The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 28. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

The post came up to Lambton just as my uncle was preparing to leave on another of his fishing expeditions. There was a letter for me in my father’s hand, which was news in itself. My father wrote letters seldom, and never willingly. He left the family correspondence to my mother, who was prolific, and to Jane, who was dutiful, and kept his own pen for the rare occasion on which a thing had gone so far wrong that irony could no longer be made to cover it.

I carried it to a window and broke the seal there and said nothing to anybody, wanting first to be certain of what I held.

I will not set the letter down here. He had written it in two sittings. I could see the place where the hand had steadied itself, and then, lower down, where it stopped pretending to be steady. What it told me, under the dry humor he tried for and failed, was this: that Lydia had gone from Brighton in the night, with Mr. Wickham, with a letter hinting at Gretna Green. Their movements, so far as they could be traced, pointed to London, which meant that no marriage had been made. My father had ceased to believe one was intended. Thanks to my mother, the matter was already known in the neighborhood. My father had planned to depart for London as soon as his letter was sent.

I had watched Lydia lean out of the Forsters’ carriage not two months before, calling back to Kitty about which bonnets were to be sent on after her, in spirits so high they had carried clear to the turn of the road. I had stood at the gate and let her go. And I had let her go knowing, better than my father, exactly what manner of man the regiment carried among its officers.

For every other soul in the world this was Lydia ruined, which was bad enough: a girl thrown away, a family disgraced, a thing to be whispered over and pitied and shut the door upon. I knew what had already been done to one girl by that same easy hand, in a hired house by the sea, on the night her usefulness gave out; and I stood at the window with my father’s letter and could not get my breath. What had I done?

I do not know how long I stood. When I looked up Mr. Darcy was entering the room, perhaps planning to wait for my uncle to appear with his fishing tackle. He had got as far as the middle of the floor when he saw my face and stopped.

“You are ill,” he said. “Let me call your aunt.”

“I am not ill.” My voice came out level, which surprised me. “I have had bad news from Longbourn, and must go to my family at once.” And then the words came rushing out of me. “My youngest sister has left her friends at Brighton and put herself into the power of Mr. Wickham. There is no marriage, and my father does not believe there will be one.”

The next part I had not meant to say to anybody, but I heard myself say regardless. “And I am half afraid that it is my doing. At my aunt Philips’s, before the regiment went, I could not keep from letting him see that I knew what he was. I was proud of it at the time, proud of being cleverer than he. I thought also that it might warn him against tampering with Lydia. Instead, it seems that he has revenged himself on me by pursuing her. I have undone my own sister with my own vanity.”

I watched him take all of it. I had braced, without knowing that I braced, for what a man does with such news of such a family: the half-step back, the cooling of the voice, the sudden recollection of business elsewhere. He did not take the half-step. He stood quite still, and I saw him weigh the true size of the danger. And behind the stillness I saw him begin to think, the way I had watched him think on the bridge, water going down by the shortest way to the floor of a thing.

“Your uncle,” he said. “Let me bring him to you.”

It was not much. It was not consolation; it did not trouble to tell me that none of it was my fault, which is the speech a lesser man makes in a doorway and has forgotten before he is down the stairs. He went away to find Mr. Gardiner, and I did not see him again in Derbyshire.

My uncle had the shape of it from my face before I had got through three sentences, and asked only what would help. My aunt was already thinking of Jane, who must be told, and of Mary, who must travel home as she had travelled out, for her health. There was a great deal to do and very little of it was hard, which is the mercy of a catastrophe: it leaves you a list. Within the hour, we were traveling down the long reach of the Derbyshire road going south; and I sat with my father’s letter folded small inside my glove.

“These catastrophes test us,” Mary said at random. “We will be stronger for them.” But she did not sound convinced. She looked listlessly out the window.

“Please let me come with you to London, Uncle,” I said.

He and Jane stared blankly at me. My aunt studied me with a more thoughtful expression.

“I have heard something of Mr. Wickham’s past in Kent, from people who knew him there.”

“Ah.” I had the uncomfortable impression that my aunt knew exactly who had told me about Mr. Wickham, but not what.

“Jane, Mary, I know it is unfair to let you face Mother, Kitty and the neighborhood without reinforcements, but I truly think I might be of more use in London.”

Jane smiled at me gently. “You must go where your conscience takes you of course.”

“We should all go where we will do the most good,” Mary said, which I took for agreement.

My uncle’s hands tightened into fists. “I don’t like to think what your father will say, Lizzy, but I think you are right. You will continue on with us to London.”