Chapter 29
Aknock disturbed Elizabeth’s reverie over the ashes. It was Mrs Hobbs. “Mrs Bingley has called.”
“Oh. Yes, of course. Tell her I shall meet her directly.”
Elizabeth washed her face and tidied her hair before going to her sister, but Jane immediately cried out over Elizabeth’s shocking appearance anyway. “Oh, never mind me.” Elizabeth waved off her concern. “All is well, Jane, I assure you.”
“Lizzy, I declare you were insensible when Bingley found you yesterday. I had to come see for myself how you were and tell you our plan for Caroline.”
“Oh, I could not care two straws for Caroline.” Elizabeth rolled her eyes. “What a foolish chit she is though! Who would start gossip about their own ruination?”
“No one will have her now. Louisa is finished, and so are we. Neither is she wanted in Scarborough, so she will need to form her own establishment, somewhere away from all of us.”
“As long as she knows she cannot come near me,” said Elizabeth. “I care not where she is.”
By the time Jane departed, two more letters awaited Elizabeth in her bedchamber. She smiled, thinking it could never be said that her husband lacked industry—once he had set himself to a task, he would finish it.
This time, she chose to first read what she had written to him.
He had included two of her letters, ones she had written shortly after arriving in Yorkshire but had never sent.
She could see her efforts at good cheer in the first part of the letters, but knew well how thin that disguise had been.
She had been miserable, scared, and lonely in those days, and reading her own words brought back much of that feeling.
Approximately halfway through the letter, she had dropped her pretence and had written to him honestly.
My dear husband, although I am making every effort to endure this situation between us and assume you know what is best for our marital felicity, I must put aside my resolve to accept this state for just a few moments and tell you what is truly in my heart.
I love you so much, and I beseech you, with all of my heart, to please let me come home to you.
I beg you. I cannot live without you, and each day I am without your love, I die a bit more.
Please allow me to come back to you, and please allow me to mend whatever has caused this rift between us.
I shall do anything you wish, but please, please do not make me stay away from you.
Reading her impassioned plea caused Elizabeth to swallow hard and wipe away a tear from her eye, but it was not sadness that threatened to overcome her—it was rage.
How wretched a creature she had been, wishing only to return home!
She had not sent this one, it was true, but many others just like it had been sent and disregarded.
She had put away all pride and dignity, had thrown herself on his mercy, yet he had had none for her. She trembled with her anger.
Odious, vicious man, how could he do this to me! Am I nothing at all? Could he have not simply answered me? He never had, not any of the letters I wrote, and that was why I stopped sending them!
She had gone to him, still with all the love in her heart, and begged and pleaded for clemency, yet he was unmoved! She was so young—only twenty—and he had sworn to protect and cherish her, yet this was what he did to her.
Shaking with an anger that increased by the moment, she rose and paced, attempting to calm herself, but she simply could not.
Her breath came fast and her heart pounded with fury, and she thought that if Darcy had presented himself to her at that moment, she might tear him limb from limb. How dare he!
At last, she went to her writing desk. If Darcy wished to hide behind his desk and write, then she would answer in kind. She yanked a piece of paper from her escritoire with a violent force that caused two additional sheets to fly to the ground beneath her.
Fury caused her hand to shake, but she disregarded it, writing fast and pressing hard enough to break her pen.
She sometimes pierced the paper with her anger.
Ink blotted and blotched haphazardly over her words as she filled three sheets with her venom.
She then sanded the sheets carelessly, the fine grit scattering over the desk and onto her skirts and the floor.
When at last it was done, she sat back, feeling spent. There were tears on her face that she irritably wiped with the back of her hand, causing ink, which had blotched on her skin, to smear across her cheek. She did not care.
She looked over the letter, which was nearly incoherent and mostly illegible.
It did not matter though, for the gist of it was communicated in nearly every sentence, over and over again: how dare he disregard her.
That was all. She simply could not stand the fact that he had chosen to ignore her cries and her pleas.
She could not tolerate the fact that her begging and her debasing of herself had gone so entirely unheeded, to the extent that he had not even troubled himself to open the letter.
She had suffered so enormously, and he had…
well, she did not know what he had done.
In her mind’s eye, he had sat silent and haughty, mocking her in her anguish, staring at her with that inscrutable gaze as he had so often in those hated months.
She burnt with helpless, unmitigated fury imagining his implacable, disdainful gaze.
At that hapless moment, Darcy chose to knock on her door.
Darcy permitted himself to rise from his desk once he had completed his replies to four of Elizabeth’s letters.
He had to admit, it was not easy going, and he was quite fatigued from the effort.
In reading her words, he had often felt as though he might become sick with the unbearable agony of witnessing her suffering.
More than once, he had wept, furtive and ashamed of himself, yet wondering at his own embarrassment; after all, a few tears were nothing to what she had endured.
Although he had always before felt a vague understanding of her suffering, as he read, he forced himself to truly consider her, imagining her fear and worry and the sadness that must have consumed her.
At several junctures, he had sat back, utterly dispirited and certain that he could do nothing that would ever redeem him in her eyes, nor create in her a desire to love him again.
Then he would rally his spirits, thinking of the time they had kissed, when she had caressed his hand, and how she had invited him to sleep with her.
In spite of it all, she still loved him, extraordinary as that seemed.
Love would triumph over his pride and his foolishness—or so he hoped.
Thus, he continued on, reading and thinking and writing.
He knew she had received the first letter in the morning, as he had placed it there himself. The other two he laid in her room while Elizabeth was with her sister, and the fourth, he decided, he would hand to her in hopes they could speak.
When Elizabeth bid him enter, he found her at the small escritoire on the side of the room. She was silent and still as she looked at him and appeared out of breath.
