The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 23. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

I had made very sure, before I let my aunt have her way, that the family was from home.

It cost me some trouble to do it without seeming to, which was the kind of trouble I had grown used to taking that summer. My aunt Gardiner had set her heart on Pemberley before we were a day into Derbyshire.

"You will think me a sentimental old woman, Lizzy," she said, the evening we came into Lambton, "but I cannot lodge ten miles from Pemberley woods and never walk in them. I knew that park before I knew your uncle, and there is not a handsomer in the county. I will not be reasoned out of it."

"I would not waste the breath," said my uncle, who liked to give his wife what she wanted and liked a trout stream besides. "I am told the water is full of fish that have never once been properly introduced to a hook. It would be uncivil not to call on them."

There were five of us, and there is no graceful way for one to hang back from a pleasure the other four think delightful, not without a reason; and my reason was the one thing in the world I could not produce.

I had refused the master of that house in the spring, in a parsonage parlour that smelt of my cousin's sermon-books, in terms I had been regretting ever since. To be discovered, of all people, admiring his carpets, was the last situation on earth I desired. So I asked the chambermaid at the inn, idly, while the question of the road was still open between us, whether the great family at Pemberley were much down at this season.

"Bless you, no, miss," she said. "All gone these two months, and Mr. Darcy not looked for till he comes down for the shooting. You may walk the whole house over and never meet a soul above the housekeeper."

And so I let my aunt have her way.

Jane was glad of the scheme, in the mild way she was glad of most things now. She had come north with us because the Gardiners had asked her, and because Longbourn, with my mother conducting a daily inquest into the silence at Netherfield, was no place to mend a broken heart in.

Mary travelled for her health. That was the word we had agreed among us to use, and we used it, and I will use it here. She was much recovered; she walked the day's distances without tiring and had left off putting her hand to the back of her head when she believed no one was looking.

We came into the Pemberley woods at the low end of the park and drove up through them the better part of a mile, and I gave the trees the close attention one gives a thing one has resolved beforehand not to admire. Then the wood fell back, and the house stood across the valley on its rising ground, stone the colour of good bread, with the water below it broad and easy and looking as though no one had ever presumed to tell it where to go. It was a large, handsome building, and it sat in its ground as if it had grown there rather than been set down on it.

I had not supposed that a house could make me feel anything to speak of.

I set the thought down because it shamed me then and shames me still: that to be mistress of such a place might be something. I had been offered it. I had said no, and now I stood looking at the no I had spoken, laid out in stone and water across a Derbyshire valley, while my uncle said something admiring about the timber and I could not have answered him to save my life.

The housekeeper who showed us over was an elderly woman, less fine and a great deal more civil than I had braced for, with the manner of a person who has loved a house so long she has stopped knowing where it ends and she begins. She took us through rooms I will not list. My aunt admired them in the right places and I made the right sounds, until I stood in front of the long gallery, in front of a portrait.

It was a good likeness. The painter had caught even the keenness in the blue eyes, and the faint smile about the lips. My aunt asked, in the way travellers ask, whether he was a good sort of master.

"The best landlord and the best master that ever lived," Mrs. Reynolds answered. "Not like the wild young men of these days, that care for nobody but themselves. There is not a tenant nor a servant on this estate but will give him a good name. I have never had a cross word from him in my life, and I have known him since he was four years old."

There was no question of flattery, or putting on a good front for the visitors. This plain, sensible woman clearly meant what she said. She had as much again to say of his sister Miss Georgiana Darcy: a most accomplished girl, doted on by the fondest of brothers. Mr. Darcy had lately sent a great new instrument from London.

I had come to Pemberley braced to be walked through the establishment of a proud man and to dislike it at my leisure. The housekeeper had simplified nothing. She only made me feel more confused in his character.

We went out afterward into the grounds, the gardener leading and my uncle asking him intelligent questions about the planting, and it was there, on the gravel walk above the water, that the master of the house, not looked for these two months, came round the angle of the building not twenty yards from where I stood.

I do not know which of us was the more confounded. He stopped as a man stops who has walked into a wall in the dark. The colour went out of his face and came back into it.

"Miss Bennet." He found his voice before I found mine. "I had not — your family are well, I hope."

"Very well. I thank you."

"You have been long in the country?"

"A fortnight." It was three days. I heard the word leave me and could not think how I had come by it, except that the whole of my arithmetic had walked off the moment he came round the house. "That is — we came only three days since. A fortnight was when we set out from home."

"Of course," he said, to this remarkable intelligence, and then asked a second time whether my family were in health, having asked already; and I told him a second time that they were; and we stood there, two people who commanded the English language tolerably well on every other day of their lives, and made a wreckage of it between us, while my aunt and uncle studied the river with the tact of people who had decided to hear nothing. Then he begged us to excuse him a moment, and walked off along the stream, and I was left wishing the water would rise and carry me quietly away.

He came back composed, and fell in to walk with us, and I watched him then the way I had been meaning to watch him since I left Kent. I had carried one small piece of unfinished business out of Rosings. The way the great lady and her daughter stared at or through people to the point of rudeness had reminded me of someone, and that I had called it a family likeness and let the matter lie. Watching him now on his own turf, I saw I had been wrong. His look was unhurried; it had always been unhurried, even across the floor of that first assembly. But it was brief. He took a person in without haste and then he let them go, like a man taught early that to hold a look is ill-bred, and never once since allowed to forget it. The de Bourgh women did not let go.

What he did next I have never entirely forgiven him, in that it left me nothing to take hold of. He drew my uncle into talk of the river, and the fish in it.

"You are welcome to come and fish here as often as you like, while you stay in the neighbourhood," he said — to a man in trade he had been made known to four minutes before. "I will send down tackle, and show you the reaches the trout keep to. The best of them lie further up than a stranger would think to try."

He said it as one gentleman to another, without a grain of the condescension I had watched him lay out on better men than my uncle in Hertfordshire. My uncle is a sensible, easy man who keeps a warehouse within view of his own front door in Cheapside and has never pretended to be anything else. Mr. Darcy used him as though Cheapside were a county and Mr. Gardiner was the head of the first family in it.

I had spent a winter and a spring building a man out of his worst half-hours, and he stood on his own riverbank and took the whole structure down with twenty minutes of ordinary good manners to my uncle. It is a strange piece of work, watching a person be, without effort and without performance, exactly the man you had sworn to your own satisfaction he could never be. I found I would have been easier had he been rude. Rudeness I had a use for.

We turned back toward the gate at last, the gentlemen ahead with their heads bent together over the question of flies, my aunt's arm drawn through mine.

"He is very much improved, I think," she said, and dropped her voice, with a sideways look at me; for my aunt missed very little, and had begun some private reckoning of her own that I was in no humour to help her with.

