The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 39. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

The rest of that business was settled in the following weeks, and I will give it as it reached me, in parcels. I did not burden Jane with the whole sordid story, because it would have shocked her to know that there was so much wickedness in the genteel world.

Anne de Bourgh left us on a Tuesday, in the Fitzwilliams' carriage, bound for London and a house where her company had been asked for rather than required. Lydia talked, I am told, the whole way to town; Anne said afterward in a letter that it was one of the things she had been looking forward to. She went wrapped to the chin as always. But she sat forward in the carriage, looking out, and that was new.

Mr. Wickham sailed for New South Wales the first week of October, a free man on the passenger list of a transport otherwise carrying men in irons — which was, when I came to think of it, as neat a portrait of his whole career as anybody could have drawn on purpose. Mr. Darcy had dealt with the matter through men whom he had done a good turn for at one time or another. No court ever heard the name of anyone I loved.

The colony, I have read, grants land to a settler in proportion to the capital he can show and the recommendations he carries; Mr. Wickham could show none, and the letters he carried were exactly warm enough to get him aboard and not one degree warmer. His passage was paid. Nothing beyond his passage was paid, or ever would be. He landed where nobody had heard his voice or lent him five pounds on the strength of his smile. The law entitled him to what he could earn, and to nothing else. He understood the whole arrangement at once, I imagine. He is free, on paper, to come home whenever he chooses. The confession Darcy keeps is also on paper.

Lady Catherine de Bourgh reached Italy before the first frosts. I set it down plainly, because I would not have anyone mistake the shape of it: this was not an escape. She had spent thirty years as the fixed point around which a county turned: the living in her gift, the parsonage in her management, the roads, the dinners, the marriages, the very glazing of the windows disposed according to her judgment. And she woke one morning in a hired house in a country whose language she did not speak, attended by servants who stayed for the wages, with nothing left in her gift and no one left in her charge, and thirty years of practice in an occupation that no longer existed. Rosings was leased out like Netherfield, to a man who treated the Collinses well. There are people for whom exile is a lighter sentence than a scaffold. I have never been sure Lady Catherine was one of them.

And in the second week of October the knocker went back on the door at Netherfield.

Mr. Bingley came down from town with Mr. Darcy two days behind him — the gentlemen had had business together in London, and whatever had passed between them there, Mr. Bingley arrived in Hertfordshire ready to be social. He was at Longbourn the first morning, and the second, and by the fourth my mother had taken to arranging the drawing-room by eleven o'clock as a general prepares a field. On the fifth morning both gentlemen came, and sat, and talked of nothing, until my mother, by a series of manoeuvres so transparent that I could not look at my father, had carried off Kitty to the stillroom, and sent Mary for a book, and discovered that she herself was wanted about the fish. She left Jane and Mr. Bingley at one end of the room with my father, Mr. Darcy and myself at the other, like two sets of chess pieces from different games.

Mr. Darcy and I spoke of the roads.

I want it understood what that sentence contains. We had sat across a breakfast table and shared out the fates of four people between us; I had argued him out of the Tower and he had let me. And on that fifth morning, in my mother's drawing-room, we spoke of the state of the roads between Hertfordshire and London, and agreed that they were tolerable for the season.

Then Mr. Bingley stood up, very red, and asked my father for five minutes in the library, and the whole room pretended it did not know why, except Jane, who looked into her lap and shone.

My father gave him considerably less than five minutes. They came back together, my father wearing the face he wore when he was very pleased and did not intend to show it. He crossed the room and kissed Jane on the forehead and added: "You are a good girl, Jane, and you are going to be an absurdly happy one. I have no fears for you at all; you are each of you so obliging that nothing will ever be decided between you, so easy that every servant in the place will cheat you, and so generous that you will exceed your income within the twelvemonth. It is everything I could have hoped."

After that the room rather went off like a flushed covey. My mother's joy was loud, and long, and I will not transcribe it. Kitty simpered. Mary offered the couple a pious observation, which was received by Mr. Bingley with a bow of perfect and impenetrable good will. Jane went from one of us to the next as though happiness were a thing she was anxious to divide fairly, having too much of it.

And Mr. Darcy — Mr. Darcy crossed the room and wished his friend joy, and I watched him do it. He looked at Bingley the way a man looks at a thing he helped to mend and has just seen hold weight. To Jane he said that Bingley was the best-tempered man of his acquaintance. It was said with so little irony that Jane, who hears the best in everything, heard it exactly right, and coloured with pleasure.

He was warm. That is the whole difficulty set down in one word. He was present, and glad, and warm, ten feet from me, in a room where his friend had just asked for what he wanted and got it inside of five minutes; and he said nothing, and asked for nothing, and spoke to me once more before the gentlemen rode home, and it was about the weather.

I was happy that evening. I want that understood too, because I have read accounts of such evenings in novels, where the overlooked sister sits in a corner being brave, and I was nothing of the kind. It was the first entirely good thing to happen in that house in a year, and I laughed at my mother's raptures and drank my share of the wine my father sent up, and when Jane came to my room that night and was happy at me until the candle guttered, I was happy back, and both of us meant every word of it.

But a heart, I discovered that autumn, can do two things at once and be sincere in both. When Jane had gone to bed I sat on at the window with the candle out. I was not being brave in a corner. I was puzzling over a man who had offered me his heart and hand when he thought my mother was a murderess, and rode ventre a terre to Longbourn when he realized that his aunt was a murderess and had come to pay a call on us. A man who had kept that murderess and her confederate from trial when I asked for it, and then came to call on us and talked of nothing but the weather and the roads.