The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 35. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

The coach and four came up our drive at eleven o'clock, and Hill had scarcely got the name out — "Lady Catherine de Bourgh" — before the name's owner was in the room past her.

We were a thin garrison that morning. My mother had carried the Colonel and his bride off to my aunt Philips's directly after breakfast, to be exhibited, with Kitty trailing along. Mary was resting, and Jane was in the still-room. Lady Catherine, sweeping the drawing-room with one look, found in it only my father with his book, myself with my workbasket, and furniture that had disobliged her by existing.

"This must be an inconvenient room in summer," she said, after the initial greetings on both sides were done. "The windows are full west."

My father put a finger in his book to keep his place. I understood the finger; I had watched him keep his place in that manner through twenty years of my mother's nerves, and it meant that he expected to be reading again shortly.

"It is fortunate that you have not come here in summer, madam," he said. "Your timing is less fortunate in other ways. My wife has carried everything worth exhibiting, including your nephew, into Meryton this morning."

Lady Catherine stared at him, a long look, much longer than is given in company, and my father ignored it. He merely turned a page in his book. Whatever she had expected in coming here, it had not been this. I watched her decide, with an almost visible motion, that he was beneath her notice.

"Miss Bennet." She turned to me. "There seemed to be a prettyish kind of little wilderness on one side of your lawn. I should be glad to take a turn in it, if you will favour me with your company. Anne shall walk with us."

I went. I have asked myself since why I went so readily, and the honest answer is that I wanted her out of the room so that she would leave my father in peace.

The morning was fine. Our wilderness is a modest one: a gravel walk, some laurels, the currant bushes that Cook harvests in July. At the moment, there was also a thrush chasing insects at the edge of the walk as industriously as if my father paid him to do it. Miss de Bourgh came over the lawn from the carriage at her mother's nod, wrapped to the chin although the day was warm, and fell in beside us on the gravel.

I confess that my chief attention, as we entered the walk, was for the daughter and not the mother. I had spent a summer believing what I believed about Anne de Bourgh, and I had argued it to a gentleman in London not a week since, and been told I was proposing impossibilities; and here was the subject herself beside me. I placed myself so that I could see her without turning my head. It seemed only sensible.

"You can be at no loss," said Lady Catherine, "to understand why I am come."

"Indeed, madam, I cannot account for the honour at all."

"A report of a most alarming nature reached Rosings two days ago. I was told that this family expected shortly to be allied with my own nephew, with Mr. Darcy."

My breath caught in my throat at the absurdity of her accusation. In London, Mr. Darcy had tried to protect me from the negotiations with Mr. Wickham, but I could point to nothing else that might support such a claim as she was making now. I had accused his cousin, in his presence, of being a murderess, and he had marshalled every argument he could think of against the idea. We had met a few times since then, most recently at a certain wedding, but he had said nothing to me that all the world could not hear.

"Since we are already connected with your other nephew, I fail to see the issue," I said.

"That is done, and past my mending. And besides, Fitzwilliam is a younger son with no responsibilities to speak of. But Darcy is a man of consequence, who deserves better."

My chin went up. "I'm sure a man of his intelligence understands what he deserves better than any aunt might."

"On the contrary, I have much more experience of life than he has. Rosings has stood clear of scandal for thirty years because I have kept it clear — I have chosen the acquaintance, I have chosen the servants, I have chosen the very clergyman — I have arranged everything that came near my daughter from the hour she was born, because that is what it is to have the charge of a person who cannot—" she gave Anne the smallest glance, the way one indicates a sideboard "—who cannot arrange things for herself. I will not see Darcy gossiped about in three counties because he chose to tie himself to such a family as yours. I require your assurance, Miss Bennet, that you will not feed this report. I require you to contradict it."

"And if I do not choose to give such an assurance?"

"Obstinate, headstrong girl!" She stopped on the walk and turned on me. "I am not accustomed to being addressed in this fashion." And then she stared at me.