I said only that he had his good points, which was the most I could manage, and was the largest ground I had given up from any position all summer.

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 22. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

I had told Jane I would say nothing and watch everything, and I had held to it for the better part of a week. The resolution did not survive the morning Mrs. Forster came to Longbourn.

She came in person, which was the colonel's wife all over. She was a bride of a few months, scarcely older than the friend she had come to carry off, and far too newly grand to trust so flattering an errand to the post. She wanted Lydia for Brighton: to go down with the regiment when it removed and to stay the whole of the encampment as her own guest and companion. I had the news from Kitty, sounding breathless and slightly aggrieved at not having been invited herself. By that time, my father had already given his consent.

I went to him in the library. The library was the one room at Longbourn where a sentence, once spoken, was heard and thought over at length. He kept the place as a bulwark against the rest of the house, and Jane and I were admitted to it even when Kitty and my mother were not. He did not look up at once. He let me stand a moment among his books, which was his way of saying that he knew why I had come and was in no hurry to begin the argument.

"You have come about Brighton," he said. "Sit down and tell me which of the disasters you have settled on. Jane favours the damp; Mary, when I consulted her, was inclined toward the moral atmosphere of a watering-town, which she has read about and disapproves of on excellent authority. I confess I had expected better invention from you."

"I have come about Mr. Wickham."

That turned him. He set the spectacles down, and I had the whole of his attention, which was a thing I had been glad of all my life and was not glad of now, because I could feel already how little I had brought to convince him with.

"Mr. Wickham," I said, and then I told him as much of the matter as was mine to give. That the living his father's friend had meant for him he had resigned, when the time came, for three thousand pounds in ready money, and had then come back upon the estate for it again when the money was gone. That he had begun the law and abandoned it the same season the cash ran out. That there was scarcely a tradesman in any town the regiment had passed through who had trusted his face and not regretted it. That the agreeable history he had poured into my ear at my aunt's table in the winter was the exact reverse of the truth, told to a girl he had judged willing to hear it.

I laid it out in order, and it was a good order, and I could hear, even as I built it, that the words were carrying less than half of what I had come to deliver. The other half was in my face and my hands and the pitch of my voice, and there was no honest place to put it. I had come to my father white over a recitation of the ordinary vices — the kind of catalogue every neighbourhood keeps one of, and shrugs at, and goes on inviting to dinner. And he was watching me the way he watched a line of verse that scanned wrong: not doubting the words, only aware that the meter did not come out even.

He heard me to the end. He did not interrupt, which was itself a kindness, and when I had finished he was quiet a while.

"Well," he said at last. "He is a scoundrel. I had supposed as much, in a general way; you have furnished the catalogue, and I am obliged to you for it. It alters my opinion of the young man not at all, which I am afraid tells you what my opinion already was." He tapped the spectacles once against the desk. "But you have not come to alter my opinion of Mr. Wickham. You have come to keep your sister at home, and there I am a worse audience than you hoped."

"He will be at Brighton. Lydia will be at Brighton."

"So will five hundred others, and a colonel's wife to look after her, and the entire ——shire to be silly over in company, which is a great deal safer than being silly over one officer in a lane." He said it without any edge of mockery, and it was not wrong. "Lizzy. A man of Wickham's appetites wants money, or he wants amusement, and Lydia can supply him the one and not the other. She has perhaps a hundred pounds a year that will ever be her own. Whatever he is, he is not a fool, and a fool is the only kind of man who courts a portionless girl for sport when the season is short and the creditors are close behind."

I had no answer that did not involve a terrible story about a watering-place, an heiress, and a word the physician had been reluctant to say. I could not so much as gesture at it without sharing a confidence that was not mine, and giving my father a fear he could do nothing useful with and would carry for the rest of his life. So I said nothing, and he watched me say nothing, and I think it was the silence that troubled him more than anything I had spoken aloud.

"You feel this," he said, and let the words down one at a time, "a great deal more than what you have told me would account for."

It was not a question. He had laid his finger exactly on the seam, the way he always could, and looked at me along it, and waited to see whether I would open.

"I have told you what I know," I said.

"You have told me what you are willing to share. They are not always the same article, in this family; I have made a study of it." He smiled faintly, and then sobered again. "If you know something, Lizzy, that would change the weight of this, you have only to set it on the table and I will weigh it with the rest. I am idle, but I am not too idle for that."

And there it was. The door held open, by the one person in the house with the wit to walk through whatever I gave him, asking me plainly for the thing I could not hand over. I have wondered since what he would have done with it. I think he would have refused Brighton; I am almost sure he would; and I have had a long while to consider the cost of being almost sure.

"There is nothing I can speak with certainty of. There are worse stories about him, but they were told to me in confidence, and the confider had only suspicions to go on," I said, which was true, and was the worst sentence I have ever spoken to my father, because it was true.

He nodded, once, as a man does who has asked his question and been answered, and reached for the spectacles. "Then I must judge by what is certain rather than what is suspected. Based on that, I take him to be a rake with a charming manner and empty pockets, unlikely to be tempted by your sister or she by him. More importantly, this household will be made unlivable for months if I rescind my permission. I have crossed your mother on better grounds than these and regretted the peace it cost me." He opened his book. "I'm sorry, my dear, but Lydia goes to Brighton."

I shut the door. I had argued with my father for the better part of a quarter of an hour, and lost, and the worst of it was that he had not been wrong once. He had reasoned cleanly the whole way down. He had only reasoned from the half of it I had been able to lay before him, and trusted the evidence over the witness, because the witness would not testify; and the evidence, weighed honestly, came out exactly where he had set it.

* * *

The regiment was to march within the fortnight, and the country gave it the send-off such things command. There were dinners, and a review at which Kitty wept, and at last my aunt Philips's evening: the great one, the one Lydia had been scoring off the calendar since before we came home from Kent, at which all the officers were asked and the carpet taken up for dancing.

My aunt's rooms were never built for the company she liked to put in them, and that night they held twice what they were meant to and a bowl of negus besides. The candles smoked; the regimental uniforms filled the parlour with splashes of scarlet. My mother was in ecstasy, and Lydia and Kitty moved through the crush in a state I can only call valedictory, mourning the regiment in advance and dancing with it at the same time. It was a merry, hot, overfull room, and I went into it meaning to do something. I had not decided what. I had only decided that I was done being the only person at the table who knew the cards and never played one.

Mr. Wickham found me within the half-hour, as Jane had said he would. I had been civil to him in my head a dozen times since Kent and made nothing of it; the reality was easier and worse. He came across with two glasses and that open, unhurried warmth he wore as other men wear a good coat, and he gave me the half-hour's news as though we had parted friends and were taking it up where we left off.

