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He went back to the library. Standing at the window again, Darcy looked out at the frost-silvered garden, which had not changed since morning, and thought about the weight of misunderstandings.

Chapter Eighteen

In winter, the paddock behind Longbourn had very little to recommend it. The grass was iron-hard underfoot, and the hedgerows had been stripped to their architecture. The sky sat low and steely grey, threatening snow without quite committing to it. Elizabeth walked the paddock anyway, because the garden circles meant she was working something out, and she was not ready to be seen working this out.

But after forty minutes in the paddock, the problem still stubbornly refused to resolve itself.

Upon coming home from Netherfield the previous afternoon, Elizabeth had been careful not to appear ill at ease or give her family any reason to worry over her. She had gone to bed at a reasonable hour and had not slept until well past two. That was becoming a habit, although it was not one she wished to endorse. She had lain in the dark and done what she had spent the past several weeks refusing to do: namely, to lay the situation out in its entirety and look at all of it at once.

There could no longer be any doubt who was responsible for the compromise, even if it had not enfolded quite as that person had intended. She also knew the identity of the housemaid more immediately responsible, which meant there was access to testimony. She had, as Caroline Bingley had made plain at Lady Lucas’s tea, everything required for a quiet and credible dissolution.

Elizabeth was not going to use it; she had decided this and undecided it and decided it over again. Standing in the frost-hardened paddock she decided it for what she intended to be the final time, because she knew this time that no matter how much she thought about it, no matter how Mr Darcy looked at her with quizzical brows and eyes full of concern, that she could not produce a different answer.

Even to free herself, even to free Mr Darcy, she could not see Miss Bingley utterly ruined, her life as good as over. In her angrier moments, the moments in which Elizabeth recalled how readily Miss Bingley had washed her hands of it all, Elizabeth wished she could. Surely there was something of justice in seeing the consequences of Miss Bingley’s selfishness rebounded on her own head.

And there was, only if Elizabeth made the truth public, the consequences would not fit the crime. She could have happily sentenced Miss Bingley to a season or two of public embarrassment, a little judgement from her acquaintances, if such would have been the result of exposure.

Elizabeth knew very well that it would not. A story such as this was not forgivable, and if it were publicly known, Miss Bingley would be dead to society in every way that mattered. Every door in England would be closed to her; every acquaintance would cut her, and if her substantial dowry could yet buy her any kind of husband, it could only be a most unequal marriage.

Perhaps all that was justice. When she thought of all Miss Bingley’s schemes, Elizabeth felt angrily that it was.

Only she knew, in quieter moments, that it could not come at her hands. Elizabeth could not wish to choose such suffering for anyone, even a woman who had brought it on herself.

Then, too, there was Jane. Jane’s happiness was contingent on a Bingley household that remained intact, while Miss Bingley’s exposure and disgrace would comprehend all her family. Elizabeth felt rather glad of the need to protect her sister’s happiness. That, at least, was a reason that left her hopeful, rather than hopelessly angry.

But there was yet one more reason. Elizabeth could not deceive herself on that point, though she might have wished to.

She did not want to dissolve the engagement.

Elizabeth turned at the far hedge and looked back at the house. The house she had longed to return to when she was at Netherfield, and that she now found she could not sit still in.

She wanted the engagement, not as a convenient salve for her reputation or for the opportunity to marry a rich and respected man, but because she wanted it to be real.

What had caused the change? Elizabeth could hardly say. It was the gentle, slow accumulation of experiences and shifted opinions of Mr Darcy. It had been the walk they had taken together and the card evening and the way he had silenced Mrs Pearce, and every conversation that had been better than the one before it, and the almost-laugh at her own supper table, and the weight of his hand on her arm on the December path. These feelings had been assembling for weeks with the patience of something that does not announce itself until it is already finished.

It did not matter, because he had stood in the library at Netherfield and made his hesitation perfectly clear.

Her breath made a small cloud in the cold air and dispersed.

What she had, then, was what she had started with, and this latest development did not shift her opinions. Half out of love for Jane and half out of knowledge that the punishment would be too great, she could not expose Caroline Bingley. She wanted the engagement and could not have it as anything other than an endurance for both parties. She was going to be married, probably, to a man who wished she were someone else’s problem, and she was going to conduct that marriage with integrity and warmth and the best of herself, because it was what she had promised and because it was all that was left to offer. Or she was going to be dissolved from it, quietly and legally, and return to Longbourn and watch Jane’s happiness through someone else’s window.

Elizabeth could not have what she wanted. This was not a new condition. She had arrived at it gradually and was now standing in it fully. Almost to her surprise, she found was that it was survivable, and that surviving it was going to require her to stop going over it in the paddock and find something useful to do.

She went inside and helped Mrs Hill calm her mother’s latest hysterics, and said nothing about any of it to anyone.

∞∞∞

Darcy wrote a handful of letters that evening; he put all but one in the fire.

The first letter, and the only one to be franked and given to a servant for the post, was intended to follow Georgiana to London. She would laugh to know he had written so quickly after her departure, and she would know that, as always, her brother thought of her and loved her.

The next letters were of business, but he was so distracted that he made several critical errors, muddling his points, becoming startlingly more personal than he intended and less legible than he required. With a muttered oath, Darcy consigned them to the fire.

Another letter was to Elizabeth. That letter, he had not intended to write at all. He had sat down at his desk for practical purposes and had found, when other letters proved unwritable, that his hand had produced her name at the top of a fresh sheet, and he had written half a page before he understood what he was writing, which was everything he had not said and could not say. He burned that, too.

Let the evidence of his weakness collapse into ash. The fire had opinions about nothing.

He had not slept. He had gone to bed at a reasonable hour because there was no useful reason to stay up, only to lie in the dark with the entrance hall replaying with painful persistence.