The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 31. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

The maps were gone when we came back to Gracechurch Street.

They had lived on my uncle's desk for five days, and I had come to hate them with a warmth ordinarily reserved for people. My father stopped in the hall with his hat still on. A house that has held its breath for a week does not go quiet in the same way twice, and this quiet was new.

My aunt came out to us before the maid could. "There you are. Supper has been put back. Come into the study, both of you."

My uncle stood at his desk, looking triumphant but bewildered, as if a difficult ledger had balanced more easily than he expected. "I have been in touch with Mr. Wickham," he said. "He will call here tomorrow at ten."

My father sat down. I did not.

"How?" my father asked.

My uncle hesitated for a moment before he said, "Through a man who knew where to ask. The how of it will keep." He took a folded paper from under the inkstand and did not open it. "I have Lydia's direction as well."

I thought of a young heiress found sick with poison after Wickham had abandoned her and my hand went involuntarily to my throat.

My uncle saw the gesture, and tried to reassure me. "She is lodged in town, and well enough, by every account I could get."

"And he will come?" my father asked. "To this house? Of his own accord?"

"He is willing enough to call. Men in his situation generally are, once they are sure it is worth their while to be found." My uncle said it without heat. "Now, I have been thinking how tomorrow ought to go. I will receive him here and settle the terms. You and Lizzy might go to Lydia while it is being done. She will want faces that are kind to her, and the fewer of us across a table from that man, the better the morning will run."

It was reasonable. It was all of it reasonable.

"I should like to be here when he comes," I said.

My uncle looked up at me.

"I have better cause than anyone in this house to know what he is," I said. "I want to hear the terms set. I want to see his face while they are set." I had been carrying what I knew of him from Kent to Derbyshire to London, sewn in like a coin in a hem, and I wanted at last to be in the room where some of it might be spent.

My aunt looked at my uncle. I had my next argument ready, and the one behind it, and a third in reserve for the appeal to propriety that any such request must bring on.

"Well," said my uncle, turning his pen over once. "If you feel you ought, Lizzy."

"There can be no harm in it, I suppose," said my aunt.

And that was all. Nobody appealed to my nerves, or my youth, or the coarseness of the business. Nobody produced a second reason to set beside the first. I had braced my shoulder for the door, and it swung before my hand ever reached it, the way a door swings when no one is holding the other side.

My father had said nothing through any of this. He said it now, from the chair, to the inkstand.

"Well. This quest for Lydia has certainly shown me my own measure. I believe I could sit an hour with my most foolish daughter and conduct myself tolerably. I am quite certain I could not sit five minutes with the man who carried her off and conduct myself at all. Your uncle shall have Mr. Wickham, and you with him, Lizzy, since you are so set on it. You were always better than I am at hating a man to his face. I shall go to Lydia, and say to her whatever will bear saying."

So it was arranged. My uncle and I at home at ten, to Mr. Wickham and the terms; my father to Lydia's lodgings, to be the kind face. My aunt kissed me at the stair and said tomorrow would be a long day and I must sleep.

I went up with every point won and not one of them fought for. Nobody had refused me anything. I slept badly on the victory.

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 30. Narrated by Bingley, from his diary.

London, the 12th of August

I wrote last at Pemberley. I was meaning to drive over to Lambton and say to Miss Bennet the thing I had been eight months not saying. I never made the drive.

I was at the breakfast table feeling like spring when Darcy came in looking like winter.

"The Gardiner party is gone," he said. "They left for Hertfordshire before it was light. There has been—" and he stopped, which Darcy does not do, and began again. "The youngest Miss Bennet has gone off from Brighton with Wickham. There is no marriage. There is not going to be one, unless I can arrange a better one for Miss Lydia."

I sat with the toast going cold in my fingers. Lydia Bennet is a loud, harmless, silly girl I have sat across from at half the tables in Meryton — and Wickham is the man Darcy has been hunting since April, and somewhere between his two sentences I watched the whole of it come down on Jane. On Jane's house, on Jane's name, on Jane. I was on my feet before I knew I had stood.

"Then I must go to her — to Longbourn — she will be—"

"And do what when you get there?" said Darcy, not unkindly. "You cannot walk in at Longbourn in the thick of this. You would simply be one more caller they must find a chair and a countenance for, on the worst morning of their lives. And there is nothing at Longbourn to be done. If the thing can be mended at all it will be mended in London, quietly, by the few who can be trusted to hold their tongues."

He was right, and I hated that he was right, and I stood there hunting the flaw in it and could not turn one up. So I took the only ground he had left me standing on.

"Then I am coming to London with you."

"There is not the least use in your coming to London."

"None in the world," I said. "I know it. I am coming regardless. I will not sit in Derbyshire shooting your birds while that whole house comes down over a child's folly, and you walk into God knows what alone. Give me nothing to do, and I will do the nothing at your shoulder."

He looked at me a long moment. "You are the hardest man in England to be rude to," he said, and he did not tell me no again.

So here we are, the pair of us, and I am finding out what use good intentions are in a business that wants a cold head. Caroline, at least, is making herself useful at Pemberley by amusing Georgiana. The one thing I have that might have served — money — Darcy would not take.

I put it to him the first hour. "Whatever it costs," I said. "To find her, to settle her, to buy the fellow off if it comes to buying, you can draw on me for the whole of it, and not a word said to a soul, now or ever."

