Page 59

“I have tried.” Jane’s fingers tightened on her arm. “It is a month since you told us, and I have had time to think it over. I believe I have forgiven her, Lizzy. But I have done it for my own sake, not hers. I do not think I could sit at a table with her again and talk about the weather as though none of it had happened. Is that very wicked of me?”

“It is the least wicked thing I ever heard you say. I am rather proud of you.”

Neither of them said any more about that evening. They did not need to. It had gone midnight before it was all told. Mr Darcy had done most of the telling. He had stood by the drawing-room fire and left nothing out, least of all his own part: that Miss Bingley had told him at Netherfield she meant to stop the wedding, and he had not done enough to stop her. Then the rest of it. The actress from town with her story of secret meetings. The handkerchief with C and B and the forget-me-nots, taken out of Bingley’s own drawer. And the cellar on the wedding day, which Elizabeth still could not think of without going hot to the ears.

Bingley had not said a word through any of it. When it was over he put his glass down on the side table very carefully, as if he no longer trusted himself with it, and asked Darcy only whether he was sure.

Jane had cried. Then, because she was Jane, she had dried her eyes and begged them all not to think she was unhappy. She was not, she said. She had not been unhappy for one single hour since her wedding day.

Bingley had his carriage at the door before breakfast the next morning. Elizabeth never knew what he said to his sister, and she did not ask. But inside a week Miss Bingley had gone to live with the Hursts, on a good deal less money than she was used to, and she did not keep house for her brother any more. All her plans had come to nothing. The grand marriage, the place at Pemberley, the long patient campaign for Mr Darcy that had begun in Hertfordshire had ended with Mr Darcy coming up out of a cellar with somebody else.

She had never sent a word of apology. Elizabeth had never expected one.

At the bridge Elizabeth stopped and leaned on the parapet. The stone was already warm from the sun, and the water ran brown and quick underneath.

“I have a letter from Charlotte,” she said. “It came yesterday. I saved it for you.”

“Oh, how is she? Mama only heard that the wedding was very quiet.”

“Very quiet, and very sensible, which is just like Charlotte. She is quite the mistress of Hunsford now.” Elizabeth took the letter from her pocket, though she knew it nearly by heart. “Lady Catherine has advised her on where to put her furniture, how to keep her hens, and how thick Mr Collins’s winter flannels ought to be. Charlotte thanked her for every word, and then did exactly as she liked.”

“And Mr Collins?”

“Mr Collins is managed just as well. Whenever Charlotte wants to write her letters in peace, she sends him out to walk in the garden. He believes the walks were his own idea.” She folded the letter away. “I admire her more than I can say. I think I admire her best from Derbyshire.”

Jane smiled. “Mama says Charlotte has done very well, all things considered.”

“Mama says a great many things. Her last letter told me that the business of the cellar had been a stroke of foresight on her part. She said she was far too modest to dwell on it. Then she dwelt on it for three pages, crossed.”

“She is quite impossible,” said Jane. Then, because Jane could never say an unkind thing without softening it: “And so very happy.”

Elizabeth did not mind. Her mother had earned her three pages. With two daughters so well married, the entail had lost its terrors at last. In fact, Mr Bingley and Darcy had convinced Collins to break the entailment for a reasonable sum.

Someone called out from the lawn. Georgiana was running down the slope towards them, her bonnet bouncing on its strings and a letter waving over her head. A year ago she would have tiptoed across a room rather than have anyone look at her.

“It is from Anne!” she called, long before she needed to. “She is to be married! Elizabeth, it is all settled!”

She arrived out of breath and laughing, and slipped her hand through Elizabeth’s other arm without being asked, as she did a dozen times a day. Elizabeth read the letter with a sister on either side of her. She had stopped thinking of Georgiana as anything else a long time ago.

Anne wrote about her gentleman near Lambton with a frankness she would never have dared at Rosings. He was not grand, she said, and never would be, and she did not care in the least. She had never been so happy in her life. She had told her mother so, to her face.

“To her face!” Georgiana could hardly stand still. “Fitzwilliam will never believe it.”

“Your brother had more to do with it than he will ever admit. He would only deny it if you asked him.”

“Then I shall not ask him. I shall just tell him it was all his doing, and watch him go pink.”

There had been a time, not so very long ago, when Elizabeth had watched Georgiana’s face for every sign of low spirits. She did not need to now. Mr Wickham had gone north with his ensigncy, and the north had kept him. Nobody had heard from him since. Nobody at Pemberley spoke his name, and Georgiana did not seem to miss it.

***

Mr Darcy was in the library.

Elizabeth had known he would be. It was past ten. Jane had gone up, and Georgiana had been sent to bed protesting that she was not the least bit tired.

He had been right about the library. She had not admitted it for weeks, out of pure contrariness, but she had loved it from the first evening: the tall windows, the smell of leather and beeswax, the ladder that ran along the top shelves on its brass rail. There was a deep chair by the hearth that had somehow become hers. Neither of them had ever decided that it should.

He looked up when she came in. He always did now, and always the same way, as if he had half expected the doorway to be empty and still could not quite believe that it was not.