The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 37. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

We could hear the horse being walked away, and boots in the hall, and Hill's voice; and in that little space my father folded his newspaper and spoke, to neither of us, in the voice he used for reading aloud out of books he did not like.

"I have not been inside the Meryton assembly rooms in five-and-twenty years. It has been my favorite joke, that nothing said in company could possibly concern me. The woman who attacked Mary stayed in this county half a winter, ten minutes' ride from my library, and I never once laid eyes on her." He put the paper by his plate. "I'm afraid my favorite joke has rather curdled."

There was no answer to make, so I made none; and by the time Mr. Darcy was in the doorway my father's face was his own again.

Mr. Darcy still wore a coat, covered in dust to the shoulders. He said, "Where is my aunt?" before he had properly bowed, and then heard himself, and bowed.

"Good morning, Mr. Darcy," said my father. "You are a day behind her."

Darcy took this the way a man takes a stair that is not there. Then his eye went past me to the table, and found his cousin sitting at it with a teacup, and stopped.

"Anne."

"Cousin," said Anne, and did not explain herself.

Mother and Kitty were not yet down, and Mary took breakfast in her room, under Jane's watchful eye. Accompanied by a running commentary from my father, Anne and I gave Darcy the story of his aunt's visit. The walk, the wilderness, what his aunt had said and what she had not troubled to deny, and what Anne had said with her mother standing by. He heard it standing, with his hand on the back of the chair my father had pushed toward him, and he did not once interrupt, and when it was done he looked at me for a long moment.

"You had no confession," he said. "No testimony. Nothing."

"I had her face," I said. "And a year's practice reading the wrong one."

He was quiet. Then: "I was at Rosings last night. Her steward told me where she had gone. We must have crossed on the roads. I came up by St Albans. I had meant…" He stopped and set the sentence down and took up a plainer one. "I threatened Mr. Wickham again with the magistrate, the day before yesterday. Miss Elizabeth had suspected…another member of my family…"

"It's all right," Anne said. "She confessed those suspicions to me already. It was quite understandable, given the information Miss Elizabeth had to work with." She produced the ghost of a smile. "I found her opinion of my competence almost flattering."

Darcy nodded gravely. "In any case, that led me to suspect a different member of my family. I did not mention my suspicions to Wickham, but what he told me confirmed them. He has sworn the whole of it: that he heard Miss Lucas name the road and the hour at your aunt's party; that he carried the intelligence to a woman he knew, inspite of her disguise, to be Lady Catherine de Bourgh; and that she paid him. The sum, the dates, everything. It is signed. I rode to Rosings with a copy of it in my coat."

"You went to confront her," said my father.

"I went to tell her what the law was about to do, to her face, before it did it. She was owed that much." He said it without heat.

He turned to me. "And I will tell you now what the law is about to do, because it must be set moving from this room, this morning. Wickham goes to the assizes — he has hanged himself twice over with his own mouth, and I will not lift a finger off the scale. My aunt goes to Westminster, if her father's blood entitles her to the Lords, and to the common dock of the King's Bench if it does not. I have kept one crime of that man's dark for two years because the light would have fallen on the wrong head, and I have watched what the darkness bought — a woman dead on a road, your sister struck down in a lane, your youngest sister carried out of Brighton at night. Every hour we sit here my aunt is nearer the water. An express to Dover; another to the Kentish bench; my name will carry both. I have waited a long time to have the law in my hand instead of against it, Miss Bennet. I mean to use it."

Nobody in the room doubted that he could. That was the weight of it: it was all there for the taking — the confession signed, the witnesses living, the lever finally on the right side of the stone — and every word of it was just.

"And who pays for it?" I said.

He looked at me.

"I am not going to tell you she deserves less than the Tower. I sat across from her at dinner half a spring. Charlotte was my friend, on an errand to me, on my father's own road. There have been mornings this year when I would have built the scaffold with my own hands." I had not planned any of this beyond the first sentence; I could hear my own voice finding the argument a half-step before I did. "Try Lady Catherine, and Anne stands in every print-shop window in England — the woman whose mother killed to arrange her marriage. She did not choose one act of it. It was all done in her name and around her and without her consent. A trial does not punish her mother without sentencing her too, and she is the one person in this whole business who gets no verdict of her own."

Anne spoke then. "Let my mother go where she can arrange nothing for anybody. Send her money if the estate demands it; send her no letters; let her grow old bullying the people of Italy, where nobody is obliged to obey her. I have been furniture for most of my life, cousin. If you bring her to trial I will be evidence for the rest of my life. The prospect does not appeal to me."

I spoke up then. "And try Wickham in open court, and you give him the one thing he loves most besides himself: an audience. There is a young lady whose history he would lay before the bench the moment it bought him a day's delay. Mr. Darcy knows the lady I mean, and knows what the papers would do with her, and I will say no more in this room."

Darcy's hand tightened on the chair-back.

"And the last of it is Mary. Mary is alive. I have had most of a year to learn the whole worth of that sentence. Charlotte is dead, and Westminster cannot reach her, and God knows the Tower cannot; but Mary is alive, and a trial makes her its second exhibit — the attacked Mrs. Collins, pointed out at every assembly she attends for the rest of her life. Mary is alive. I would not have her suffer for the rest of her life for the sake of those two."

"It is not justice," said Darcy.

"No, it is not justice, but you go to the same Church I do, and you know that true justice is not promised us this side of the grave."

He turned to the window, and the room let him stand there. Hill came in and took away the plates, because houses go on.

"You have spent two years keeping one girl's history out of the light," I said. "I am asking you for the same office. I have less claim on you than she has, and I am asking anyway. "

Darcy stood at the window a while longer. When he turned around he looked first at Anne, then at me, and I could see him make his decision. He sat down.

"Wickham does not go to trial," he said. "He goes to Australia as a free settler, and the confession stays filed where I can reach it; if he sets foot in England again in this life, it is produced, and he hangs on his own signature. He will keep the bargain. He has always been quickest to understand arrangements that are about himself." He drew a breath. "And my aunt keeps her head start. No express, no Bow Street, nobody behind her on the Dover road. She may have Calais, and Italy after it, and the rest of her life to be obeyed grudgingly and insolently by people who are not paid well enough to serve her politely. Anne, Rosings will be looked after. You shall have my solicitor, if you want him." He looked around the table, at my father last. "There it is, said aloud. Transportation for the one. Italy for the other. If any man here can call it justice with a whole conscience, he is a better casuist than I am."

"It will do," said my father. "I have kept accounts long enough to know when a column will not balance. One writes carried forward at the foot of it, and rules the line." He rose. "You will want pen and ink, Mr. Darcy. The library is at your service — I find I have some letters of my own to finish as well."

The two men went out of the room together.

Anne poured herself another cup of tea, and her hand hardly shook at all.