"You were greatly missed," he said. "Meryton is a poorer place for a clever woman's being away from it. How did you find Kent? They tell me you saw a great deal of Rosings."

"A great deal," I said. "Her ladyship was everything I had been promised."

"And her nephew?" He said it lightly, idly, a man making conversation, and only a person who had spent a winter watching him bait a hook would have seen the line go out. "Mr. Darcy was much at Rosings, I think. He cannot have improved on acquaintance. He is not a man who improves; he is only a man one learns the worst of by degrees."

He was fishing, for what I had been told, for the shape of the ground under his own feet. I knew the cast for what it was, and I let it pass over me, and I gave him back the cheerful, glancing nothing the room would expect of me. We talked of Kent, and of the colonel, and of Brighton; he was charming about Brighton, and I was charming back, and under the whole pretty performance I was turning over the one remark I had brought, looking for the moment to set it down where only he would hear it land.

It came when he spoke of the sea. He was in fine spirits about the sea-bathing, and the air, and the good it did a constitution; and I let him finish, and I said that I had heard the coast did not always answer for young ladies as well as one might hope.

"Indeed?" he said.

"A friend of my Kentish acquaintance told me of one. She was a girl of fortune, very young, who came to a great deal of grief at a watering-place not long ago. A near thing, I gathered. She was got away in time, but only just, and only because those who loved her came down very fast when they heard. It was thought best to say nothing, after. These things are." I turned my glass in my fingers. "One is glad to think she had such friends. A young woman in that situation has so few who will come fast and ask no payment for it."

I have spent this whole history learning to read a face that does not wish to be read, and I read this one. It was the work of a breath. The glass paused on its way to his mouth and went on; the smile did not go out, but it was relit, struck fresh off the same flint, and for the length of that one heartbeat there was a man looking out from behind it who was doing arithmetic at speed and did not care for the sum. Then it was gone, and he was Mr. Wickham again, agreeing with me that the world was a sad place for unprotected girls and that one could not be too careful, and asking whether I had tried my aunt's negus, which he could not recommend.

No one else in the room saw anything at all. There was nothing to see. Two acquaintances had exchanged a melancholy little anecdote over the punch, and moved on to the negus, and the dancing had not so much as paused.

We parted a few minutes later on the best of terms. He bowed; I curtseyed; he went to be delightful elsewhere, and was, for the rest of the evening, exactly as delightful as ever. I watched him a little, after, across the smoke and the regimentals, and could not tell from the outside that anything had passed between us at all. That was the trouble with him.

The regiment marched three days later. Lydia went down to Brighton at the end of the week in the Forsters' carriage, leaning out of it to the last to call instructions to Kitty about the bonnets she was to be sent, in spirits so high they carried clear to the turn of the road. My mother wept and was comforted by the thought of the letters; my father went back into his library; and I stood at the gate after the dust had settled and tried to make myself believe I had done a useful thing, and could not.

I had moved at last. I had reached out and shifted one piece with my own hand. But I could not see the board it stood on, nor what exactly I had set in motion by touching it. I went in to my mother's lamentations with the unfamiliar weight of having acted, and no way on earth to tell whether acting had been wise.

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 21. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

I had the road out of Hunsford nearly to myself again, the maid in her corner, Mary beside me with a philosophical treatise on her knees. I had come into that county in March carrying half a truth. I left it with a coffer-full: what Mary had confessed in the dark and must believe forgotten; what Mr. Darcy had believed of my mother, and what he had asked me notwithstanding; why Mr. Bingley had been taken from Jane, which Jane must never learn while I lived; and a possible poisoner quartered a mile from my father's door. Somewhere past Bromley I had the inventory sorted into the half that could be spent and the half that must be locked, and the lock tried, and the key put away; and the hedges gave out, and Kent let us go.

Longbourn received us at full volume. My mother had Mary's bandage off-set within the hour — "for you have a hat-brim, child, there is no occasion to look like a pensioner" — and the attack itself arranged, by supper, into a form she could use: the wickedness of Kent, the idleness of Kentish magistrates, the mercy that it had been nothing worse, and the very great pity that such a thing should happen to a clergyman's wife, for it would look ill if it got about wrong, and she should write to her sister Philips directly so that it got about right.

My father looked up when I came into the library. "So Kent has returned both my philosophers. I am told nothing improves a young woman like travel." He looked at me a moment over the spectacles — longer than his habit — and what he saw I do not know, but he only said, "Mary is to have the blue room and quiet. I have asked Hill to see to it. Please keep your mother from troubling Mary."

Jane I had kept for last, the way one keeps the most difficult sum in the lesson. She had come out to me before I was well through the hall door, and embraced me, and I her. She was thinner under my hands than the winter had left her.She said into my bonnet that she was glad, so glad, that I was home, and that I was not to fret over her looks for she was perfectly well; and I stood in my sister's arms possessing the entire ledger of her unhappiness — every reason, every author, every honest mistaken word of it — and paid out what I could afford, which was: "I am home, and I am not going anywhere, and you are to help me unpack the gossip before the trunks."

It was Lydia, at supper, who set my clock for me. The regiment was not yet gone to Brighton — three weeks more, she and Kitty were in mourning for it already — and the officers were all asked to my aunt Philips's on Thursday se'ennight, and everyone would be there, and — "and Wickham asked after you twice, Lizzy, twice, and Maria Long heard him do it!"

I said that Mr. Wickham was very obliging, and asked my father to pass the ham.

It was late that night, with the house gone quiet and Jane brushing out her hair at my glass for old times' sake, that I spent the half of Kent that could be spent.

"Jane. Are you too tired to be astonished? For I had rather astonish you tonight and have it done."

"I am never too tired for you." She went on brushing. "Though I cannot think what Kent can have left to astonish me with, after all your letters."

"My letters were edited. Hear the unedited portion." I sat down on the end of the bed, where bad news has been delivered between sisters since the world began. "While I was at Hunsford, Mr. Darcy made me an offer of marriage."

The brush stopped. My sister turned on the stool with her hair half over her shoulder and her mouth open, and for a moment she looked sixteen.

"Mr. Darcy."

"Mr. Darcy of Pemberley. In form, in the parsonage parlour, with Mr. Collins's sermon-books looking on. He has loved me, by his own account, more or less since I came to Netherfield to see you. Against his judgment, against his family, against, I believe, his own express instructions to himself, all of which he explained to me at the time with great thoroughness."

"And you—" Jane had not yet arrived at breathing. "Lizzy, you refused him."

"I refused him."

