The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 27. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

Miss Darcy had asked us to Pemberley to hear her play, and two days after her call at the inn we went. She played for the room very well, and knew it, and looked at me once when she had done in a way that asked me to keep my promise to praise her music to her brother. I did so, and he seemed pleased. Afterward, the afternoon holding fine, Mr. Darcy proposed we walk down to the water before the carriages were ordered.

So we walked, and I contrived to let the rest of the party draw ahead of us. Mr. Darcy missed very little. He knew that I had done it on purpose, and shortened his stride to the size of the thing I had not yet said.

Ahead of us, where the path ran down along the water, Jane walked with Mr. Bingley, glad of him as she had always been glad of him and showing it now, which was new. I had been watching the back of her bonnet for a quarter-mile with a happiness so careful it was nearly an ache, the way one watches a candle one is afraid might gutter out. The Gardiners were beyond them with Miss Darcy between, my uncle pointing out to her some virtue of her own river. Mary had fallen a little behind us all, gone quiet over a bank of ferns with the contented frown she wore when she had found something to moralize over. By the turn below the planting we had the path to ourselves.

"I told you that my sister Mary is travelling for her health," I said.

"Is she not?"

"It would be fairer to say that she is travelling for her peace of mind. She was attacked in Kent this spring, in the lane between the parsonage and Rosings, in the open afternoon, by someone who came at her from behind and struck her down and left her there, and who has never been found. Mr. Collins and I were the only kinfolk with her while she recovered."

I had been watching the path but now I gave him a sidelong glance and saw that he had stopped, and so I did the same.

"She was struck down in the same terrain and the same manner as Charlotte Lucas. Whoever reached Charlotte reached Mary. It is one hand. I have known it since the spring and had no one to say it to who could be of the smallest use. I tell you now because you are the one man of my acquaintance who will know what to do with it."

I had meant to say the last part more gently. I found, having said it, that I did not regret the want of gentleness, and I held my tongue and let him do the work.

I had watched a great many people think, in my life. My father thinks like a man turning the pages of a book he has read before. Mr. Darcy thought the way water carves a path through soft ground: without any show of effort, going down by the shortest way there was, arriving before you had seen it move. I watched the theory he had carried since the autumn come apart in his mind now that he knew about the attack on Mary. I watched him understand that he had been wrong, and what he had done while he was wrong, and to whom.

He had gone the colour of the gravel. His hand had come up to the rail of the little bridge we had stopped beside and taken hold of it.

"Yes, indeed. My mother was nowhere near Kent at the time."

He looked up at the easy meaning, the one that said only that I had stood and watched him clear my mother across the last half-minute and could follow the steps of it. There was even something like relief beginning in his face, that I had seen him arrive in the right place at last.

And then the rest of it reached him. I watched it reach him. I had known what he believed of my mother — known it since a sickroom in Kent, and known it every hour of this visit: while his housekeeper stood under his picture and gave him a character I could not have invented; while he came round the corner of his own house and found me on his gravel and could not get a sentence out; while I sat at his table and was glad to be there. I had come into his county meaning never to set eyes on him, and had met him notwithstanding, and been used by him with a kindness I had done nothing to earn, and I had taken all of it and said nothing, because there had never been a way to say it that was not a blow. He understood that now. He understood that the woman who had refused him for his pride had been carrying his worst secret through every hour he was kind to her, and had let him go on.

The relief went out of his face, and the shame that came up under it he neither hid nor arranged. He did not look away, which I think cost him everything he had. His hand stayed on the rail, and his face went from gray to red.

"Believing what you did, you still asked my mother's brother to come and fish," I said.

"It was my pleasure. Your uncle is a man of straightforward goodness, rather like Charles there." He indicated his friend, walking beside my sister, with a tilt of his head.

"You judged him to be so," I said. "On our first morning here."

"It was not a difficult judgment to make. I am glad that it pleased you."

"It did. And also, it is hard to go on convicting a man whose own servants have known him since he was four years old and have not yet found him out."

He let go of the rail.

"I removed Mr. Bingley from your sister," he said, "on the strength of…a certain theory. I told myself it was the connexions. It was not only the connexions." He looked ahead, to where Jane's bonnet had stopped beside Mr. Bingley's shoulder at the water's edge. "I have been a great fool."

I thought of Anne, and her strange fascination with Mr. Collins, and her stranger resemblance to a haughty widow who had visited Meryton just when Mr. Collins had come to us looking for a wife. I felt sick, and could not speak to him of my fears. I understood something of what he must have felt that evening at Hunsford, going to ask a woman for her hand in marriage even though he believed her the daughter of a murderess.

"You did not know my mother well enough to know better," I said. "She is a selfish creature, a little like the unjust steward in the parable, determined to settle her children well so that they may receive her into their houses when her husband dies. But she has not the cunning, nor the industry to kill my cousin's betrothed so that one of my sisters could marry him."

That reached him. The shame did not leave him, I do not think it ever wholly left him, in the matter of Jane, but it moved over and made room.

"Tell me what you have observed," he said. "All of it, leaving nothing out, no matter how trivial it may seem to you."

So we walked, very slowly, the bridge behind us and the others a field ahead, and we laid our halves of it side by side for the first time. He had a man's whole history that I had once defended at a card-table and now would not have given a wet glove for; he laid Mr. Wickham down between us without my having to ask, and I told him I had believed his account since a lane in Kent and believed it more every month. I had the shape of the violence, the two attacks that rhymed, the announced hour Charlotte had spoken in a crowded room and paid for on an open road. But I did not tell him what I suspected. I could hardly accuse his cousin on the strength of her way of looking at people in a crowded room. We did not solve the mystery on that path. We did the thing that is better than solving, the first time it happens. We stopped being two people each privately sure, and became two people uncertain in the same direction.

"We have been right about different things," he said, "and wrong about the same ones. I do not know whether to be glad of your thoughts or ashamed of mine."

"You may attempt both," I said. "It is what I am doing right now."

Ahead of us the party had turned at the foot of the water and were coming back toward us in the easy scatter of people who have walked far enough; and Miss Darcy, catching sight of her brother, lifted a hand to him, and he lifted his to her, and I saw him put his face back on for them by degrees as we closed the distance. It was not a mask, only the ordinary face a man wears among people who must not yet know what he has learned. We walked back in step, which we had not done going out, and he matched his stride to mine without either of us arranging it, and that, on the whole of that long day, was the thing I took away and kept.