"I know it, Charles. I thank you. And I will not touch a shilling of it."

"Why in Heaven's name not? It is only money. I have a great deal more of it than sense, as you have told me to my face—"

"Because this one is mine to pay." He said it in the voice that shuts a subject like a drawer, and I have not tried it again. There is a reckoning somewhere under all this that is his own and no other man's, and he means to settle it with his own hand and his own purse and be hanged to anybody who offers to help.

So I make myself what use I can, which is a small and homely sort of use and beneath the dignity of the thing, and has taken the absurd shape of my keeping house for a man under his own roof. I chivvy his cook; I have opinions now on his coal and his candles; I send his footman to bed and sit up in the fellow's place. Darcy suffers the whole invasion the way he suffers weather. I have watched clever men go stupid for want of a dinner at the very hour they had most need of their wits; and if the one thing I am fit to be in a business like this is an unpaid and unwanted steward to the best man I know while he saves a family that is never to hear his name for it, then I will be that, and reckon it no bad week's work.

This afternoon the drawing room acquired a Colonel.

Fitzwilliam — Darcy's cousin, whom I have met over cards and liked — came straight from some review or field-day in the whole of his regimentals, scarlet and gold from his stock to his boots, with a sabre that took the umbrella-stand off at the knees on the way in and the general air of a man who has ridden through the door rather than walked. He filled the room the way a fire fills a cold grate.

"Well," said the Colonel, stripping off his gloves and casting about for the map he had plainly expected to find laid ready. "Where are we, then."

"Sit down, Fitzwilliam." Darcy looked at me, and I watched him weigh, for the half of a second, whether to send me out of the room.

"I'll see about something cold," I said, to spare him the deciding of it, and rang for the butler. Then I stayed.

What passed between the two of them after was carried on in a shorthand of names and streets and sums that meant everything to them and next to nothing to me, and I will set none of it down, partly because I could make no shape of it and partly because it was plainly never mine to overhear. The Colonel grew graver by the minute, his splendour sitting stranger and stranger on him as the talk went into low and ugly places.

"You are certain it is he?"

Darcy said, "I have been certain of him for a long time. The difference is that now I can prove it."

And the Colonel looked away at the middle of the carpet and would say nothing.

Twice a day Darcy goes out. He will not take me, and I have left off pressing him; a man wants no genial fool at his elbow in the places he has been going, which are, by the state of his boots when he comes in and the set of his mouth, not the sort of places a gentleman commonly leaves cards at. He goes in hired hackneys — Darcy, who keeps as good a carriage as any in town, rattling about this business in coaches no one would look at twice — and comes home later each night, and grimmer, and says less.

He came in near two this morning and stood a moment in the hall with his hat still on, as though he had mislaid the way to his own stairs. I told him there were cold meats kept back in the dining-room against his coming.

He looked at me a moment. "In my own house," he said.

"Somebody had to see to it, and it was plainly not going to be you."

"I keep a cook for that, Charles. I keep, unless I am greatly mistaken, a butler. I had the two of them a good many years before ever I had you." But he ate the cold meats standing at the sideboard while I held the candle for him, and when he had done he said "Thank you" in a different voice from the one he had said the rest of it in, and went up. I do not know where he had been. I know it had cost him.

This morning he was at the street door before eight, drawing on his gloves with the Colonel behind him, and I came down in my dressing-gown feeling every inch the passenger on another man's ship.

"You are off, then," I said.

"The game's afoot," said Darcy, with the ghost of his old dryness, and to Fitzwilliam, "Come. We have an hour before the office opens, and I mean to be on the step when it does."

"Is there truly nothing I can do?" I asked, for the twentieth time in a week.

He paused with the one glove on. "Keep yourself out of mischief, and be here when I come back. You know my methods."

"Darcy, I give you my word, I have not the least idea in the world what your methods are, and never have had, in all this time of watching you at close quarters." It fetched half a smile out of him at eight in the morning on a black day, which I count among the better works I have done in this life.

Then they were down the steps and into a waiting hackney and gone, and I came back up to write this and to wait, which is the whole of my employment now. Somewhere in this enormous town Lydia Bennet is in the worst trouble a girl of sixteen can come to, and does not know that the most dogged man in England has made her his one concern; and her sisters at Longbourn, sitting up behind drawn blinds over a disgrace they take for the end of them, do not know it either. And they are not to know. On that one point he has been plainer with me than on anything: that if this is mended, no soul at Longbourn is ever to learn whose hand mended it. I gave him my word. So I may be the one man in England who could carry a little hope down to that house, and I am sworn not to. I shall wait up for him instead, and hold my tongue, and be there when he comes in.

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 29. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

I had exactly one thing to give the search, and I gave it once we were all at my uncle's house in Cheapside.

My father looked up from the map spread out on my uncle's desk. "And where did you come by that, Lizzy?"

"From somebody who had reason to know his history." I kept my eyes on the shelves of ledgers in my uncle's study, and did not give the somebody a name; and after a moment my uncle took out his note-book and set the name down in his good clear hand, and did not ask again. My aunt watched me from her chair for slightly longer than the question had wanted, and then she too let it lie.