I watched my gentle sister race through three emotions inside half a minute: astonishment, and concern for me, and then, because she is Jane, pity for the man in the case. "Oh, poor Mr. Darcy," she said. "To have loved you all this while, and said nothing, and then to be refused. However he may have deserved it — Lizzy, was it very dreadful?"

"You will make me repent my refusal out of pure pity for the refused, which is an economy of yours I have never mastered. It was dreadful enough. He told me at generous length how hard he had struggled against the inclination, and I told him with equal generosity what I thought of the struggle; we parted on the worst terms two civil people can manage; and the next morning—" I had come to the boundary, and stepped along it with care— "the next morning he took the trouble, before he left Kent, of correcting my history of a gentleman of our acquaintance. Jane, the rest of this is about Mr. Wickham, and you will like it less."

I gave her the half I could share: the living resigned, at Mr. Wickham's own asking, for three thousand pounds in hand; his studies in law abandoned the day the money was; the debts in every town that had trusted his face; the slander he had poured into my willing ear at my aunt's party. I did not say poison. I did not say a word about a girl at a watering-place. That history was not mine to shared — it had been trusted to me unnamed, and I would keep it unnamed — and so the worst of what I knew stayed in the locked half of the coffer, and what I laid before Jane was only sponging and malice: the small, shabby, daylight sins of an agreeable man.

It was enough. Jane heard it the way Jane hears everything, looking for the door by which everyone might still escape blameless.

"There must be some mistake," she said at last. "Interested people may have misrepresented each to the other. Perhaps neither is so much to blame as—"

"You may try, my love, but you will not get them both out. There is exactly one good man's portion of merit between the two of them, and it has all sat down on the one side of the scale, and we have spent a twelvemonth bowing to the other."

"But to take in everybody — the whole neighbourhood — Lizzy, he was liked. There was such an expression of goodness in his countenance."

"Indeed, I never checked further. He admired me, and I have a regrettably soft heard for everyone who has ever done it." And that silenced us both a moment, for it was truer than I had meant to say aloud, and Jane is too kind to agree with true things of that sort.

She braided her hair the whole way down before she spoke again. "Ought it to be known? If he is what you say — Lizzy, the regiment is asked everywhere. The Harringtons, the Kings, my aunt's parties. Ought we to tell?"

"Tell what, and on whose word? The half I have given you was given me in private, by a man this whole country is agreed in disliking, with no proof I can put on a table; and the parts I have not given even you, are under a confidence I will not break for anybody's card-party. Set it about, and Meryton will weigh Mr. Wickham's smile against my secondhand story, and the smile will carry the parish. And in three weeks the regiment is gone to Brighton, and the whole question marches away with it. We will say nothing; we will watch everything; and Mr. Wickham may keep his happy manners until they are Brighton's trouble."

"You sound like a magistrate," said Jane, and yawned, and kissed me, and stood at the door a moment with her candle. "Lizzy. At my aunt's on Thursday — he will come straight to you, you know he will. What shall you say to him?"

"I shall be perfectly civil," I said. "Civility costs nothing."

"You have never once believed that," said Jane, and went to bed.

She was right, as Jane is right about everybody but herself. I sat at the glass a while after she had gone, looking at the woman who knew everything in the house and could spend almost none of it, and tried faces for Thursday — the cool one, the blind one, the one that gives a man back exactly the coin he offers — and they were all of them wanting in some article I could not name. Eight days. I blew out the candle and did not choose.

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 20. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

"You will go by Bromley, of course."

It was not a question, and I had learned by then not to answer the ones that were not questions, so Lady Catherine continued without me. "Everybody goes by Bromley. If you mention my name at the Bell you will be attended to; mention it at the Crown and you will be overcharged, for the man there is an upstart and keeps his hay too long. You will take the carriage as far as the first stage and you will tell your mother, when you are home, that she is fortunate in her daughters beyond what I can suppose her to deserve, since she contrived to teach neither of you music nor drawing nor anything else that I have been able to discover."

"I shall give her every word of it, ma'am," I said, and meant it, for it would keep my father entertained through three dinners at least.

We were a week from our going by then, and the farewell calls had begun, Rosings requiring several, in the way that royal leave is taken by stages. Her ladyship had much to say on each occasion. On Mary's recovery, which had been managed creditably though she herself would have had the bandage changed oftener. On Mary's pianoforte practice, which must on no account lapse merely because she had been struck on the head, the head and the fingers being separate organs. The unwisdom of two young women crossing three counties with only a maid, which she pronounced with such relish for the dangers that I understood them to be, in her view, the principal attraction of travel. She was generous, after her fashion: the carriage, a basket of the succession-house fruit for Mary, her own receipt for a restorative jelly pressed on Mrs. Hollis with instructions to follow it exactly and none of the Hunsford apothecary's notions. I record it as it was: she did everything for us that week that money and command could do, and said over the top of it every word that self-consequence could supply, and I do not believe it once occurred to her that there was any other way of being kind.

It was during the second of these calls, with the mother enthroned by the fire and the daughter folded into her corner out of the candlelight, that I noticed something.

They were not alike, the two of them — I have set down already how the one looked at you, point by point, like a buyer, and the other through you, at whatever it was she kept behind the room — and yet that afternoon, with both pairs of eyes raised to me across the tea-things, I saw what was alike in them, and it was this: they both stared to the point of rudeness. Most women are taught from their cradles not to look to long or too hard at others, but the DeBourg women stared as long as they chose, mother and daughter. I had seen it before. Somewhere, on someone, I had seen exactly that quality of attention, held past the lawful term. It nagged at me like a tune mislaid, and my mind, which had kept only one lodger since the night of Mary's confession, went where it was bound to go and produced him: Mr. Darcy, standing at the edge of a dozen rooms that spring, watching me the way other men read law.

There is the family likeness, I concluded. I poured out the tea and thought about Lady Catherine's nephew, which I had been doing anyway.

Anne came out to the phaeton sweep when we made our last call, which she had never done. She stood wrapped to the chin in June, and gave Mary a careful farewell and a flat instruction about resting her eyes; and then, while Mary was handed in, she said to me, in the sideways voice she kept for the things she actually meant:

"I am sorry you are going. You looked at things while you were here. Most people who come to this house only look at my mother." And then, before I had decided what was safe to do with that: "You will write to your cousin Mr. Collins, I hope. I shall ask him to read your letters to me. You write the way you talk, I think; it will be like having somebody still here."

"Then I shall write the long ones," I said, and her face did the small crooked thing that served it for a smile, and she went back into the house with her shawl held close; and I pitied her the whole length of the avenue, a lonely creature in a great cold house with nobody to look at things with, and counted myself, for all my freight, the richer woman of the two.

