The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 22. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

I had told Jane I would say nothing and watch everything, and I had held to it for the better part of a week. The resolution did not survive the morning Mrs. Forster came to Longbourn.

She came in person, which was the colonel's wife all over. She was a bride of a few months, scarcely older than the friend she had come to carry off, and far too newly grand to trust so flattering an errand to the post. She wanted Lydia for Brighton: to go down with the regiment when it removed and to stay the whole of the encampment as her own guest and companion. I had the news from Kitty, sounding breathless and slightly aggrieved at not having been invited herself. By that time, my father had already given his consent.

I went to him in the library. The library was the one room at Longbourn where a sentence, once spoken, was heard and thought over at length. He kept the place as a bulwark against the rest of the house, and Jane and I were admitted to it even when Kitty and my mother were not. He did not look up at once. He let me stand a moment among his books, which was his way of saying that he knew why I had come and was in no hurry to begin the argument.

"You have come about Brighton," he said. "Sit down and tell me which of the disasters you have settled on. Jane favours the damp; Mary, when I consulted her, was inclined toward the moral atmosphere of a watering-town, which she has read about and disapproves of on excellent authority. I confess I had expected better invention from you."

"I have come about Mr. Wickham."

That turned him. He set the spectacles down, and I had the whole of his attention, which was a thing I had been glad of all my life and was not glad of now, because I could feel already how little I had brought to convince him with.

"Mr. Wickham," I said, and then I told him as much of the matter as was mine to give. That the living his father's friend had meant for him he had resigned, when the time came, for three thousand pounds in ready money, and had then come back upon the estate for it again when the money was gone. That he had begun the law and abandoned it the same season the cash ran out. That there was scarcely a tradesman in any town the regiment had passed through who had trusted his face and not regretted it. That the agreeable history he had poured into my ear at my aunt's table in the winter was the exact reverse of the truth, told to a girl he had judged willing to hear it.

I laid it out in order, and it was a good order, and I could hear, even as I built it, that the words were carrying less than half of what I had come to deliver. The other half was in my face and my hands and the pitch of my voice, and there was no honest place to put it. I had come to my father white over a recitation of the ordinary vices — the kind of catalogue every neighbourhood keeps one of, and shrugs at, and goes on inviting to dinner. And he was watching me the way he watched a line of verse that scanned wrong: not doubting the words, only aware that the meter did not come out even.

He heard me to the end. He did not interrupt, which was itself a kindness, and when I had finished he was quiet a while.

"Well," he said at last. "He is a scoundrel. I had supposed as much, in a general way; you have furnished the catalogue, and I am obliged to you for it. It alters my opinion of the young man not at all, which I am afraid tells you what my opinion already was." He tapped the spectacles once against the desk. "But you have not come to alter my opinion of Mr. Wickham. You have come to keep your sister at home, and there I am a worse audience than you hoped."

"He will be at Brighton. Lydia will be at Brighton."

"So will five hundred others, and a colonel's wife to look after her, and the entire ——shire to be silly over in company, which is a great deal safer than being silly over one officer in a lane." He said it without any edge of mockery, and it was not wrong. "Lizzy. A man of Wickham's appetites wants money, or he wants amusement, and Lydia can supply him the one and not the other. She has perhaps a hundred pounds a year that will ever be her own. Whatever he is, he is not a fool, and a fool is the only kind of man who courts a portionless girl for sport when the season is short and the creditors are close behind."

I had no answer that did not involve a terrible story about a watering-place, an heiress, and a word the physician had been reluctant to say. I could not so much as gesture at it without sharing a confidence that was not mine, and giving my father a fear he could do nothing useful with and would carry for the rest of his life. So I said nothing, and he watched me say nothing, and I think it was the silence that troubled him more than anything I had spoken aloud.

"You feel this," he said, and let the words down one at a time, "a great deal more than what you have told me would account for."

It was not a question. He had laid his finger exactly on the seam, the way he always could, and looked at me along it, and waited to see whether I would open.

"I have told you what I know," I said.

"You have told me what you are willing to share. They are not always the same article, in this family; I have made a study of it." He smiled faintly, and then sobered again. "If you know something, Lizzy, that would change the weight of this, you have only to set it on the table and I will weigh it with the rest. I am idle, but I am not too idle for that."

And there it was. The door held open, by the one person in the house with the wit to walk through whatever I gave him, asking me plainly for the thing I could not hand over. I have wondered since what he would have done with it. I think he would have refused Brighton; I am almost sure he would; and I have had a long while to consider the cost of being almost sure.

"There is nothing I can speak with certainty of. There are worse stories about him, but they were told to me in confidence, and the confider had only suspicions to go on," I said, which was true, and was the worst sentence I have ever spoken to my father, because it was true.

