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She had a great deal to carry, and spent much of the journey trying to think about those things, and devise some plans or solutions around them, rather than focusing all her mental attention on the memory of a stableyard and a man on horseback, of the way Mr Darcy’s voice had sounded as he said, “I am doing it for you.”

So simple a task, or at least it ought to have been. Elizabeth was vexed to find that she failed at it, over and over again.

Longbourn, when they arrived, was exactly as awful as she had imagined it would be. Her mother had progressed from weeping into a frantic, circular anxiety that expressed itself by voicing the same set of fears in the same order every quarter hour. Kitty was sulky and frightened at once, terribly at a loss without Lydia, whom she seemed to be equally worried for and angry with. Mary was the only person in the house who seemed to have retained any composure, and she met the others at the door with an air of relief, as though she had been waiting for some responsible person to arrive and was considerably glad that one finally had.

Elizabeth hugged her. “Thank you,” she said, meaning it more deeply than mere words could convey. “Your letters were invaluable. I do not know what we would have done without them, or without you bringing us back.”

Mary looked pleased. “I was glad to be of use, though I shall say I am gladder still to have you back. Everyone has been… Well, it has been difficult, even before Lydia…” She trailed off, unable to put words to it. “And since she left… Mrs Long has come every day, looking for more news. Other ladies, too. And Mr Collins wrote a horrible letter that has quite altered my opinion of him. I had not previously thought him a cruel man.” She did not elaborate, and Elizabeth did not ask her to.

By the time evening had come, Elizabeth and Jane had done what could be done: their mother was soothed to a manageable level of distress, Kitty was reassured and given small tasks to occupy her, and the household was arranged into some semblance of order. Their father had disappeared to his study the moment they arrived, which had added immeasurably to Mrs Bennet’s distress, and she had sobbed her conviction that he was angry with her into Elizabeth’s shoulder.

Throughout the evening, Elizabeth watched the solid, resolutely closed door, until the feeling that had been building inside her for months reached the point where it took over everything else. She willed the door to open, willed her father to appear. But of course, he did not, and she decided she no longer had the energy or inclination to keep her opinions bottled up so that he could enjoy a peace that no one else in the household could feel.

She knocked on the door and went in without waiting for an answer. Her father was sitting at his desk, not reading. That showed his disarrangement of mind more clearly than anything else, and calmed her slightly.

He looked up when she entered, and something in his face shifted, as though something that he was waiting for had finally arrived. He looked weary — more so than she had ever seen him.

“Your family is asking for you,” she said.

“I will go to them presently,” he said, looking down at the desk.

“When?” she asked, keeping her voice even. “Mama is beside herself, and devastated even more by the belief that you are so angry with her that you cannot even look at her. Kitty is frightened. Mary has been managing all of this on her own, and she is eighteen years old and should not have had to.”

“Elizabeth.” His voice was quiet, but carried a note of warning.

It was that warning that made Elizabeth’s pain and anger overflow. Now he could take on the authority of a father, when it suited him, when it might save him from the trouble of reproach. Not when it might have done any good at all.

“I have been watching you watch this family for as long as I can remember,” Elizabeth said. Her voice sounded strange in her own ears. “Not guide or lead. Just watch, never being part of us, separate from us even when you are in the same room. Why?”

He pressed his lips together, staring down at the surface of the desk, and did not answer her.

“You are the cleverest man I know. You always have been, and no one I have yet met changes that. Yet you have used that cleverness almost entirely in the service of your own amusement, and almost never in the service of the people who depend on you.”

His head jerked up at that. “That is not the —”

“You have let Mama be ridiculous,” Elizabeth continued, ignoring his objection, “when a word from you or a moment of your attention might have steadied her. You have let Lydia run wild when you had the authority and the ability to check her. Instead, you retreat to this room and make the rest of us manage what you should be managing, because managing is considerably less entertaining than observing and laughing at the results.”

Her father said nothing, but did not look away from her.

“I have rarely asked anything of you,” Elizabeth said. To her considerable frustration, her voice was unsteady with the weight of her emotion. “I have managed. I have always managed. But Lydia is somewhere with a man who means nothing good for her, and we cannot fix it, and I do not know what to do. I don’t know what to do, Papa. And you do not help. You sit in here while we struggle to solve a problem we do not have the means to solve, and I find that I have run out of the patience required to pretend that your absence from our family has cost us nothing.”

The room was very quiet. Outside, she could hear her mother’s voice, too distant to distinguish the words, but with a note of worry in it that made her chest ache.

“You are not wrong,” her father said at last. He sat back in his chair, turning his head to stare at the fire as though he could not bear to look at her. “You are not wrong about any of that.”

“Why?” Elizabeth demanded, the desperate question tearing from her. “Why have you chosen not to be our father?”

He winced at the question, his eyes closing briefly. “I realised, many years ago, that I had made…a poor choice,” he said finally. “A choice that I could not undo, and a choice that would not lead to happiness for me. I should have… I should have found a way to make the best of it, to ensure that all of you were happy, at least.” His eyes met hers briefly, then slid away again. “Instead, I was angry. And so I withdrew, because withdrawal was easier than being present in a life that was not what I thought it would be. That was wrong, Lizzy, and it was cowardly, and I am deeply sorry that you are the one who has had to tell me this.”

Elizabeth looked at him, seeing him for the first time not as her father, but as a man — a man who had married someone wrong for him, and spent twenty-five years paying for the choice by separating himself from those who loved him and needed him.

A realisation hit her with a suddenness that stole her breath: if she married Mr Bingley, she would spend her life in the same situation. Would she do the same thing? Wall herself up in her loneliness and her isolation?

Mr Bingley was not a bad man; he was kind and good-natured, and she was genuinely fond of him. But that was not enough: she knew it was not enough, and the proof of it was sitting across a desk from her with her entire lifetime of purposefully chosen absence between them. Her mother was not unkind either. She was loving, and she did her best.

But it was not enough for her father. He had been unable to make it enough, and the whole family had grown up in the shadow of that unfulfilled need and never quite knew what was missing, only that it was something very important.

She would not do that to her own family. She could not repeat this.