Mr. Collins parted from us at the parsonage gate in a speech that had plainly been worked on, and broke down once in the middle of it — at the word sister, of all places — and recovered himself and finished the architecture; and then, as the chaise moved, he walked beside it as far as the corner with his hand on the window frame, telling Mary through it to mind the draughts, to take the jelly, to write the day she arrived, the day after at the latest; and Mary, who had lectured that man across every dinner of her marriage, put her hand over his on the frame for a moment before the corner took him. I looked out the other window and gave their leave-taking the privacy of the lane.

Then the corner was behind us, and the green tunnel had us, and we were for home.

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 19. Narrated by Bingley, from his diary.

London, the 29th of April

Darcy has been a fortnight in town, and he is not himself.

He is uncivil to no one. He is not low in the ordinary way, the way a man is low when a bank has failed him or a horse has gone wrong. He dines when I ask him and answers when I speak, and both a half-beat late, as though my voice had to be fetched to him from the next street. I visited him at breakfast yesterday and tried him with the whole of my budget of news.

"Champion has thrown out a splint," I said. "The farrier thinks he will come sound with rest."

"I am glad of it." This to his coffee.

"And Caroline is set on a house at Scarborough for the summer, and having us all down to it, and being very gay."

"That is the best thing she could do."

"And I am to turn Methodist in the meantime, and go about the country preaching."

"You must do as you think right," said Darcy, and it was a full quarter of a minute before he came up out of wherever he had been, and looked at me, and said, "What was it you meant to do?" I had not the heart to hand him the joke a second time. He went into Derbyshire when he left his aunt's after Easter, and came down to town a fortnight past. Somewhere a thing was done to him that he has not told me and does not, I think, mean to.

I have not asked. We do not ask each other the large questions, Darcy and I; we have got on for years by leaving shut the doors a man wants shut. For my part, I came away from Hertfordshire in the winter and left a thing there unfinished that I have neither the courage to finish nor the sense to let alone.

Twice this week a man has come to him of a morning. A spare, quiet person with an inkstained pocketbook who appears, and is shut up with Darcy the better part of an hour, and goes away without a word to anybody. After the second of them I came on Darcy at the window with a paper in his hand that he had plainly stopped reading, and I asked him whether it was bad news.

"It is no news at all," he said. "That is the whole of the difficulty."

I waited, which I have learned to do with Darcy.

"There is a man I am trying to keep in view," he said at last. "Wickham."

"Your steward's son, who took so hard against you?" Caroline had sounded Darcy out about the man one day in my hearing. Darcy's terse summary of Wickham's character would not have helped him secure a position anywhere.

He turned the paper over without looking at it. "We were boys together, and my father loved him as a son. He was brought up on the same ground I was. He is going down to Brighton with his regiment when it removes, to be a charming fellow in a fresh set of drawing-rooms. My man there sends me word he is behaving beautifully."

"That is surely to the good."

"He is exactly where he ought not to be able to do any harm, and I do not believe it for an hour."

"Then say so," I told him. "If you know the fellow for what he is — a word in the right ear, the colonel put on his guard, the thing done."

"Because I can prove nothing, Charles." He set the paper down on the sill. "I have known what he is these ten years and I cannot lay one line of it before a colonel, or a magistrate, or a girl's father, in a shape that any of them could act upon. I can make no bricks without clay. Until he does a thing in the plain sight of a witness who will stand up and say it, I have a certainty and no case."

There was more feeling under that than the business, as I understood the business, seemed to me to carry. I have seen Darcy angry, which is a cold, quiet thing and soon over. This ran older and deeper. And I thought of the other weight he has carried since the autumn, the poor woman dead on the Hertfordshire road that he would not let lie, and I supposed the two of them together were grinding him finer than either could alone. I was sorry for him, and did not say so, there being no quicker way to empty a room of Darcy than to pity him aloud in it.

We sat a while after, not talking, which the two of us have always managed better than most men manage conversation. Once he began — "When I was in Kent—" and stopped.

"You were saying," I offered, once, when it had gone on too long even for us.

"Nothing of importance," he said, and that was the end of it.

I had "when I was in Hertfordshire" lodged behind my teeth the whole of that morning, and never let it loose either. So we passed as companionable a half hour as I have had this spring, each of us standing guard over a county he would not name.

He is at the window again now. He keeps that window a good deal this April. The regiments go down to the sea in three weeks and he means to know the day they do. I shall ask him nothing. He will tell me nothing. We will go on being two of the quietest men in London until one of us is fit to speak.

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 18. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

"Lizzy."

"I am here." I put the music aside. "Shall I fetch the drops?"

"No." The lamp was low, and she lay looking at the ceiling, not at me, with her hands folded on the counterpane like a woman arranging herself for prayer. "I have a confession to make, and I wish to make it while my head aches too much to dress it up. You will hear it plainly, which is more than it deserves."

"Mary, it is two in the morning. Whatever it is has kept this long—"

"It has kept since the winter," she said. "That is the confession."

I sat down again.

"When Charlotte Lucas died," said my sister to the ceiling, "the gentlemen came to Longbourn to pay their respects. You remember it. And Mamma — Mamma spoke of the living. Of poor Mr. Collins's situation, and the parsonage going to a stranger, and what a mercy it was he had friends about him. Over a dead woman, Lizzy, three days dead, and her own neighbour. It was dreadful. And I thought—" Her hands tightened on each other. "I have read that women have done such things, for the settling of daughters. I thought it. I could not stop thinking it. I have carried it to church and back every Sunday since the winter, beside her, in the same pew."

The room was very quiet. The clock dealt out its small change downstairs.

"You thought Mamma might have had some hand in it," I said, because one of us had to carry the sentence the whole way, and it was not going to be Mary.

"Yes." Her face turned away from me at last, toward the dark side of the room. "And here is the rest of it, and then I am done. When I woke on Sunday, and knew the ceiling, and knew my own name — the first thing I felt, Lizzy, before the pain, before anything, was gladness. Because a mother does not do this to her own child. It had come for me too — so it was never her — so I might put the whole wicked thought down at last and be only a daughter again. I was glad of it, Lizzy. Somebody stood behind me in a lane and struck me down, and I lay in my bed and was grateful, because it acquitted my mother of a crime nobody but I had ever charged her with." Her voice did not break; Mary's voice never broke; it simply got smaller, as though it were walking away from both of us. "What kind of daughter thinks such a thought? I have looked for the scripture that covers me and I cannot find it."

I got from my chair onto the edge of the bed and took both her hands apart and held them, the way one is held when one is nine and the world has gone wrong.

"Listen to me," I said. "Mamma did behave badly about Charlotte's death. I sat in that room and could have gone through the floor of it, You had no explanation for what you saw, so it festered. That is the whole of your crime, Mary. Mamma's heart is foolish the way her tongue is foolish; everything in her comes out as nonsense, grief no less than the rest. And you, who do nothing by halves, took the nonsense for evidence because you were frightened and you were alone with it. You ought to have brought it to me."