It was meant to end the conversation. I believe it had ended every conversation of her life. She held my eyes and did not blink and did not leave off, on and on, past every boundary that governs how one woman may look at another. It was the look that had rested on Mr. Collins across my aunt Philips's card-room while he bowed and scraped to a widow he did not know, and had gone on resting on him after he turned away.

The widow. The look that went at a person, like a hand on goods. I had carried that look in my mind for the better part of a year, and I had hung it on the wrong de Bourgh, because Anne's eyes went through people toward something beyond, and I had wanted a frail woman in disguise and there had been one to hand, and all that time, all that long time…

"It was you in Meryton." My voice came out before anything in me had finished. "The widow at my aunt's party. You sat by the wall and you watched Mr. Collins half the evening. Wickham heard Charlotte say the road, and the day, and the hour — she said it to me, and Wickham heard it and told you — and you paid him. You paid Wickham. Charlotte Lucas walked out to visit me and you had her killed on the road, and then in Kent, when Mary — my sister Mary, on the lane—" I ran out of voice and found more. "Tell me I am wrong. You insulted my family's drawing-room a quarter of an hour ago. Tell me I am wrong."

The thrush had moved his work under the currant bushes. Lady Catherine looked at me, and what happened in her face was a thing I had never seen in a face before: the machinery reaching for the answer that puts a servant back in her place, and finding the shelf empty. She had never in her life been required to answer. She did not know how it was done.

"You forget yourself," she said at last.

"That is no answer, madam."

"I do not answer to the likes of you." But it came out wrong, a woman quoting her own authority to herself because Mr. Collins was not here to say it for her.

"Mamma."

I had never heard Anne de Bourgh's voice raised above the level of a dinner requirement. It was not raised now. It came out small and scraped, like a thing that had been kept in a drawer for years and was being made to work, and she had both hands closed on the ends of her shawl, and she was looking at her mother — through her mother, toward whatever stood behind her — and she made herself stop and look at her, and I watched what it cost to do it. Then she turned towards me.

"I suspected it," said Anne. "In the spring, after the parsonage — after Mrs. Collins was hurt. I have suspected it since the spring. I could not believe it of her." Her breath went and she got it back. "I have sat at her table every evening since May, not believing it. That is what I have been doing since May."

Lady Catherine's head came round to her daughter, and here at the end I will set down plainly what I saw, because I have never seen it since and hope not to: there was no guilt in her face, and no fear either. There was incomprehension.

"Everything I have done," she said, "I have done so that you should have what you want. Whatever you wanted, Anne, you were to have it. You have never in your life had to ask — I have known what you wanted before you knew it yourself, always, since you were in the cradle — that has been the whole work of my life, and I did it gladly. The Lucas woman would have had the parsonage arranged past mending in a twelvemonth — the living, the household, the whole of it settled wrong, and settled for thirty years, before ever you came into your own. She was not what was wanted. I saw to it."

Anne shook her head sadly. "I was not what was wanted. Not what he wanted."

"In time, with encouragement from me, Collins would have plucked up the courage to court you. That is what a mother is for."

Lady Catherine turned, as though the interview had now concluded to her satisfaction, and walked back across the lawn toward her carriage, at her own pace, past the windows of my father's house.

Anne did not go with her. She stood beside me in the wilderness, staring blankly into the distance. "Your mother is…not rational," I said. "If you feel unsafe with her, I'm sure my mother would be willing to entertain you at Longbourne for a few days, and the Fitzwilliams can then escort you to London, or wherever else you wish to go."

Anne shook her head. "You are mistaken. Mamma would never harm me. But I cannot bear to look at her, now that I have heard it from her own mouth." She produced a tremulous smile. "And so I will accept your very kind invitation, assuming your mother does not disavow it the moment she sees me!"

"Nonsense. She would be delighted to entertain the daughter of a baronet. Any daughter, of any baronet. Since we cannot prove your mother's crimes, we will say nothing of them to her. My father has been fretting over Charlotte's death, and I might drop a hint in his ear, if you do not disapprove. He is a very discreet man."

Anne turned towards the house with a purposeful air I had never seen on her before. "I will help you explain it, if you will let me," she said.