the music aside. "Shall I fetch the drops?"

"No." The lamp was low, and she lay looking at the ceiling, not at me, with her hands folded on the counterpane like a woman arranging herself for prayer. "I have a confession to make, and I wish to make it while my head aches too much to dress it up. You will hear it plainly, which is more than it deserves."

"Mary, it is two in the morning. Whatever it is has kept this long—"

"It has kept since the winter," she said. "That is the confession."

I sat down again.

"When Charlotte Lucas died," said my sister to the ceiling, "the gentlemen came to Longbourn to pay their respects. You remember it. And Mamma — Mamma spoke of the living. Of poor Mr. Collins's situation, and the parsonage going to a stranger, and what a mercy it was he had friends about him. Over a dead woman, Lizzy, three days dead, and her own neighbour. It was dreadful. And I thought—" Her hands tightened on each other. "I have read that women have done such things, for the settling of daughters. I thought it. I could not stop thinking it. I have carried it to church and back every Sunday since the winter, beside her, in the same pew."

The room was very quiet. The clock dealt out its small change downstairs.

"You thought Mamma might have had some hand in it," I said, because one of us had to carry the sentence the whole way, and it was not going to be Mary.

"Yes." Her face turned away from me at last, toward the dark side of the room. "And here is the rest of it, and then I am done. When I woke on Sunday, and knew the ceiling, and knew my own name — the first thing I felt, Lizzy, before the pain, before anything, was gladness. Because a mother does not do this to her own child. It had come for me too — so it was never her — so I might put the whole wicked thought down at last and be only a daughter again. I was glad of it, Lizzy. Somebody stood behind me in a lane and struck me down, and I lay in my bed and was grateful, because it acquitted my mother of a crime nobody but I had ever charged her with." Her voice did not break; Mary's voice never broke; it simply got smaller, as though it were walking away from both of us. "What kind of daughter thinks such a thought? I have looked for the scripture that covers me and I cannot find it."

I got from my chair onto the edge of the bed and took both her hands apart and held them, the way one is held when one is nine and the world has gone wrong.

"Listen to me," I said. "Mamma did behave badly about Charlotte's death. I sat in that room and could have gone through the floor of it, You had no explanation for what you saw, so it festered. That is the whole of your crime, Mary. Mamma's heart is foolish the way her tongue is foolish; everything in her comes out as nonsense, grief no less than the rest. And you, who do nothing by halves, took the nonsense for evidence because you were frightened and you were alone with it. You ought to have brought it to me."

"You would have laughed at me."

"I would not." And I would not have; God knows I would not. "Now you will drink the barley-water and go to sleep, for the surgeon says I am to keep you quiet and you are the noisiest penitent in Kent."

That got the ghost of the considering look, and then — "The barley-water is stale," said Mary, with a flicker of her own exactness, "but I will drink it for the principle of the thing"; and she drank it, and her hands let go by degrees, and she slept the first deep sleep since the lane.

And I sat back in my chair with the lamp going down, and my sister's hand where she had put it, in my lap.

I had sat at that condolence call, mortified, watching my mother hope aloud that the living would not go to a stranger, and I had spent my shame on her and my anger on the silent man by the wall. Mr. Darcy of Pemberley, who reads rooms the way my father reads books, had been watching my mother flaunt her selfish plans for Mr. Collins, with his betrothed scarcely buried. He did not know her, and had no daughters'-lifetime of her nonsense to translate by.

There were besides circumstances. Things had lately occurred in that neighbourhood — I say no more than that, and I am not at liberty to say more.

Cannot, or will not? — In this case they are the same word.

He had taken his friend away from us within the week of that call. I had charged him with snobbery to his face and he had stood in the lane and answered, you have a right to read it so, and let me keep the reading, because the truth he could not prove was not a thing a gentleman says of a woman's mother to her daughter on any evidence short of certainty. And the proposal I had been carrying around in my head for days: I have been engaged in an argument with myself, and I have lost it… the result does not yield… it has not altered by a grain in six months. I had heard a proud man calling his love for me irrational. He had been telling me, in the only language he possessed, that he had reasoned his way to a conclusion no feeling ought to have survived, and that the feeling had survived it. Item against item, in the dark, with my sister breathing beside me, I assembled what he had been carrying since the autumn, and it assembled without one piece left over.

Mr. Darcy believed that my mother might have murdered Charlotte Lucas. He believed it when he took Mr. Bingley out of Hertfordshire. He believed it at Rosings, across every dinner and every dance of wits. He believed it, or could not unbelieve it, on the evening he stood in the parsonage parlour and asked me to be his wife.

I, of course, knew that he was wrong. My mother had not been ten miles from Longbourn since Michaelmas; and whoever had stood behind Mary in that lane four days ago had stood in Kent. The two attacks came from one hand, and the hand was here. My mother was at Longbourn abusing the post for not bringing her better news.

He had reasoned with care from true things and arrived at a falsehood, which I had supposed, before that night, to be a thing that happened only to the careless. Then believing what he believed, fearing what he feared, he had walked into the parlour where the murderer's daughter sat and offered her his name, his house, his sister's company, and the whole keeping of his life. I had spent the spring correcting my portrait of the man, a feature at a time, grudging every stroke. Sitting in that sickroom I understood that the canvas itself had been swapped while I quarrelled over the likeness, and what I held now was a different portrait of a different man.

I did not forgive him the rest. Jane had loved, and been loved, and lost the whole of it. She had been just as completely parted from Bingley as if he had done it out of plain contempt, Knowing his reasons now sharpened that edge instead of dulling it, for there was nobody left to be angry at and the harm stood. And Wickham…everything Darcy had told me in the lane took on more weight. Nothing resolved that night into any feeling I could name and keep hold of. Sympathy and grievance sat down on either side of me like ill-matched dinner partners, and I entertained them both until the lamp went out.

There was no one to tell. Not Mary, who had given me the key without knowing there was a lock, and who must never know what her confession had opened. Not Jane, of all people. Not my father, who would be appalled, and hide it behind a joke. The one person on earth who could have followed every step of my reasoning across that dark room was gone into Derbyshire carrying my refusal. I sat with my sister until the lamp burned itself down to the blue, and made the only resolution that was in my power to make: as soon as Mary could travel, I was taking her home.