My uncle made a great work of Mrs. Younge once we were in town. There were lodging-houses enough in that quarter to swallow a fortnight, and a woman may call herself anything she likes on a brass plate; and within a few days he had come back with the name crossed through. "We will come back to her," he said, which is what one says of a thing one does not expect to come back to.

By then the search had found its shape. My uncle went at the business as though it were a ledger that would balance if he were only patient enough. My father faced it with the same grim determination he brought to any social gathering he was forced to attend. It was not despair. My uncle was too steady for it and my father too proud. But they were not hopeful. I watched my father most. He sat in my uncle's dining-room each evening turning the day's nothing over in his hands, and he was so plainly out of his right element that I could hardly bear to look at him and could not look away. I had spent my life watching that man be the cleverest person in any room he chose to exert himself in. London did not care how clever he was. London had simply mislaid his daughter, and declined to be reasoned with about it.

On the fifth evening I could stand the dining-room no longer, and I asked him to walk out with me.

He came without the argument I had half-counted on. I knew that he loved walking and riding in the countryside, but he found London oppressive. Instead of arguing, he got up and found his hat.

We walked up out of Cheapside and came in time to Finsbury Square, which was new then. It was an odd thing, that square: a piece of country manners laid out in the middle of a town that had no manners at all, and surrounded by wrought iron so the town could not get at it. We had it nearly to ourselves. My father took a turn of the gravel in silence, and then another, and I knew his methods too well to fill the quiet for him.

"Charlotte Lucas's death never felt right with me," he said at last, to the railings.

I said nothing, which was the correct thing to say.

"Footpads." He brought the word out. "On the open road between Lucas Lodge and Longbourn, in the broad afternoon, for a woman with nothing on her worth the hanging it would have earned them. I have known that road sixty years. There has never been a footpad on it. And then your sister Mary was struck down in a Kentish lane, and we put it about that she was travelling for her health, and I let it be put about, and did not believe a word of it from the hour I heard it. Two women of one small connection, knocked on the head within a season, on two quiet roads a hundred miles apart, and nobody the wiser and nobody the worse for it but us." He turned the corner of the square. "I do not like coincidences. I find them ill-bred."

"What did you do?" I asked, because he wished to be asked, and because my voice was steadier than the rest of me.

"I did a thing I am not in the habit of doing. I wrote letters." He said it as another man might confess to having broken a window. "To Sir John, at Meryton, who is a magistrate because his father was, and who answered me very handsomely and told me nothing whatever. And to a man in Kent who was a good deal less handsome about it and contrived, in three pages, to tell me that there was nothing he was at liberty to tell me. Neither of them would say there was anything in it. Neither of them would say there was nothing in it." He stopped walking, and looked at me. "And I do not, Lizzy, for the life of me, see what any of it has to do with Mr. Wickham and your sister. I cannot fit it to the rest, and I cannot set it apart from the rest. Three unconnected misfortunes would not cost me a night's sleep; I am too idle to lie awake over other people's bad luck. These three keep me awake, and I could not tell you, if you put me on my oath, what binds them together."

I could not answer him, for I did not know what to say. There was Mr. Wickham, who had once poisoned a young woman because he could not get at her fortune. I was not brave enough to tell my father that my cleverness might have led him to pursue Lydia, might even have led him to murder her. I also could not see why he would have harmed Charlotte or Mary. And there was Anne de Bourgh, who had apparently come all the way to Meryton in disguise just to watch Mr. Collins seek a wife. She might have been behind the attacks on my friend and my sister, but I could not see her involving herself with the likes of Mr. Wickham.

My father did not press me for an answer. Perhaps he did not want to distress me, from kindness or fear that I would make a scene.

I did not give him one. We turned at the north side of the square and walked back down toward Gracechurch Street and the maps and the lists and the day's allotment of nothing.

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 28. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

The post came up to Lambton just as my uncle was preparing to leave on another of his fishing expeditions. There was a letter for me in my father’s hand, which was news in itself. My father wrote letters seldom, and never willingly. He left the family correspondence to my mother, who was prolific, and to Jane, who was dutiful, and kept his own pen for the rare occasion on which a thing had gone so far wrong that irony could no longer be made to cover it.

I carried it to a window and broke the seal there and said nothing to anybody, wanting first to be certain of what I held.

I will not set the letter down here. He had written it in two sittings. I could see the place where the hand had steadied itself, and then, lower down, where it stopped pretending to be steady. What it told me, under the dry humor he tried for and failed, was this: that Lydia had gone from Brighton in the night, with Mr. Wickham, with a letter hinting at Gretna Green. Their movements, so far as they could be traced, pointed to London, which meant that no marriage had been made. My father had ceased to believe one was intended. Thanks to my mother, the matter was already known in the neighborhood. My father had planned to depart for London as soon as his letter was sent.

I had watched Lydia lean out of the Forsters’ carriage not two months before, calling back to Kitty about which bonnets were to be sent on after her, in spirits so high they had carried clear to the turn of the road. I had stood at the gate and let her go. And I had let her go knowing, better than my father, exactly what manner of man the regiment carried among its officers.

For every other soul in the world this was Lydia ruined, which was bad enough: a girl thrown away, a family disgraced, a thing to be whispered over and pitied and shut the door upon. I knew what had already been done to one girl by that same easy hand, in a hired house by the sea, on the night her usefulness gave out; and I stood at the window with my father’s letter and could not get my breath. What had I done?

