Page 107 of The Matchmaker’s Mistake

“Mr. Darcy proposed?”

Elizabeth’s head ached. She nodded once, slowly. “Mr. Darcy says he loves me, and I think that he does. But instead of telling me straight away, he let his mother arrange to keep us apart all winter, and in the end he asked only because he believed Mr. Aldridge might ask me first.” She pressed her hands together beneath the coverlet. “Do men see me as so easily attained? So unnecessary to know?”

“Lizzy.”

“No, I am not wallowing, I am asking in earnest. Is there something in me that tells gentlemen that the preliminaries may be dispensed with? For if there is, I must change how I behave.”

Jane was quiet for another moment. “I hardly know where to begin, so perhaps I will simply ask the most obvious question. Mr. Darcy said he loves you?”

“Yes.”

“And you do not love him?”

“I . . . truthfully, I believe I might.”

Her sister considered this. “And yet you sent him away.”

It was not a question.

“It was not so much that I sent him away as I was too confused to offer a rational response and he took that as a rejection. If he was so easily dissuaded from pursuing me all winter, how can he be so certain now?” She closed her eyes. “It seems a very important decision to be making without more evidence that we are well suited.”

“I have known you better than anyone for twenty years,” Jane said. “If there were something wrong with you, I should have found it by now. I may not be as quick as you, but I do think that is ample time.”

Elizabeth’s laugh was feeble. “Then what could it be?”

“I think Mr. Darcy is in a hurry because of himself, not because of you,” Jane said. “But I will say, Lizzy—you are so easy to love.”

Elizabeth laid her head back on her pillow.

“You are,” Jane said, before she could object. “You make people so comfortable that they feel they have known you longer than they have. You laugh with them, and argue with them, and understand them quickly. Perhaps some men mistake that for permission to hurry.”

Elizabeth was silent.

“But if they do, that is their mistake, not yours.” Jane was quiet for a long moment before she asked a different sort of question. “Lizzy, did you wish to say yes?”

“What I wished—” She made herself finish. “I did not want different words from him. What I think I wanted was just a little more time, a bit more certainty. I wanted him to come to me because he could not bear to be without me. Because he loved me too much not to ask. To have him ask without reference to anyone else.” She smiled. “Terribly romantic and not very practical, I am afraid.”

“My dear sister,” Jane said, placing her arm around Elizabeth’s shoulders, “being loved in such a way is not too much to wish for.”

“Is it not?” Elizabeth stared up into the dark. “No, I have been very severe upon Mr. Darcy. He asked me to marry him because he was afraid. But I refused him for the very same reason.”

Jane was silent for so long that she might have been asleep. Finally, she asked, “What would you do if he asked you again?”

Elizabeth laid her head on her sister’s shoulder. “If he ever asks me anything again, even the time of day, I mean to answer him honestly and in full. Even if I frighten him into never wishing to ask anything of me again.”

Jane sat up and reached for the candle. “I think . . . yes, this is the right moment.” She tossed back the covers and disappeared to her chamber. When she returned, she held Mary’s note from her workbag. She climbed back into bed and held it out.

“I thought it would be Mrs. More,” Jane said.

“Is it not?”

Jane shook her head. “It is Cowper.”

Elizabeth unfolded the paper. Mary had copied only the first stanza of a poem.

God moves in a mysterious way,

His wonders to perform;