He nodded, once, as a man does who has asked his question and been answered, and reached for the spectacles. "Then I must judge by what is certain rather than what is suspected. Based on that, I take him to be a rake with a charming manner and empty pockets, unlikely to be tempted by your sister or she by him. More importantly, this household will be made unlivable for months if I rescind my permission. I have crossed your mother on better grounds than these and regretted the peace it cost me." He opened his book. "I'm sorry, my dear, but Lydia goes to Brighton."

I shut the door. I had argued with my father for the better part of a quarter of an hour, and lost, and the worst of it was that he had not been wrong once. He had reasoned cleanly the whole way down. He had only reasoned from the half of it I had been able to lay before him, and trusted the evidence over the witness, because the witness would not testify; and the evidence, weighed honestly, came out exactly where he had set it.

* * *

The regiment was to march within the fortnight, and the country gave it the send-off such things command. There were dinners, and a review at which Kitty wept, and at last my aunt Philips's evening: the great one, the one Lydia had been scoring off the calendar since before we came home from Kent, at which all the officers were asked and the carpet taken up for dancing.

My aunt's rooms were never built for the company she liked to put in them, and that night they held twice what they were meant to and a bowl of negus besides. The candles smoked; the regimental uniforms filled the parlour with splashes of scarlet. My mother was in ecstasy, and Lydia and Kitty moved through the crush in a state I can only call valedictory, mourning the regiment in advance and dancing with it at the same time. It was a merry, hot, overfull room, and I went into it meaning to do something. I had not decided what. I had only decided that I was done being the only person at the table who knew the cards and never played one.

Mr. Wickham found me within the half-hour, as Jane had said he would. I had been civil to him in my head a dozen times since Kent and made nothing of it; the reality was easier and worse. He came across with two glasses and that open, unhurried warmth he wore as other men wear a good coat, and he gave me the half-hour's news as though we had parted friends and were taking it up where we left off.

"You were greatly missed," he said. "Meryton is a poorer place for a clever woman's being away from it. How did you find Kent? They tell me you saw a great deal of Rosings."

"A great deal," I said. "Her ladyship was everything I had been promised."

"And her nephew?" He said it lightly, idly, a man making conversation, and only a person who had spent a winter watching him bait a hook would have seen the line go out. "Mr. Darcy was much at Rosings, I think. He cannot have improved on acquaintance. He is not a man who improves; he is only a man one learns the worst of by degrees."

He was fishing, for what I had been told, for the shape of the ground under his own feet. I knew the cast for what it was, and I let it pass over me, and I gave him back the cheerful, glancing nothing the room would expect of me. We talked of Kent, and of the colonel, and of Brighton; he was charming about Brighton, and I was charming back, and under the whole pretty performance I was turning over the one remark I had brought, looking for the moment to set it down where only he would hear it land.

It came when he spoke of the sea. He was in fine spirits about the sea-bathing, and the air, and the good it did a constitution; and I let him finish, and I said that I had heard the coast did not always answer for young ladies as well as one might hope.

"Indeed?" he said.

"A friend of my Kentish acquaintance told me of one. She was a girl of fortune, very young, who came to a great deal of grief at a watering-place not long ago. A near thing, I gathered. She was got away in time, but only just, and only because those who loved her came down very fast when they heard. It was thought best to say nothing, after. These things are." I turned my glass in my fingers. "One is glad to think she had such friends. A young woman in that situation has so few who will come fast and ask no payment for it."

I have spent this whole history learning to read a face that does not wish to be read, and I read this one. It was the work of a breath. The glass paused on its way to his mouth and went on; the smile did not go out, but it was relit, struck fresh off the same flint, and for the length of that one heartbeat there was a man looking out from behind it who was doing arithmetic at speed and did not care for the sum. Then it was gone, and he was Mr. Wickham again, agreeing with me that the world was a sad place for unprotected girls and that one could not be too careful, and asking whether I had tried my aunt's negus, which he could not recommend.

No one else in the room saw anything at all. There was nothing to see. Two acquaintances had exchanged a melancholy little anecdote over the punch, and moved on to the negus, and the dancing had not so much as paused.

We parted a few minutes later on the best of terms. He bowed; I curtseyed; he went to be delightful elsewhere, and was, for the rest of the evening, exactly as delightful as ever. I watched him a little, after, across the smoke and the regimentals, and could not tell from the outside that anything had passed between us at all. That was the trouble with him.

The regiment marched three days later. Lydia went down to Brighton at the end of the week in the Forsters' carriage, leaning out of it to the last to call instructions to Kitty about the bonnets she was to be sent, in spirits so high they carried clear to the turn of the road. My mother wept and was comforted by the thought of the letters; my father went back into his library; and I stood at the gate after the dust had settled and tried to make myself believe I had done a useful thing, and could not.

I had moved at last. I had reached out and shifted one piece with my own hand. But I could not see the board it stood on, nor what exactly I had set in motion by touching it. I went in to my mother's lamentations with the unfamiliar weight of having acted, and no way on earth to tell whether acting had been wise.