I do not know how long I stood. When I looked up Mr. Darcy was entering the room, perhaps planning to wait for my uncle to appear with his fishing tackle. He had got as far as the middle of the floor when he saw my face and stopped.

“You are ill,” he said. “Let me call your aunt.”

“I am not ill.” My voice came out level, which surprised me. “I have had bad news from Longbourn, and must go to my family at once.” And then the words came rushing out of me. “My youngest sister has left her friends at Brighton and put herself into the power of Mr. Wickham. There is no marriage, and my father does not believe there will be one.”

The next part I had not meant to say to anybody, but I heard myself say regardless. “And I am half afraid that it is my doing. At my aunt Philips’s, before the regiment went, I could not keep from letting him see that I knew what he was. I was proud of it at the time, proud of being cleverer than he. I thought also that it might warn him against tampering with Lydia. Instead, it seems that he has revenged himself on me by pursuing her. I have undone my own sister with my own vanity.”

I watched him take all of it. I had braced, without knowing that I braced, for what a man does with such news of such a family: the half-step back, the cooling of the voice, the sudden recollection of business elsewhere. He did not take the half-step. He stood quite still, and I saw him weigh the true size of the danger. And behind the stillness I saw him begin to think, the way I had watched him think on the bridge, water going down by the shortest way to the floor of a thing.

“Your uncle,” he said. “Let me bring him to you.”

It was not much. It was not consolation; it did not trouble to tell me that none of it was my fault, which is the speech a lesser man makes in a doorway and has forgotten before he is down the stairs. He went away to find Mr. Gardiner, and I did not see him again in Derbyshire.

My uncle had the shape of it from my face before I had got through three sentences, and asked only what would help. My aunt was already thinking of Jane, who must be told, and of Mary, who must travel home as she had travelled out, for her health. There was a great deal to do and very little of it was hard, which is the mercy of a catastrophe: it leaves you a list. Within the hour, we were traveling down the long reach of the Derbyshire road going south; and I sat with my father’s letter folded small inside my glove.

“These catastrophes test us,” Mary said at random. “We will be stronger for them.” But she did not sound convinced. She looked listlessly out the window.

“Please let me come with you to London, Uncle,” I said.

He and Jane stared blankly at me. My aunt studied me with a more thoughtful expression.

“I have heard something of Mr. Wickham’s past in Kent, from people who knew him there.”

“Ah.” I had the uncomfortable impression that my aunt knew exactly who had told me about Mr. Wickham, but not what.

“Jane, Mary, I know it is unfair to let you face Mother, Kitty and the neighborhood without reinforcements, but I truly think I might be of more use in London.”

Jane smiled at me gently. “You must go where your conscience takes you of course.”

“We should all go where we will do the most good,” Mary said, which I took for agreement.

My uncle’s hands tightened into fists. “I don’t like to think what your father will say, Lizzy, but I think you are right. You will continue on with us to London.”

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 27. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

Miss Darcy had asked us to Pemberley to hear her play, and two days after her call at the inn we went. She played for the room very well, and knew it, and looked at me once when she had done in a way that asked me to keep my promise to praise her music to her brother. I did so, and he seemed pleased. Afterward, the afternoon holding fine, Mr. Darcy proposed we walk down to the water before the carriages were ordered.

So we walked, and I contrived to let the rest of the party draw ahead of us. Mr. Darcy missed very little. He knew that I had done it on purpose, and shortened his stride to the size of the thing I had not yet said.

Ahead of us, where the path ran down along the water, Jane walked with Mr. Bingley, glad of him as she had always been glad of him and showing it now, which was new. I had been watching the back of her bonnet for a quarter-mile with a happiness so careful it was nearly an ache, the way one watches a candle one is afraid might gutter out. The Gardiners were beyond them with Miss Darcy between, my uncle pointing out to her some virtue of her own river. Mary had fallen a little behind us all, gone quiet over a bank of ferns with the contented frown she wore when she had found something to moralize over. By the turn below the planting we had the path to ourselves.

"I told you that my sister Mary is travelling for her health," I said.

"Is she not?"

"It would be fairer to say that she is travelling for her peace of mind. She was attacked in Kent this spring, in the lane between the parsonage and Rosings, in the open afternoon, by someone who came at her from behind and struck her down and left her there, and who has never been found. Mr. Collins and I were the only kinfolk with her while she recovered."

I had been watching the path but now I gave him a sidelong glance and saw that he had stopped, and so I did the same.

"She was struck down in the same terrain and the same manner as Charlotte Lucas. Whoever reached Charlotte reached Mary. It is one hand. I have known it since the spring and had no one to say it to who could be of the smallest use. I tell you now because you are the one man of my acquaintance who will know what to do with it."

I had meant to say the last part more gently. I found, having said it, that I did not regret the want of gentleness, and I held my tongue and let him do the work.

I had watched a great many people think, in my life. My father thinks like a man turning the pages of a book he has read before. Mr. Darcy thought the way water carves a path through soft ground: without any show of effort, going down by the shortest way there was, arriving before you had seen it move. I watched the theory he had carried since the autumn come apart in his mind now that he knew about the attack on Mary. I watched him understand that he had been wrong, and what he had done while he was wrong, and to whom.

