The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 41. Narrated by Bingley, from his diary.

Longbourn, the 26th of November

Darcy and I were married this morning, an hour apart, to two sisters, in the same small church, by the same overworked parson, and I do not think I have ever in my life been so thoroughly managed by other people while every one of them assured me I was doing exactly as I pleased.

We waited together in the cold vestry beforehand, the two of us, while the bells argued overhead and Mr. Bennet's man went at a spot of candle-grease on my sleeve with the flat of a heated knife.

"You are very white, Charles," said Darcy.

"I am very happy. It comes out the same colour on me." I got my collar to sit. "How is it you are not just as pale?"

"I used up my pallour in a lane in October," he said. "I have none left over for church."

The service I will not give an account of, having attended very little of it. I was occupied in looking at Jane, who was the handsomest thing that county has produced or is ever likely to, and in getting a ring past a knuckle, which no one warns a man is the whole of the difficulty in getting married. Then it was done, and she was Mrs. Bingley, and I turned about and Darcy was standing up in my place with Elizabeth, and did the whole thing over again with a steadiness I envied and a colour I did not.

The breakfast was at Longbourn, and my new mother-in-law was in such a state of triumph that I had fears for her heart. She had married off two daughters in a single morning, one of them to ten thousand a year, and she went along the tables telling everybody who could not get away from her that she had known from the first how it would fall out.

"I said to Mr. Bennet the very first evening," she told me, her hand on my sleeve and her eye on the plate, "I said, that young man will do for one of my girls, you mark me. And was I ever wrong? And now Lizzy and her Mr. Darcy besides, and Lydia with her Colonel — four daughters married and only Kitty of them left on my hands. Some people have all the luck in the world and never once know how it came to them; but I am sure I shall not grudge Lizzy hers, though she was always the difficult one."

She knows nothing. I set that down as the strangest fact in a year of them, and I am the one soul seated close to her who feels the whole weight of it. She sits at the head of her board with her girls safe and has no notion anything was ever wrong, nor from what, nor by whom, nor at what price, nor to whom the whole of it is owed. Long may she never find out.

I got my first proper look at Mr. and Mrs. Darcy together while the cake was being murdered by a great-aunt with a blunt knife. His wife said something to him from behind her glove that I was not meant to catch. He laughed aloud at whatever it was. I do not know what she said. I begin to think that is the point of the thing. I never know what she said. I only know it undid in one morning a reserve I have spent ten years failing to dent.

My mother-in-law has already done the sums on the next generation, aloud, at table, to the pardonable horror of both brides, and has settled on a great many grandchildren and begun upon their names. I let her run at it. Somebody in a family ought to be looking that far down the road, and it will not be Darcy and it certainly will not be me. I could not tell you the first thing about the children who will come after us. I hope only that they are happy, and take their mothers' looks over their fathers', and think kindly, when they are old, of the two foolish men who married the Miss Bennets.

Everybody knows Mr. and Mrs. Darcy settled matters between them on a walk to Oakham Mount. Nobody knows one word of what passed there, Elizabeth being as close as a locked desk on the subject and Jane too delicate to ask. I am neither. I asked Darcy what he said on the walk. He looked at me the way he looks at a man who has missed the point of a thing. I record for posterity that I generally have.

Late in the day, when the last carriage had gone off down the drive and the two brides were upstairs conspiring over something that needed both of them, Darcy and I were left a moment in the emptying room.

"You are happy," I said. I had not meant it for a discovery. It arrived as one. I had walked at this man's side through a murder and a scandal and a year of grey mornings and never once been able to say those words and mean them.

He looked at me with a faint smile and a gleam in those keen eyes, and he said, "You have observed something at last, Bingley."

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."

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.

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.

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.

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 36. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

Of the hour we spent with my father I will set down very little. He heard us through without once looking away from Anne, which I had never seen him do with any guest; he asked her two questions that had not occurred to me in a year of carrying the matter; and at the end of it he sat a while turning his spectacles in his hand, and then said, "Well," and got up, and was, from that hour, of use. "Your mother," he told me at the library door, "will be told that Miss de Bourgh is paying us a visit out of solicitude for your sister Mary. It has the advantage of being plausible, and no other virtue whatever."

The house took Anne in the way houses do, without opinions. Hill carried linen up to the spare room; Cook, informed there was a baronet's daughter at table, sent up to Meryton for fish; and Anne sat in our parlour with her hands quiet in her lap and drank her tea, and asked, in a voice that hardly shook at all, whether Longbourn kept a fire in the evenings, for she felt the cold. She looked as she had always looked. She held her cup as though someone might yet take it from her. I made no observations aloud.

My mother came back from Meryton at five o'clock with Kitty, the Colonel, and Lydia, and was in raptures before her bonnet was off. To have missed Lady Catherine de Bourgh's call was a calamity from which, she assured us all, she would not soon recover. To have gained Miss de Bourgh in exchange was a stroke of fortune she attributed, on no evidence, to her own management. The visit's cause she never thought to question. Great families were forever falling out; it was, she said, one of the burdens of rank; look at what she herself had suffered from her own daughters. Nobody corrected her arithmetic, and she went off to instruct Cook about the fish that had already been sent for.