"You would have laughed at me."

"I would not." And I would not have; God knows I would not. "Now you will drink the barley-water and go to sleep, for the surgeon says I am to keep you quiet and you are the noisiest penitent in Kent."

That got the ghost of the considering look, and then — "The barley-water is stale," said Mary, with a flicker of her own exactness, "but I will drink it for the principle of the thing"; and she drank it, and her hands let go by degrees, and she slept the first deep sleep since the lane.

And I sat back in my chair with the lamp going down, and my sister's hand where she had put it, in my lap.

I had sat at that condolence call, mortified, watching my mother hope aloud that the living would not go to a stranger, and I had spent my shame on her and my anger on the silent man by the wall. Mr. Darcy of Pemberley, who reads rooms the way my father reads books, had been watching my mother flaunt her selfish plans for Mr. Collins, with his betrothed scarcely buried. He did not know her, and had no daughters'-lifetime of her nonsense to translate by.

There were besides circumstances. Things had lately occurred in that neighbourhood — I say no more than that, and I am not at liberty to say more.

Cannot, or will not? — In this case they are the same word.

He had taken his friend away from us within the week of that call. I had charged him with snobbery to his face and he had stood in the lane and answered, you have a right to read it so, and let me keep the reading, because the truth he could not prove was not a thing a gentleman says of a woman's mother to her daughter on any evidence short of certainty. And the proposal I had been carrying around in my head for days: I have been engaged in an argument with myself, and I have lost it… the result does not yield… it has not altered by a grain in six months. I had heard a proud man calling his love for me irrational. He had been telling me, in the only language he possessed, that he had reasoned his way to a conclusion no feeling ought to have survived, and that the feeling had survived it. Item against item, in the dark, with my sister breathing beside me, I assembled what he had been carrying since the autumn, and it assembled without one piece left over.

Mr. Darcy believed that my mother might have murdered Charlotte Lucas. He believed it when he took Mr. Bingley out of Hertfordshire. He believed it at Rosings, across every dinner and every dance of wits. He believed it, or could not unbelieve it, on the evening he stood in the parsonage parlour and asked me to be his wife.

I, of course, knew that he was wrong. My mother had not been ten miles from Longbourn since Michaelmas; and whoever had stood behind Mary in that lane four days ago had stood in Kent. The two attacks came from one hand, and the hand was here. My mother was at Longbourn abusing the post for not bringing her better news.

He had reasoned with care from true things and arrived at a falsehood, which I had supposed, before that night, to be a thing that happened only to the careless. Then believing what he believed, fearing what he feared, he had walked into the parlour where the murderer's daughter sat and offered her his name, his house, his sister's company, and the whole keeping of his life. I had spent the spring correcting my portrait of the man, a feature at a time, grudging every stroke. Sitting in that sickroom I understood that the canvas itself had been swapped while I quarrelled over the likeness, and what I held now was a different portrait of a different man.

I did not forgive him the rest. Jane had loved, and been loved, and lost the whole of it. She had been just as completely parted from Bingley as if he had done it out of plain contempt, Knowing his reasons now sharpened that edge instead of dulling it, for there was nobody left to be angry at and the harm stood. And Wickham…everything Darcy had told me in the lane took on more weight. Nothing resolved that night into any feeling I could name and keep hold of. Sympathy and grievance sat down on either side of me like ill-matched dinner partners, and I entertained them both until the lamp went out.

There was no one to tell. Not Mary, who had given me the key without knowing there was a lock, and who must never know what her confession had opened. Not Jane, of all people. Not my father, who would be appalled, and hide it behind a joke. The one person on earth who could have followed every step of my reasoning across that dark room was gone into Derbyshire carrying my refusal. I sat with my sister until the lamp burned itself down to the blue, and made the only resolution that was in my power to make: as soon as Mary could travel, I was taking her home.

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 17. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

My sister walked up to Rosings to practise on Tuesday mornings and Friday afternoons, by her ladyship's standing permission, on her ladyship's own instrument in the housekeeper's room; and she was always home by four, because Mrs. Hollis kept dinner at five and Mary held unpunctuality to be a species of lying.

The weeks since the gentlemen had gone had settled over Hunsford like dust finding its level. The dinners at Rosings resumed at their old intervals; Miss de Bourgh's phaeton stopped at the gate once or twice, and its owner said her odd sideways things, and I pitied her and thought of other matters; and underneath all of it I went on holding my two histories of Mr. Wickham up to the light, evening after evening, leaning the way I did not want to lean. Nothing had resolved. Things do not resolve, I had begun to learn; they wait.

That Friday at breakfast Mary asked whether I would hear her new piece after dinner and tell her truly how she did with the left hand of the music, which she suspected of being beyond her. I promised her honesty and looked forward giving my opinion, because Mary rarely asked for it. She went off at one with her music under her elbow, the way she carried it everywhere that spring, like a deed to something.

At four she was not home. At a quarter past, Mr. Collins began to walk up and down the garden with his watch in his hand. At half past he took his hat, called for the gardener, and went down the lane at a pace I had never seen him use. I sat at the parsonage window with my needle stopped in the cloth, remembering another, dreadful day, when I had sat at a window once before, waiting for a friend who would not come. I made myself put the needle through the cloth. I had got it through twice when I heard running on the lane — a man running on a hard lane has a sound you do not mistake for anything — and I was at the door before Mrs. Hollis.

It was the gardener, hatless. "Found, miss." He got it out in pieces, gasping for breath. "In the lane — the open stretch — master's with her — I'm for Mr. Crane." And he was past me and away toward the village; and Mr. Crane was the surgeon, and a man does not run for a surgeon to no purpose. Alive, then. I took that one word and walked down the lane to meet them, because my legs would not consent to stand at any window a minute longer.

They brought her up on the hurdle from the home field, a labourer at one end and Mr. Collins at the other, and Mr. Collins would not give up his end to the stronger men who came out to meet them, though his arms were shaking, and so they came slowly, the whole way. As they drew level with me he spoke — to me, to the men, to the lane in general.

"Her music is along the hedge," he said. "It must not be left in the wet. Her music — someone must—"

Nobody answered him, and nobody went, and he did not ask again; and that, of everything that afternoon, is the piece I have kept: Mr. Collins, under the corner of a hurdle, with his wife's blood on his cuffs, providing for the sheet music because it was the one thing in the lane that could still be saved by being careful. She had been found a hundred yards short of the turning to the great house's lane, and whoever had done it had simply gone away into the wide ordinary afternoon. Her music had blown along the hedge. I went out the next morning before anyone was up and gathered it, page by page out of the blackthorn, because I could not endure that anyone else should; and I can still say which pages the week had cost — the new piece, the one with the left hand she did not trust, opened flat at the place she would have reached by four.