He had gone the colour of the gravel. His hand had come up to the rail of the little bridge we had stopped beside and taken hold of it.

"Yes, indeed. My mother was nowhere near Kent at the time."

He looked up at the easy meaning, the one that said only that I had stood and watched him clear my mother across the last half-minute and could follow the steps of it. There was even something like relief beginning in his face, that I had seen him arrive in the right place at last.

And then the rest of it reached him. I watched it reach him. I had known what he believed of my mother — known it since a sickroom in Kent, and known it every hour of this visit: while his housekeeper stood under his picture and gave him a character I could not have invented; while he came round the corner of his own house and found me on his gravel and could not get a sentence out; while I sat at his table and was glad to be there. I had come into his county meaning never to set eyes on him, and had met him notwithstanding, and been used by him with a kindness I had done nothing to earn, and I had taken all of it and said nothing, because there had never been a way to say it that was not a blow. He understood that now. He understood that the woman who had refused him for his pride had been carrying his worst secret through every hour he was kind to her, and had let him go on.

The relief went out of his face, and the shame that came up under it he neither hid nor arranged. He did not look away, which I think cost him everything he had. His hand stayed on the rail, and his face went from gray to red.

"Believing what you did, you still asked my mother's brother to come and fish," I said.

"It was my pleasure. Your uncle is a man of straightforward goodness, rather like Charles there." He indicated his friend, walking beside my sister, with a tilt of his head.

"You judged him to be so," I said. "On our first morning here."

"It was not a difficult judgment to make. I am glad that it pleased you."

"It did. And also, it is hard to go on convicting a man whose own servants have known him since he was four years old and have not yet found him out."

He let go of the rail.

"I removed Mr. Bingley from your sister," he said, "on the strength of…a certain theory. I told myself it was the connexions. It was not only the connexions." He looked ahead, to where Jane's bonnet had stopped beside Mr. Bingley's shoulder at the water's edge. "I have been a great fool."

I thought of Anne, and her strange fascination with Mr. Collins, and her stranger resemblance to a haughty widow who had visited Meryton just when Mr. Collins had come to us looking for a wife. I felt sick, and could not speak to him of my fears. I understood something of what he must have felt that evening at Hunsford, going to ask a woman for her hand in marriage even though he believed her the daughter of a murderess.

"You did not know my mother well enough to know better," I said. "She is a selfish creature, a little like the unjust steward in the parable, determined to settle her children well so that they may receive her into their houses when her husband dies. But she has not the cunning, nor the industry to kill my cousin's betrothed so that one of my sisters could marry him."

That reached him. The shame did not leave him, I do not think it ever wholly left him, in the matter of Jane, but it moved over and made room.

"Tell me what you have observed," he said. "All of it, leaving nothing out, no matter how trivial it may seem to you."

So we walked, very slowly, the bridge behind us and the others a field ahead, and we laid our halves of it side by side for the first time. He had a man's whole history that I had once defended at a card-table and now would not have given a wet glove for; he laid Mr. Wickham down between us without my having to ask, and I told him I had believed his account since a lane in Kent and believed it more every month. I had the shape of the violence, the two attacks that rhymed, the announced hour Charlotte had spoken in a crowded room and paid for on an open road. But I did not tell him what I suspected. I could hardly accuse his cousin on the strength of her way of looking at people in a crowded room. We did not solve the mystery on that path. We did the thing that is better than solving, the first time it happens. We stopped being two people each privately sure, and became two people uncertain in the same direction.

"We have been right about different things," he said, "and wrong about the same ones. I do not know whether to be glad of your thoughts or ashamed of mine."

"You may attempt both," I said. "It is what I am doing right now."

Ahead of us the party had turned at the foot of the water and were coming back toward us in the easy scatter of people who have walked far enough; and Miss Darcy, catching sight of her brother, lifted a hand to him, and he lifted his to her, and I saw him put his face back on for them by degrees as we closed the distance. It was not a mask, only the ordinary face a man wears among people who must not yet know what he has learned. We walked back in step, which we had not done going out, and he matched his stride to mine without either of us arranging it, and that, on the whole of that long day, was the thing I took away and kept.

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 26. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

Miss Darcy called on us at the inn the morning after the dinner, with only Mrs. Annesley for escort and no brother in sight. I understood that she had not come to return a civility at all, but with the held breath of a girl who has settled on a thing and has now only to endure the interval before she may begin.

The men were on the river and Jane and Mary had walked into Lambton, so there was only my aunt to be got past; and my aunt was charmed with her, and said so in effect by being charming back. The tea came up. Mrs. Annesley had grown up the next valley but one from my aunt's own and was drawn at once into the great business of whose people had farmed what with my aunt. And when the two of them were fairly launched, Miss Darcy rose and went to the window, and asked me, in a small even voice she had plainly rehearsed against the chance of its failing her, whether I would come and stand a moment in the better light.

We stood together at the glass, with the inn yard below us where a man was backing a horse between the shafts of a gig, and she did not look at the yard, or the light, or anything at all beyond the room. She put one hand flat against the cold pane, as though to hold shut something on the other side of it.