The Colonel had stopped in the parlour doorway at the sight of his cousin. Anne looked back at him. He bowed, said he was glad to find her looking so well, and asked nothing. Lydia, to her credit or to the griffin's, was too full of Meryton's admiration to notice anything so quiet as Anne de Bourgh.

It was at dinner, watching Anne decline a second helping of soup under the full artillery of my mother's hospitality, that I noticed that my old suspicion of Mr. Collins was gone. For most of a year, it had sat in me like a stone in a shoe, never provable, never quite dischargeable. Now that I knew the truth, I could see him as the pompous, foolish clergyman he truly was, rather than the homicidal maniac I had feared.

The next morning I was at the breakfast table, reading a letter from my aunt Gardiner and getting no further than the date, when a horse came up the drive at a pace our drive was not accustomed to. There had not been time — I want that set down; I had counted the hours myself — there had not been time for any word of yesterday to reach London and bring anyone back again.

Hill got the whole name out this time, and had the pleasure of it.

"Mr. Darcy, ma'am."

I stood up before I had decided to.

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.

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 34. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

We changed horses at Barnet, and Lydia's wedding had already improved twice.

When she was telling the story at our first halt, there had been eleven people in the church, which was true, for I had been one of them and had counted. By the second there were rather more, and the Colonel's regimentals had acquired a sword-knot given him by a general. By Barnet the wedding had a bishop in it. My father listened to each version with the gravity he reserved for exceptionally ridiculous developments, and said nothing. Every now and again, he looked at his new son-in-law over the top of it all with the expression he usually kept for a tradesman's bill that had come in lower than expected and must therefore contain an error somewhere.

"And Denny will be sick as a cat when he hears," said Lydia, "for he always said colonels were too old to be worth having, and now I am Mrs. Fitzwilliam and shall go into dinners ahead of half the county. I shall write and tell him so on the new paper, for we have ordered everything from the stationer's with the crest on it — it is a very good crest, isn't it Fitzwilliam?"

"It has a griffin on it," said the Colonel. "You will find the griffin does most of the work of the letter."

"A griffin." Lydia sat back, satisfied, as though she had ordered one from a warehouse and it had come. "Kitty may have my blue bonnet, and the spotted muslin too, for I am to have everything new in town — Fitzwilliam says I may fit out the whole of Bond Street if I will only do it by degrees. Kitty will die."

She was exactly as she had always been: the same volume, the same total want of proportion, the wedding and the griffin and Denny's discomfiture all weighed in the same scale. And yet twice on that road I caught hints of what she had become.

The first time was the bracelet. "…and when George said we must wait for the money before we could dine anywhere fit to be seen, I took my coral bracelet down to the man at the corner myself. George offered to carry it for me and I told him no, for I had seen what he got for his own watch, and I knew I could do better. And I did. Nine shillings better."

"Nine and six," said the Colonel, without looking up from the window. "She does herself an injustice. Tell your father about the man's dog."

He had heard it before, then. He had heard it, kept the figure, and wanted it told again. A man does not ask twice for a story about a pawnbroker's dog unless he has decided the story's owner is worth collecting. I had come into that carriage prepared to pity Colonel Fitzwilliam, and I spent the journey changing my mind.

The second time came past Hatfield, in a lull, when the griffin had been exhausted and the horses were tired. Lydia looked out the window and said, to the hedgerows more than to us: "The last week was not such good fun. George was out a great deal, and the woman of the house would keep locking the street door." And then, before anyone could make anything of it: "Fitzwilliam, when we are at Longbourn you must not let Mamma seat you next to Mary, for she will improve you, and you are not to be improved until I have shown you off."

"I shall cling to my faults," said the Colonel, "for your sake."

I looked at my youngest sister and found I had nothing to say that would not have been a door better left shut. She had gone into that house at Brighton a silly girl and come out of the other one still silly, and somewhere between the two she had pawned her own bracelet at a better price than George Wickham could get for a watch, and had noticed a locked door and kept her head about it.

My father spoke perhaps four times in as many hours. Once, somewhere past the turnpike, he said: "You have barely known my daughter a fortnight, Colonel. What sort of woman do you imagine you have married?"

Lydia protested the question. The Colonel considered it.

"A woman who got nine and six above the fair price out of a Cheapside pawnbroker," he said, "in the worst week of her life. I expect to be very well looked after, sir."

"Hm," said my father, and returned to the window. He only went on watching, with the patience of a judge who has decided that the evidence is not yet all in. I thought that my father did his best work in exactly that posture, and had simply never before had anything worth doing it on.

Longbourn came up the way it always came up, paddock first, then the chimneys, and Jane was out on the steps before the carriage had properly stopped, and for a moment everything was arms and bonnets and Kitty shrieking from the doorway about the griffin, the moment Lydia mentioned it.

"Jane, you must go down lower now," said Lydia, embracing her, "for I am a married woman, and I take your place. Lord, how strange it is!"

"You are very welcome to it," said Jane, laughing, and took her in under her arm, and looked over her shoulder at me with all the questions she was too kind to ask in the drive. I gave her a look which meant that I would tell her as soon as I was able.