She did not die. There was a wound above her ear and another at the nape of her neck. Mr. Crane explained them for us in the passage, in the low voice surgeons keep for passages.

"A blow from behind," he said, "and one more as she fell, or after. Keep her dark, keep her quiet, and change nothing in the room without telling her what you change."

"Will she live?" It was out of me before I had voted on it.

"I have known men plough fields after worse." He took up his hat. "Keep her quiet, Miss Bennet. And the household too, if you can manage it. A sickroom hears more than it says."

There was a day and a night when she knew none of us, and spoke once, distinctly, about candle-ends to somebody who was not in the room; and then on the Sunday morning her eyes came to me and held.

"Lizzy."

"I am here."

"My music was new." A thread of a voice, and exact to the last. "Six shillings. I bought it uncut."

"Every page of it found," I said. "Dried and pressed flat under the parlour Bible. There is mud on the allegro and nothing worse."

She considered it with her eyes shut. "Then I shall begin with the allegro," she said, as though the world had kept one of its promises at least, and slept; and I sat with my hand over my mouth for some little time after, for it would not have done to be heard.

Of the lane she could tell us nothing. She had been walking; the next thing she remembered was the ceiling of her room. There had been — when Mr. Crane pressed gently, and only then — an impression at the very edge of the hole: a shape, a darkness at her shoulder, the world tilting. Nothing with a face on it. Nothing with a height or a coat or a voice.

The magistrate's man came over from the village on the Monday and took down her nothing in a notebook.

"Hop-pickers," he said, closing it. "They come up through this country in the season, miss — rough men, some of them, and the lanes not what they were. The young lady will have been in the wrong lane at the wrong hour."

"She was in her own lane," I said, "at her own hour. She has walked it twice a week since March."

"Just so," he said, and put on his hat with the air of a man whose work was behind him, and went. I did not believe him. Common criminals do not go circling like wolves around the womenfolk of a Kentish clergyman.

That is the truth of where I stood, and I will not dress it up as detection: I had no name, no face, only the most foolish idea of a motive, and a suspicion that had stopped pretending to be grief. Charlotte, on the road to Longbourn, at an hour she had named in a parlourful of people two days before she walked it. Mary, on the lane to Rosings, on an afternoon fixed by a routine as regular as church and known to every soul acquainted with the parsonage. Two women, eighteen months apart, two open roads, the same wide ordinary daylight; attackers never seen, never taken, never heard of in the country before or since. The only connection was a foolish, shallow vicar prostrated twice by grief.

Mr. Collins, through all of this, was a man I had not met before. The flow of him stopped. He did not perform his distress to us, which alarmed me more than weeping would have; he sat outside Mary's door on a hall chair much of the first night, with his hands on his knees, and when Mrs. Hollis brought him broth he held it and did not eat it; and once, very late, I heard him say to nobody, in the voice of a man reading a sum he cannot make balance, "She only went to practise."

It was real. I would have staked my life it was real…but his grief had been real for Charlotte, too. Are there not murderers driven by some mania, repentant after the fact but killing again and again in the throes of some evil desire or imbalance of mind?

Miss de Bourgh came on the second day. She came in the carriage, with her ladyship's compliments, her ladyship's physician — sent down from the great house before he was asked for — and her ladyship's instruction that the parsonage spare itself all expense; and she delivered the whole of this errand in six words and then stood in the hall with her bonnet still on, white to the mouth, and asked where Mr. Collins was.

Mr. Collins came down. He looked dreadful, and she looked at him — at him, mind; I had grown used to being furniture in the path of that gaze, and it did not go through him, it stopped on him and stayed — and then Miss Anne de Bourgh, who to my knowledge had never voluntarily touched any person in my sight, crossed the hall and put her hand on his arm. Not a great lady's gesture. Her hand closed around his forearm and held it, the way you hold a gate in wind.

"You must eat what they bring you," she said. "You are no use to her fasting. I will send the fruit down from the succession-houses; you will share it with her, and see that she takes it." And then, lower, with her hand still on his arm a breath past any reading of duty: "It will be borne, Mr. Collins. It will all be borne."

He thanked her as a vicar thanks a patroness's daughter, out of the middle of his fog, and noticed nothing; and she took her hand away and went away again. I stood in my exhaustion and watched the carriage go, and dealt the poor woman the only card I had in my hand that week, which was pity — a creature in love where it could do her no good, watching the man suffer for a wife who lectured him. What a houseful we all were. I was too tired and too frightened to look at any of it harder, and did not.

The parsonage rearranged itself around the sickroom, as houses do. Mrs. Hollis ran the world; Mr. Collins wrote to Longbourn a letter I made him soften twice; the physician came and went and pronounced himself satisfied. And late on the fourth evening I sat by Mary with one candle and the new piece on my lap, trying to hear it in my mind for want of anything else to do. The clock let down its weights. The candle had an hour in it.

I thought she was asleep. She was not.

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 16. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

He was at the park gate before me, and he had been there some time; the dew was off the rail where his gloved hand had rested.

I had come out early to be alone with the letter I was writing Jane in my head, and my walk along the plantation edge had one virtue above all others in Kent, which was that nobody knew of it. Somebody had known of it. He stood away from the gate as I came up, and did not pretend, as a smaller man would have, that the meeting was fortune.

"Miss Bennet. I ask for a quarter of an hour. I am aware that I have no claim to it, and that this meeting might cause you some embarrassment if it is observed; I have chosen the hour and the place with that in mind. A quarter of an hour, and I will not trouble you again."

I granted it with a civility I did not trouble to warm, and we walked. He had chosen, I saw, the one stretch of the lane the plantation screened from every window in the county, and I understood that the ground had been arranged with the same care as whatever speech was coming. The thought arrived with an edge of comedy even through everything else: refused at sunset, and by breakfast he had surveyed the terrain. He did not make me wait for the speech.

"Two subjects, and then I have done. Nothing I say this morning renews anything I said yesterday evening; you gave your answer, and it is not my purpose to dispute it. But you laid two charges against my character, and a man may accept his sentence and still ask to correct the record. That is the whole of my errand."

"You have a quarter of an hour of my record, sir. Spend it as you like."