"You saw, last night," she said. "When Miss Bingley spoke of — of that gentleman. You saw me, and you turned it away, and you did not look at me afterward the way the others would have, to see how much I had minded. I lay awake on it. I have not many people who do not look to see how much I have minded." She drew a breath that shook on the way in. "I should like to tell you a thing, if you will let me, before I lose the courage I came with. I have never told it whole. My brother knows it, and Mrs. Annesley knows most of it, but they were in it, and one cannot tell a thing to the people who were in it. One can only be careful around them forever."

I said that I would be honoured by her confidence; and I said nothing else, because I could see that any kindness larger than that would frighten the words back down her throat.

"Last summer my brother took a house for me at Ramsgate, by the sea, with Mrs. Younge, the companion I had before this one." Her hand moved a little against the pane. "I was fifteen, and I had known Mr. Wickham since I was in the nursery. He was my father's godson, and when he came to Ramsgate, as if by chance, and was everything to me that he had always been, only now looking at me as though I had become worth looking at, I thought it was the best thing that had ever happened in my life. Mrs. Younge thought so too, and said so, very often. I did not know then that she had known him a great while, and was his before she was ever mine."

She told it then. The persuasion of it. The word love, which he had been generous with. The plan to go to Scotland, which had seemed to her not a wicked thing but a romantic one, a story she was being allowed inside. That they had gone — had actually got into the chaise and gone, the two of them and Mrs. Younge, north out of Ramsgate in the evening.

"And on the first night, at the inn, I told him about the money." She said it to the window. "I thought he ought to know how it stood, so that we might plan. I have thirty thousand pounds. I told him it was thirty thousand pounds and that I was glad of it, for his sake as much as mine — and that of course none of it could be touched until I was of age, or married with my guardians' consent, my brother's and my cousin the colonel's. I thought it a small obstacle. I thought he would laugh and say we should be poor and happy. I was fifteen, and I thought thirty thousand pounds locked in a box was the same as thirty thousand pounds, if you were the one it belonged to."

She stopped. I did not fill the silence. It went on a while.

"He was very quiet after that. And that night I was taken ill." Her hand had gone white at the knuckle against the glass. "Very ill. I was sick past anything I had known, all that night and the day after, and I could not be moved, and in the morning he was gone, and she was gone with him. I thought they had gone for a doctor. I lay in that room two days thinking, between the worst of it, that they had gone for a doctor and would come back."

The coffee-things chinked across the room. My aunt laughed at something. Mrs. Annesley laughed.

"My brother came instead. I have never been sure how he knew where to come. He has never told me, and I have learned not to ask him the questions that cost him to answer. But he sees things that other people do not, and he builds a story in his head of what they mean, and more often than not it is a true story."

"Yes," I said, and thought of the time he guessed which route I'd walked by the burdock on my petticoat.

Georgiana went on. "He brought a physician from the next town who would not say very much. It was a long time before anyone would tell me plainly what had been done, and longer before I would believe it had been done on purpose, and longest of all" — and here her voice did the smallest thing, a hairline crack she sealed over at once — "before I stopped being ashamed of myself. Both for going away with him, and for telling him about the money."

"You were fifteen," I said. It was the only thing I let myself give her, because it was the only thing that was not about me.

"I was fifteen." She took her hand off the glass at last. "He did not get a farthing. I should like you to know that, since you saw last night what the world thinks it knows of him. He spent a summer and a girl's whole heart and very nearly her life, and he rode away from it with empty pockets, and within the year he was in your Hertfordshire being charming at card-parties."

"And of course your brother could say nothing of it, without risking your reputation," I said. So he let himself be thought proud, and cold, and a withholder of other men's just deserts, in a country full of people who had decided to like Mr. Wickham.

"That is the kind of man he is," Georgiana said. "I wanted one person here to know the story."

I had carried two Mr. Wickhams since the spring, the agreeable one and the smaller, shabbier one, and had spent a season unable to make them resolve into a single man. They resolved now, at an inn window with a girl's hand flattened white against the glass. I understood at last what it had cost Mr. Darcy to stand in a parsonage parlour and be refused for his pride, with this in his heart. I had guessed, that spring, that the harm done at the watering-place had been to a young woman of his family, and I had set it, in my mind, on the wrong branch, and pitied the wrong people. The girl it had been done to was standing at my elbow asking me, without asking, only to be believed.

"I believe every word, and I am glad to be the one person."

That reached her. She looked at me directly for almost the first time, a tall fair girl with her brother's keenness just beginning, far back, behind the fright; and whatever she saw in me seemed to comfort her, because she gave a small breath of something that was nearly a laugh, and took her hand down from the glass.

"Then you must come to Pemberley and hear me play," she said, "and tell my brother I played well, for he worries, and it pleases him to be told. He need not know what we talked of this morning, at least not yet."

"I shall come," I said, "and he shall hear you played like an angel, and nothing else from me at all."

By the time Mrs. Annesley had gathered her up, and my aunt had said all the things that are said to a girl of such pretty manners, the ordinary morning had closed over the half-hour as though it had never been opened. I went down with her to the inn door. She drew on her gloves on the step, and made me a small grave curtsey, and was handed up into her carriage and the morning went on as though she had only paid a call.

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 25. Narrated by Bingley, from his diary.

Pemberley, the 2nd of August

I came down into Derbyshire for the partridges and have not given a partridge a thought since I got out of the carriage.