“Are you well?” he asked. “You seem flushed.”
“I am well.” Her voice sounded strained and tight.
“Did you read my letters?”
“Just the one so far. I…I thank you for what you are doing. I appreciate the effort.”
She looked at her lap, her fingers tightly clutching a sheaf of papers in her hand, papers that seemed to be a letter but were written so untidily he could not fathom who could have sent them.
They were as blotted and blotched as the worst of Bingley’s had ever been.
The tips of Elizabeth’s fingers were white from the tight grip she had on the papers, and he noticed she had ink on her face.
He went to a nearby chair and sat. He wanted to talk to her, but the tension and anxiety were so thick in the air, he was paralysed under the weight of them. They did not speak for several agonising moments, and he searched his mind frantically for something to say to break the silence.
Suddenly, she burst out, “You rejected me!” She glared at him fiercely, her eyes on his.
For a moment, he was confused; had he missed something in the conversation? Then he opened his mouth to speak, but she spoke before he could, her voice accusing and relentless.
“How dare you? How. Dare. You?! Did you not see that you were killing me? You did not care! Not at all! You rejected me completely! Look at this!” She waved the pages at him, neither realising nor caring that they were the ones she had just written and not one of her letters from Yorkshire.
“I begged you for relief! Begged! No dignity nor pride was left to me. I threw myself at your feet, begging for a chance to rectify matters, and you rejected me!” Her voice rose to a shriek on ‘me’ and she leapt to her feet and began to pace before him.
“I know, and I am so—”
“I hardly care what you are! You could not even trouble yourself to read my words—my jagged, horribly painful words—and I was in so…so much pain, and you disregarded me!”
“I—”
“It always must be exactly your way, is that not it? Are my wishes in this matter a concern? Not at all! You said go, and I went, you said come, and here I am. You keep saying you want me to yell and scream and tell you I hate you. Well, get ready, because here it is—I HATE YOU! I hate you, I hate you, I hate you. You neglected me, and you disregarded my pain and my begging and my pleading, and I hate the very sight of you because of it! You are the last man in the world I ever should have married, and I deeply regret the day that I did.”
Darcy could not speak, frozen in shock and horror at what she had said. He could only watch her silently.
“Do you have any idea, any idea at all, how terrible it was? That Nelson lady could not even look at me, and I blamed myself, always wondering what was wrong with me. I thought of what I must have done, how greatly I had failed as a wife. I was so ashamed, and I was so very afraid! I could not speak to my family—I was too humiliated by my stupidity, and my father must have known it would be this way all along! I was nothing, throwing myself at your feet and begging for your mercy, yet you looked away from me. You did not care, you just looked away.”
“I did—”
“No, you did not! I was terrified! I was so happy to know I was with child, and you rejected him too. You abandoned me, pregnant and alone, and then I walked alone through the darkest night there ever was! I was sure highwaymen or vicious animals would be upon me at any moment, and I shook with the fear of it the entire way! Sixteen miles! Do you know how long that is?”
“Yes and I…” Stupidly, Darcy attempted to reach out to her, and she slapped his arm aside violently.
“Now you want to reach out to me? Do you know how many times, I wished I was dead? If not for Bennet, I would surely have ended my own life. That is how I felt, that is where my wishes were. Bennet saved my life. If not for him, you would be a widower, so how does that strike you? Answer me!”
He opened his mouth to speak, but she did not permit him to do so.
“Do not speak! I do not care to hear you, just as you did not care to hear me, not as I stood before you and not as I wrote to you, letter after letter after letter! And now you have the unmitigated audacity to tell me you love me? Well, go back to university because”—her voice hitched, and she began to cry—“you do not know what that word means!”
Weeping angrily, she began gathering up all the various papers in the room: her letters from Yorkshire, his two still unopened letters, the blotched papers in her hand, some scraps on the floor. Not looking at him, she said, “Do you know how I spent my days?”
She took the papers, which shook in her hands, and walked to the fireplace, tossing them into the flames with a force that caused several of the papers to fly back out. She took the poker and stabbed at them viciously, forcing them into destruction.
“I walked and I cried. That is all I did, walk and cry and cry and walk until I was tired enough to sleep, and then I slept until I woke and walked and cried some more. I never knew such a state of pure despair and utter hopelessness could exist. So of course I left. Why would I not leave? I had nothing more to lose.”
Darcy could not speak a word; his chest was tight, and his throat was closed, understanding what pain she had suffered, and knowing with surety that his wife rightly despised him and there was nothing left between them but anger and hatred.
He tried to think of something he might say to her, but there was just nothing that could matter.
He was condemned to sit in silent agony, wordlessly begging her forgiveness for all the hurt he had known was within her, yet was shocked to witness just the same.
He rose from the chair, intending to at least stand near her, retrieve a handkerchief for her, something… Without looking at him, she held out her hand in a ‘stop’ motion, so he stopped and instead stood silently watching her.
As the papers burned, her tears stopped, and she seemed to become enshrouded in a terrible, silent calm. Quietly she said, “I offered you everything I had—my heart, my mind, my soul, and my body—and you threw it away like nothing.” Her words were accusatory, but her tone was detached.
He opened his mouth to apologise or protest or something, but she saw it and said, “Please do not speak. There is nothing you will say that can make this different.”
So he closed his mouth once again and watched with her until all of the pages were nearly entirely consumed, then turning, she said, “Please leave me now. I need to be alone awhile.”
Darcy felt like he might be ill. “Elizabeth, please, could we—”
“I need to be alone right now.” She enunciated very clearly through what seemed to be gritted teeth. “Just go.”
He nodded quickly and rose. She had turned from him and was staring at the rug beneath her feet.
He looked at her for a moment but could think of nothing to say, and so he left.