"Your sister first." He looked ahead, down the lane, and gave it in order, as I had known by then he gave everything. "I told you yesterday there were circumstances I was not at liberty to explain, and you put a construction on that which I had earned. It was unfair as I delivered it, and I will deliver it better. When I observed your sister with Bingley, I watched for signs of affection on her part, and I did not find it. She received his attentions with pleasure — and with a composure so even that I could not satisfy myself her heart was engaged. I concluded it was not. If I concluded wrongly, then the worst injury in this business is hers, and it is mine to own. That is the first thing. The second is this: a man advising his friend weighs the connection entire, and the neighbourhood was at that time — I must say it plainly and you will dislike it — a place where a young woman had been murdered on an open road within the month, the matter unresolved, no one taken, the affair hanging over every family in the district and your own among them. To bind my friend, at such a moment, into such a situation, was more than I could in conscience leave alone. You may call that pride. It will bear the name."

"It will bear it very comfortably," I said. "A man of fortune cannot be too careful what counties he loves in. My sister's heart against the credit of the map — I am glad to know the exchange rate at last, Mr. Darcy. Did it weigh more heavily with you than my family's flaws?"

"There my liberty ends, Miss Bennet. I will not lie to you, so I will not say yes; and I cannot say more."

"Cannot, or will not?"

"In this case they are the same word." He let that stand exactly as long as it needed to, and then: "The second charge. Mr. Wickham."

I had been waiting for it, and I had my colours nailed up. I am obliged to record that he took no notice of the flag.

He gave me Mr. Wickham the way he had given me his objections the evening before, in good order, from the beginning: the son of his father's steward, a godson loved on the father's side and watched on the son's; a living held in reserve for him, which Mr. Wickham, having no intention of taking orders, resigned in exchange for three thousand pounds, with the stated design of studying the law; the law lasting as long as the money, and no longer; the applications renewed when both ran out, and refused; the resentment dating, in its public form, from the refusal. Debts in every town Wickham's dissipation had touched, paid twice over by a man who had loved his father's memory and then no more. It was a smaller and shabbier story than the one I had been given over my aunt's negus, and the very smallness of it troubled me, for the story I knew was a better story: it had a villain of consequence in it, and an injury worth resenting. I had a sudden unwelcome view of which kind of story is more often true.

"That is the history," he said. "It would not, by itself, justify what I said of him at the Phillipses' party, and you would be right to tell me so. What follows justifies it. I ask you to hear it through, because I will only manage it once. I am…acquainted with the family in this story, and became involved by chance in helping them resolve the matter."

We had stopped walking. I did not decide to stop; my feet had made some arrangement with his.

"Not a year ago, a young woman — very young, fifteen, in the care of a paid companion at a watering-place — was persuaded by Mr. Wickham to consent to an elopement. He had got at the companion first; the thing was thoroughly built. On the first evening of their escape together, the young woman confessed to Mr. Wickham that her fortune, which was considerable, and which was the whole of his object, could not be touched without the consent of her guardians and trustees, married or not, until she came of age. He had hoped to live comfortably off the annual interest from thirty thousand pounds. He could expect a lump sum of perhaps two or three thousand pounds, as a bribe to leave the young lady alone. He did not take the loss philosophically."

He was looking down the lane; his voice had gone very level, and I knew that tone was the opposite of what it sounded like.

He went on. "She was taken ill that night. Violently ill. The companion was gone by morning, and Mr. Wickham with her. The physician who attended the lady found indications which he was, at first, reluctant to name, and which I will name, since I have come this far. She had been poisoned. Whether from spite, or to cover the flight, or because a dead heiress tells no tales a living jilted one might — I have never settled it, and I have had some months to try. She lived. I found her at the first town beyond the watering-place, two days on — I was in a position to trace the road they had taken, through circumstances I need not give — and Mr. Wickham was by then gone into the next county, and from there, in time, into a militia regiment, and into Hertfordshire, and into your aunt's parlour, where you found his manners so happy."

The word sat in the lane between us. Poisoned. I had spent an evening — I had spent a winter — defending Wickham on the strength of a sorrowful voice and a pair of fine eyes turned on me as though I alone in the room were worth the truth. The man in front of me, whom I had refused with insults sixteen hours before, stood in the open lane counting off the days and towns from the start of the elopement to his discovery of the young woman in the case.

By chance, Darcy had said, presenting himself as a family friend who had happened to be on hand, with no stake in it worth the naming. But I am my father's daughter, and not a fool. Darcy would not have brought out all that icy self-control for a story that had happened among some acquaintances he valued as much as he did, say, the Bingleys. This was a hidden scandal within his own family, perhaps involving one of Fitzwilliam's younger sisters.

I looked at the question. I was, that morning, a woman with no instrument left to measure men by — I had calibrated everything against Wickham's candour and Darcy's arrogance, and one of those weights was now known to be false, and I could no longer swear to the other — and I had not the hardihood to open one more door in a morning that had already opened too many. I let it lie. I have wondered since what he would have said if I had asked for the identity of the young heiress.

"You have no proof of any of this," I said instead. "No name, no witness, nothing but your word — the word of a man with every reason to hate him."

"That is correct," said Mr. Darcy. "The persons who could speak to it are persons I will not bring into this or any conversation, at any price. Even for the sake of your good opinion. You have his account, and mine, and your own judgment. I can leave you nothing else."

He moved away from me. "I have had my quarter-hour. We leave Kent on Saturday. I wish you every possible happiness, Miss Bennet."

I began to see the absurd side of this conversation again. "You said as much yesterday, sir, by way of an angry goodbye."

"This morning, it serves as a different kind of goodbye." He bowed, and went up the lane toward the great house, and did not look back; and I stood by the plantation until I was cold, holding two histories of one man, written in incompatible hands, and I could discard neither.

They left on the Saturday, as he had said. There was a formal leave-taking at the parsonage — Mr. Collins at his fullest stretch, her ladyship's opinions on the journey, the roads, and the ingratitude of nephews who would not stay a third week — and Colonel Fitzwilliam pressed my hand and said the spring had been the pleasantest he could remember, and meant it, and knew nothing, and I let him go on knowing nothing. Mr. Darcy bowed to me exactly as a man bows to the cousin of the vicar of his host's parish. I curtseyed exactly as a woman curtseys to a departing guest. The carriage took them off down the avenue.

That night I began the argument that was to keep me company for a great many weeks: Wickham's words at my aunt's house against Darcy's words in the lane, item against item, with no judge to decide between them but my own thoughts. Much against my will, I found myself inclining towards Darcy's account. I looked into my memories of Wickham and found no positive act of good in him beyond his easy courtesy. I looked into my memories of Darcy, and found a man coolly defending my walks and my reading against the insinuations of Caroline Bingley, a man quietly enraged by the murder of my friend, a man who sought to protect his friend from the encroachments of my mother. For reasons of discretion, Darcy had not told me the whole story of Wickham's greatest crime, and I would later realize he had softened his objections to my family for the same reason.