Darcy met me on the step. "There is a thing you had better have from me before you go in," he said, "and not from Caroline. The Bennet sisters are in the country."

I believe I said, "Which Bennet sisters," like a fool, there being only the one set in England that interested me, or that Darcy was likely to mention.

"Miss Bennet and Miss Elizabeth, and Mrs. Collins, who was Miss Mary Bennet when you met her last. They come with an aunt and uncle from town, and are lodged at Lambton. They dine here tonight." He watched me take it. "If it is not to your liking, I will make your excuses, and you need not come down at all."

"It is entirely to my liking," I said, which was the truth and not the half of it, and I went up to dress with my hands not quite steady on the buttons.

I have spent many months assuring myself I had given her up. It appears I have done no such thing. I have only mislaid her, the way a man mislays a thing he cannot bear to have lost, by refusing ever to look in the place he had it last.

She came in on her uncle's arm, and I had one bad moment when I feared I had built her up in the dark into something the daylight would spoil. Then she looked up and saw me, and a colour came into her face that no woman gets up on purpose though her life should hang on it, and I knew two things in that half-second and have not been able to un-know them since. The first is that Darcy was wrong about her in the autumn, wrong to the bone, wrong as I have never in twelve years known him wrong about a plain fact. The second is that I let him be wrong for me, and paid a winter for it.

"Mr. Bingley." She gave me her hand. "You are come for the shooting."

"I am told there is shooting," I said. "I confess I forgot to ask." Which fetched the ghost of a smile out of her, the first I had earned of her in eight months, and I would have walked back to Hertfordshire to earn the next one. At dinner, we said nothing across the table that would bear repeating. One does not, with a sister on either hand and the fish going round.

Here is the thing I came upstairs to set down before it stops astonishing me. Darcy spent the whole of this evening making himself agreeable to a merchant from Cheapside.

Mr. Gardiner is an easy, sensible, well-made man who keeps a warehouse in view of his own front door and has never pretended to be otherwise; and Darcy talked to him of fishing as though he were an old family friend.

"Come up on Thursday and I'll put you on the big fish," he told him. "They lie further up than a stranger would try. I'll send a man down with tackle."

"I warn you, sir, I shall hold you to it," said Gardiner.

"I count on it," said Darcy, and meant the whole of it, and I sat there with my glass and wondered what had been done to my friend. He was capable of generosity to those at any kind of a disadvantage, including to me, when I had been a stupid young cawker. But somehow, I would not have thought calm, practical Mr. Gardiner to be the sort who inspired such a reaction from him.

Caroline enlightened me, though she would go to her grave before she owned she had. She has been in a temper all evening, and the whole of it aimed at Miss Elizabeth Bennet, whom she cannot pardon for standing in the same county as Darcy. Somewhere over the sweets she must remind the table that Miss Eliza and the Darcys had been quite thrown together in the spring, in Kent, at Rosings, when Darcy went down to his aunt's. "Such a reunion for you all," she said.

Kent. In the spring. I sat there and did the one sum I have ever done quickly in my life. Darcy went into Kent after Easter and came out of it grey to the bone and would not tell me why; and kept a window in Grosvenor Street the whole of April like a man watching a road; and once began to say to me, when I was in Kent—, and shut his mouth on the rest of it. And Miss Elizabeth Bennet was in Kent that spring.

I have not the least notion what passed between the two of them there. The nature of their falling-out, for clearly there had been one, was not my affair. I know only that his grimness since Kent, and the quick bright look he could not keep off her tonight, were the two ends of one rope; and that whatever they broke between them in the spring they have been quietly mending all this evening, and neither of them able to say so aloud.

He is in love with her. I would stake my fortune on it.

Darcy's sister is still a child at heart: a great tall girl of sixteen frightened out of her wits by her own dinner table. She looked ready to go through the floor when Caroline, still hunting Miss Elizabeth, brought up some officer the Meryton people had known — a Wickham. Miss Darcy set down her glass and looked miserable, perhaps remembering the feud between her brother and this Wickham. Miss Elizabeth turned the talk so smoothly you would never have marked her doing it.

I have formed a resolution, which for me is very nearly an event. I let a cleverer man reason me out of the best thing that ever came near me, once, on evidence, and the evidence was rotten. I will not hand him the chance a second time, though I think, from his face tonight, he is the last man in England who would take it now. Tomorrow I mean to call at Lambton, and the day after, and every day they will have me, and say to Miss Bennet in daylight and in plain English the thing I should have written her in the winter and had not the heart to.

The partridges will keep. They have kept this long.

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 24. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

Miss Bingley came to Pemberley with her brother on our fourth day. For three days I had been more at my ease in that house than I had any right to be. My uncle had gone twice to the river and come back boyish about a great fish he had not in the end landed; my aunt had walked me through Lambton, naming the windows of her girlhood; and Mr. Darcy had been everywhere correct and nowhere pressing, attentive to the Gardiners in a manner that cost me a little more each time I watched it.

And Jane had begun, by very small degrees, to come back. I will not say she was happy. She was careful, the way a person is careful on a foot lately out of splints. But there was a colour to her again of an evening, and once I caught her laughing at something my uncle said before she had remembered to be quiet about it, and I found I would have paid a great deal to keep her laughing and said nothing whatever that might startle it off.

