The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 38. Narrated by Bingley, from his diary.

London, the 5th of October

Darcy carried me off to his club after dinner. It was a grave place in St James's where the carpet takes your footstep whole and no one has laughed aloud in a generation. He had a bottle brought that wanted an hour to breathe, and then did not pour himself a drop of it. I put my boots to the fire and waited. When Darcy takes that long coming at a thing, the thing is worth a man's patience.

"I did you a wrong last autumn," he said, to the coals. "I have carried it about since, and I find I cannot carry it down into Hertfordshire with me. So you shall have it here, where you may throw the bottle at my head if you like, and nobody we know will be by to see."

"What wrong?" I said, though I had a guess. A man does not need to be clever to know which of his own hurts a friend means, when there has only ever been the one that signified.

"I parted you from Miss Bennet. Last November. It was not chance, and your sisters were only the surface of it, though I let them do the visible part. It was me."

"I know it was you." I had known it since a dinner-table at Pemberley, though I did not say so; a man lets a friend make his confession without telling him the half of it is stale. "You told me she did not care for me."

"Twice. I remember every word of both times, which is a penance of its own." He turned the stem of the untouched glass. "I believed it, and I was wrong, and I have watched with my own eyes this summer how wrong. But that was never why I took you off. The indifference was the excuse I gave you. The reason I kept to myself."

"Then in God's name what was your reason?"

"You remember I never believed the footpads."

I did remember. It came back to me whole: the last night at Netherfield, the boxes in the hall, Darcy at the window telling me a dead woman's purse had come home in her pocket. "You said nothing had been taken from her," I said. "You called it the curious circumstance. I have never forgotten it, though I never once knew what to do with it."

"Neither did I, for the longest while. But I could not let it alone, and I looked, the way I look at things, for who was the better off for Charlotte Lucas being dead. And for the better part of a year, Charles, every road I walked down came out at the door of your Miss Bennet's own family." He said it evenly, the way a man reads out a sum he has checked too many times to doubt. "I thought her mother might have had a hand in it. I could prove nothing. I could say nothing. There is no crueller thing on this earth than to lay the word murder at a mother in a houseful of daughters on a suspicion you cannot carry to a magistrate. But I believed it enough that I would not stand and watch you marry into it. So I brought you to London, and told you the girl was cold, and let you go on thinking me the proudest snob in England, because a snob is an easier friend to keep than a man who suspects your intended's mother of killing her neighbour to advance her daughter's cause."

I thought on that for a time. The fire did the talking for both of us.

"And you were wrong," I said at last.

"Root and branch. Wrong about Jane's heart, and wrong about her mother, and wrong about the whole shape of it. No Bennet harmed Charlotte Lucas." He set the glass down. "There was a name put to me, a person I would have sworn on my father's grave could not have done such a thing. That name was wrong, but it pointed towards another. I have learned this year that when you have crossed off everything that cannot be, what is left is the truth. What was left was my own aunt."

"Lady Catherine." I do not know how I got the name out. It arrived on its own.

"Lady Catherine. Wickham was the hand; she was the purse and the will behind it. How it was done, and how it was hidden, and how at the last it was found — that I will keep, Charles, even from you. Some of it is not mine to give away, and none of it does any living soul the least good now." He looked at me then, straight. "Wickham sails for New South Wales inside the week, a free man aboard a ship of convicts, which is as near to justice as this business will ever come. My aunt is gone into Italy. Neither of them will ever trouble any of you again. That is the whole of it, in the only shape I am able to hand you."

I had forgiven him somewhere in the middle of it, and I told him so, because a man ought not to be left hanging over a fire for his sins any longer than the telling takes.

"You great, grim, solitary fool," I said. "You carried a murder about in your chest for a year sooner than lay an unproved word on a pack of women who had done you no harm. You took the whole world's low opinion of yourself as the price of it, and never sent up so much as a flare. And you sit there braced for the bottle at your head." I found I could not quite manage the light thing I had meant to say. "I forgave you the Jane of it in August, the day I walked into a room and saw her colour before she could help it. This other — I am only sorry, Darcy. Sorry you did not give me the carrying of even the corner of it."

"You'd have made a poor conspirator," he said. "You have a face like a lit window."

"I have. Jane says so too." And we were, for a moment, only two men by a fire again, and I would not trade that moment for a great deal.

"Go down to her," he said. "Open the house. She has grieved the best part of a year on my account, and I should like one thing in the whole of this filthy twelvemonth to come out the way it ought."

And there it was; the thing I have been turning over ever since, and cannot make lie flat. He had spent the evening setting my life to rights, and had said not one word for his own.

"And you?" I said. "You have handed me back my Jane, and put your own aunt out of the kingdom, and paid for God alone knows what besides with your own purse and your own name. When does a thing come round the right way for you, Darcy?"

"I have had the arranging of your happiness. That will serve me very well."

"That is not what I asked, and you know to a hair it is not. There is a lady in Hertfordshire—"

"There is a bottle," he said, "which neither of us has yet had the civility to drink. Pour it out, Charles. We have talked sufficient of me to last me the year."

And he would not be moved off it, and I did not try him twice; I have learned that much about the doors he wants shut. But I know what I know. At Pemberley I had grasped something of what Elizabeth Bennet was to him. Tonight at his club, I sat there while he built my whole happiness back up brick by brick with his bare hands and would not lift one finger toward his own.

I go down on Thursday to take the covers off the chairs. He follows on the Saturday, on business he did not trouble to give a name. I carry two things out of that club that I did not carry in. Firstly: the whole ugly weight of what he saved us all from, which I will not tell Jane though I lie at her side fifty years. Secondly: the sight of a man setting every life about him straight and walking home to his own crooked one alone. I have never in my life wanted so badly to be the clever one of us, and never less known how.