The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 40. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

It took me four days to get Mr. Darcy alone, and I will say this for my mother: I had watched her clear rooms all my life and thought it a foolish art, and it turned out to be a heritable one.

We walked out on the fifth morning toward Oakham Mount, six of us, and I disposed of my forces. Jane and Mr. Bingley required no management; they fell behind of their own accord, at the pace of two people for whom arrival had stopped being the object of walking. Kitty I sent home from the second stile with a commission about my mother's shawl, invented on the spot and accepted without suspicion, Kitty being used to a world in which errands descend on the youngest present like weather. The hedges were red with hips, and a wind was working the stubble on the far slopes, and none of it cared what I was about, which steadied me.

That left the lane, and Mr. Darcy, and me. "Mr. Darcy," I said, "I am going to ask you a question, and I have decided to ask it badly, because I have found I ask my best questions badly. You will oblige me by not helping."

He stopped walking. "You have my word."

"Why have you said nothing?"

He did not pretend to misunderstand me. I will always honour him for that; a smaller man would have bought a minute with of what do you speak, Miss Bennet, and he stood in the lane and paid the question its full price on sight. He was quiet for the space of several steps we did not take. Then he said:

"You told me that you had less claim on me than Georgiana has."

I had not heard my own sentence since the morning I said it, and it sat differently in his voice — heavier, and worn at the edges, like a coin that has been carried about in a pocket and turned over daily.

"You said that to me in your father's breakfast room," he said, "in the middle of asking me for the largest thing anyone has ever asked me for. A woman stands in front of a man and argues him out of the deepest conviction he owns and in the very middle of prevailing, with the whole room hers, she stops to tell him that her claim on him is a lesser one. I did not take that for rhetoric. I took it for kindness. I believed you were telling me, in the gentlest form the morning allowed, that you did not choose to matter to me."

He paused, but I could not bring myself to speak just yet.

"And there was this besides: after Lydia, after the settlement, any word of mine came with a bill fastened to it. If I had spoken that week, or the week after, I could never have been certain what emotion moved your answer. Gratitude is a debt, and I would not court you with one in my hand. So I have been waiting for the debt to age, and to see if I had understood you rightly that day, when you spoke of your claim on me. And keeping, in the meantime, to the roads."

"And the weather."

"The weather," he agreed, "in my bolder moments."

There is a kind of misreading that insults a woman and a kind that honours her, and I had been handed the second kind and found it no lighter to carry. He had taken me at my word. That was the whole of his crime. He had heard me say less claim and had built around that sentence, with the thoroughness he brought to everything, a policy of doing nothing forever and he would have kept to it, I understood, for years if I had not spoken. The careful are not cured by waiting. They are only confirmed.

I had three answers ready. They were all of them clever, and all of them sideways, and mentally I threw them into the hedge. My heart was going like a hare with the hounds after it. It is a terrible thing, saying plainly what you want. I understood at last, standing in that lane, why the whole world talks of the weather when it once to talk of serious matters.

I forced myself to speak. "I love you. I have loved you since somewhere between a stile with burdock at it and a breakfast table in Gracechurch Street. I want every claim on you that you will give me. You asked me a question once, at Hunsford, and I answered it in ignorance. Ask it again. I am better informed now."

He looked at me for a long moment. Now that I had convinced him that the answer would be different this time, he asked a certain question again.

What he said I will not set down entire, even in a manuscript meant for no eyes but the family's; a woman is entitled to keep one page blank. I will record that it was longer than his question at Hunsford, and humbler, and that the words dearest, loveliest Elizabeth loomed large in it. When he was done I gave him a different answer from the one at Hunsford, and we stood in the lane while the wind went on with the stubble, two people out of arguments at last.

We caught up with Jane and Bingley at the turn, walking back. Jane, who shone at everything that autumn, shone at us and asked whether we had not found it a beautiful morning.

"Tolerable," I said.

"The roads," said Mr. Darcy, "have never been finer."