Then Mr. Bingley's carriage came up the drive with his sister Caroline in it, and Miss Darcy besides.

I had been prepared, by his housekeeper, to find Miss Darcy a paragon; I found instead a tall girl of sixteen so overcome by her own table that she could scarcely be got to raise her eyes from it, and so plainly grateful for any small civility that I made it my business to send a few down to her end. Mary sat between my aunt and Miss Darcy and conversed with neither, which was the greatest kindness she could have shown to the timid Miss Darcy. My uncle and Mr. Darcy fell at once talking of the river. Mr. Bingley found, over the course of the soup and the fish, a remarkable number of reasons to address himself to Jane, and Jane found none of them suspicious, which was its own kind of progress.

It was Miss Bingley who broke the surface, in the voice she kept for kindnesses performed in public.

"Pray, Miss Eliza, are the ——shire quite gone from Meryton now? It must be a sad change for your younger sisters. You had all of you such warm friends among the officers. One in especial, I seem to recall — Mr. Wickham, was it not? — that you would defend so prettily to anybody who ventured a word against him. I do hope he has not disappointed his admirers."

I had my answer ready. One always has an answer ready for Miss Bingley, and a civil one costs her the most. But I did not give it at once, because at the name Miss Darcy set down her glass as though it had grown heavy in her hand, and the blood went out of her face and was slow coming back. It was over almost before I had it — she bent to her plate, and her brother said something even and unhurried to my uncle about the morning's water, and the table turned after him as a boat turns with the tide. But I had seen it, and I set it by to look at later.

I gave Miss Bingley the dull half of the truth — that the regiment was gone to Brighton, and that Meryton was supporting the deprivation with more fortitude than she perhaps hoped for it — and I turned the talk to her brother's plans for the shooting, a subject she could never let lie, and one that had the further merit of letting Miss Darcy at my elbow get her colour back without an audience.

But Miss Bingley had done me a service she would have been very sorry to learn of. She had sent me back to my aunt Philips's parlour — to the crowded night the name Wickham first came into my life over a glass of negus — and I went there gladly, because the past was better company than the present.

I had spent that whole evening watching Mr. Darcy. I had wanted to catch him in the wrong, and I had been so busy at the centre of the thing that the edges of the room came to me sidelong, the way they do when the eye is fixed. And at the edge of it, in the corner by the card-room door, there had been a widow in black. A stranger; somebody's grand relation, I had supposed, down from a part of the country that minded such things less — for she watched the room as no woman of our training is suffered to watch it, resting her look on one face and then another and holding it well past the moment a look is given back. I had half-known the quality of that look even then and been unable to lay a name to it. In the spring I had laid it, at last, to Mr. Darcy, and called it a family likeness and been satisfied. Three days ago, on his own gravel, I had watched his eyes take a man up and set him down again unhurried and brief, and not hold anyone at all, and the name had come loose from him and gone wandering.

Two things met over the syllabub while Miss Bingley talked of grouse.

The first was that the widow's long look had rested, that night, on my cousin Collins. It had found him across the room and stayed on him after he had bowed and bobbed and taken himself away, the way the eye stays on a page after the candle has been carried off. I had thought nothing of it. An old woman, looking where she liked.

The second was that I had seen that look again since. I had seen it in a Kentish sickroom in the spring, when Anne de Bourgh stood over the bed of a clergyman's wife she had every reason in the world to leave to the women of the house, and could not take her eyes from the husband.

Anne de Bourgh, who looked through people from habit and at Mr. Collins as her one exception. Anne de Bourgh, who had dragged herself out to a phaeton sweep she had never once troubled to reach, to ask that a man's letters be read aloud to her. I had taken the widow for an old woman; but I had taken Anne herself, the first evening at Rosings, for ten years older than she was, the illness having got into her face and aged it past her three-and-twenty years. In black, by candlelight, across a packed and noisy room — she would have done very well for an old woman. And the picture I had been given of an Anne who never stirred ten miles from her mother was a picture her mother had painted, and her mother had shown me already that spring how little her paintings answered to the life.

The widow in Meryton had watched my cousin with Anne de Bourgh's eyes because the widow in Meryton had been Anne de Bourgh.

I sat very still and let the rest of it come. A woman does not travel sixty miles into a strange county, in mourning that is not hers, to watch a man she may not have, and then go home and watch him still, on love alone. Love does not need a disguise. There was something standing under the love and holding it upright, and I had a word for what feeds a watchfulness like that and will not let it sleep, and the word was not a kind one. Anne de Bourgh knew how Charlotte Lucas had come to die. She had perhaps known before it was done. That was why, months after, in a sickroom that was no business of hers, she could not leave off looking at the man it had been done for.

I told no one and over the next hour the idea quietly set fire to everything I thought I had understood about the spring.

The evening went on over the top of it. Mr. Bingley contrived to be at Jane's end of the room for the better part of an hour, and my aunt watched the two of them and then watched me, well pleased with the arrangement of the world. Mr. Darcy was correct to me and correct to everyone, the host and nothing more; and twice I found him looking at me with the open, brief regard I had cleared of every suspicion three days before, and twice I was the one to look away. I had no practice yet in being looked at by a man while I sat at his table knowing a terrible truth about his family.

I went up that night certain of Anne de Bourgh, and the certainty settled in cold and whole, the way the true ones did.

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.