The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 24. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

Miss Bingley came to Pemberley with her brother on our fourth day. For three days I had been more at my ease in that house than I had any right to be. My uncle had gone twice to the river and come back boyish about a great fish he had not in the end landed; my aunt had walked me through Lambton, naming the windows of her girlhood; and Mr. Darcy had been everywhere correct and nowhere pressing, attentive to the Gardiners in a manner that cost me a little more each time I watched it.

And Jane had begun, by very small degrees, to come back. I will not say she was happy. She was careful, the way a person is careful on a foot lately out of splints. But there was a colour to her again of an evening, and once I caught her laughing at something my uncle said before she had remembered to be quiet about it, and I found I would have paid a great deal to keep her laughing and said nothing whatever that might startle it off.

Then Mr. Bingley's carriage came up the drive with his sister Caroline in it, and Miss Darcy besides.

I had been prepared, by his housekeeper, to find Miss Darcy a paragon; I found instead a tall girl of sixteen so overcome by her own table that she could scarcely be got to raise her eyes from it, and so plainly grateful for any small civility that I made it my business to send a few down to her end. Mary sat between my aunt and Miss Darcy and conversed with neither, which was the greatest kindness she could have shown to the timid Miss Darcy. My uncle and Mr. Darcy fell at once talking of the river. Mr. Bingley found, over the course of the soup and the fish, a remarkable number of reasons to address himself to Jane, and Jane found none of them suspicious, which was its own kind of progress.

It was Miss Bingley who broke the surface, in the voice she kept for kindnesses performed in public.

"Pray, Miss Eliza, are the ——shire quite gone from Meryton now? It must be a sad change for your younger sisters. You had all of you such warm friends among the officers. One in especial, I seem to recall — Mr. Wickham, was it not? — that you would defend so prettily to anybody who ventured a word against him. I do hope he has not disappointed his admirers."

I had my answer ready. One always has an answer ready for Miss Bingley, and a civil one costs her the most. But I did not give it at once, because at the name Miss Darcy set down her glass as though it had grown heavy in her hand, and the blood went out of her face and was slow coming back. It was over almost before I had it — she bent to her plate, and her brother said something even and unhurried to my uncle about the morning's water, and the table turned after him as a boat turns with the tide. But I had seen it, and I set it by to look at later.

I gave Miss Bingley the dull half of the truth — that the regiment was gone to Brighton, and that Meryton was supporting the deprivation with more fortitude than she perhaps hoped for it — and I turned the talk to her brother's plans for the shooting, a subject she could never let lie, and one that had the further merit of letting Miss Darcy at my elbow get her colour back without an audience.

But Miss Bingley had done me a service she would have been very sorry to learn of. She had sent me back to my aunt Philips's parlour — to the crowded night the name Wickham first came into my life over a glass of negus — and I went there gladly, because the past was better company than the present.

I had spent that whole evening watching Mr. Darcy. I had wanted to catch him in the wrong, and I had been so busy at the centre of the thing that the edges of the room came to me sidelong, the way they do when the eye is fixed. And at the edge of it, in the corner by the card-room door, there had been a widow in black. A stranger; somebody's grand relation, I had supposed, down from a part of the country that minded such things less — for she watched the room as no woman of our training is suffered to watch it, resting her look on one face and then another and holding it well past the moment a look is given back. I had half-known the quality of that look even then and been unable to lay a name to it. In the spring I had laid it, at last, to Mr. Darcy, and called it a family likeness and been satisfied. Three days ago, on his own gravel, I had watched his eyes take a man up and set him down again unhurried and brief, and not hold anyone at all, and the name had come loose from him and gone wandering.

Two things met over the syllabub while Miss Bingley talked of grouse.

The first was that the widow's long look had rested, that night, on my cousin Collins. It had found him across the room and stayed on him after he had bowed and bobbed and taken himself away, the way the eye stays on a page after the candle has been carried off. I had thought nothing of it. An old woman, looking where she liked.

The second was that I had seen that look again since. I had seen it in a Kentish sickroom in the spring, when Anne de Bourgh stood over the bed of a clergyman's wife she had every reason in the world to leave to the women of the house, and could not take her eyes from the husband.

Anne de Bourgh, who looked through people from habit and at Mr. Collins as her one exception. Anne de Bourgh, who had dragged herself out to a phaeton sweep she had never once troubled to reach, to ask that a man's letters be read aloud to her. I had taken the widow for an old woman; but I had taken Anne herself, the first evening at Rosings, for ten years older than she was, the illness having got into her face and aged it past her three-and-twenty years. In black, by candlelight, across a packed and noisy room — she would have done very well for an old woman. And the picture I had been given of an Anne who never stirred ten miles from her mother was a picture her mother had painted, and her mother had shown me already that spring how little her paintings answered to the life.

The widow in Meryton had watched my cousin with Anne de Bourgh's eyes because the widow in Meryton had been Anne de Bourgh.

I sat very still and let the rest of it come. A woman does not travel sixty miles into a strange county, in mourning that is not hers, to watch a man she may not have, and then go home and watch him still, on love alone. Love does not need a disguise. There was something standing under the love and holding it upright, and I had a word for what feeds a watchfulness like that and will not let it sleep, and the word was not a kind one. Anne de Bourgh knew how Charlotte Lucas had come to die. She had perhaps known before it was done. That was why, months after, in a sickroom that was no business of hers, she could not leave off looking at the man it had been done for.

I told no one and over the next hour the idea quietly set fire to everything I thought I had understood about the spring.

The evening went on over the top of it. Mr. Bingley contrived to be at Jane's end of the room for the better part of an hour, and my aunt watched the two of them and then watched me, well pleased with the arrangement of the world. Mr. Darcy was correct to me and correct to everyone, the host and nothing more; and twice I found him looking at me with the open, brief regard I had cleared of every suspicion three days before, and twice I was the one to look away. I had no practice yet in being looked at by a man while I sat at his table knowing a terrible truth about his family.

I went up that night certain of Anne de Bourgh, and the certainty settled in cold and whole, the way the true ones did.