Chapter 18 #2
“And you found yourself with child.” Elizabeth shook her head. “My dear sweet sister. But all is well now, is it not?”
Jane was silent.
The gaiety beneath them had begun to sound frantic. There were more crashes—was Mr Bingley tossing the plates to the floor on purpose?—more laughter, the conversations between the remaining guests rising into high-pitched nothingness.
“It must have been devastating to your purpose when his sisters prohibited you from seeing him. You could hardly begin knocking on the door of bachelor residences,” Elizabeth added. “I wish I could have been with you but…why did you lie? What did Mama mean by this?”
Still Jane said nothing, her eyes kept lowered.
There was something in her aspect, some terrible possibility that led Elizabeth to ask, “You were with child, Jane, were you not? Our aunt said that even though there had been bleeding, you might still…” Elizabeth’s voice died away as she beheld her sister slowly shaking her head.
“There was never any baby?”
Jane could barely emit the required syllable. “No.”
“No?” Elizabeth reeled backwards. “But…but you said it had quickened!”
Jane’s face was growing increasingly pale, but all it seemed she would do was shake her head. She certainly was not meeting her sister’s gaze.
“The letters you wrote to me! You filled me with such dread…I thought surely we were sunk!”
A small sob escaped her sister who remained with her head bowed. “I am sorry, Lizzy, so very sorry, particularly now that I see that mine is not the only marriage that has resulted.”
The understanding of that hit her almost forcibly.
Yes, she had chosen to marry Darcy, but how could she have refused him?
Not when he had done so much for her, for all of the Bennets.
His exertions may not have been wholly needful, but the honour of his triumph ought not ever to be lessened by the lies which provoked it.
“And our mother has known the entire time? Or did she truly believe there was a child?”
Jane sniffled, and pressed her lace handkerchief to her eyes, plainly trying to control herself.
It provoked an uncommon feeling in Elizabeth, at least where Jane was concerned: vexation.
Why was she crying? She got what she wanted, had she not?
Elizabeth inhaled deeply to control the pulse of anger, knowing it did no one any good.
“Our mother knew,” Jane said with quiet despair. “It…much of it was her idea, but I would not have you think I blame her.”
“Her idea?”
“I had my courses when I left Longbourn,” Jane told her.
“I had confided in her about my fears over that long December of waiting to learn if there would be consequences from the ball. When my courses came, I went to her, very relieved. She was…not as pleased as I should have imagined. And there the scheme was begun.”
“The scheme,” Elizabeth said numbly. “The scheme to deceive Mr Bingley into thinking you were with child.”
Jane nodded. Elizabeth rose and walked slowly to the window. The bedchamber overlooked the street where there stood two very elegant carriages, carriages that would take them away from Gracechurch Street and on to their new homes.
“I am sorry, Lizzy, so very sorry to deceive you.”
Deceit. Elizabeth hardly knew how she felt about that. She and Jane had always told each other everything. And in this, the biggest secret either of them had ever owned, Jane not only did not tell her, she lied to her outright.
“Did you not think I would help you find him regardless?” Even as she spoke the words, Elizabeth knew she might not have. She might have encouraged Jane to turn her eye elsewhere, to put Mr Bingley behind her.
“My mother did not,” said Jane. “Particularly once you wrote that Mr Darcy had come to Kent. Mama thought he might at least tell you where to find Bingley, if you believed it desperate.”
“And so I did,” Elizabeth echoed softly.
She raised a hand to cover her mouth again, still staring at the street below.
A more singularly-minded matron did not exist than Mrs Bennet, but never could she have imagined her concocting a scheme like this one.
Nor could she have imagined that Jane would be a willing participant in it.
“What about your new husband? He will surely notice it if you do not produce a child in the next months.”
“I told him there may have been some troubles,” Jane admitted. “That the child might have been lost. I did offer to release him if he wished it.”
“Clearly he declined that offer.”
“He did,” said Jane. “He made some joke about not wishing to back out now lest you hunt him down.”
The two sisters fell silent until Jane said, “Should I tell him the truth?”
Elizabeth gave a bitter, scoffing laugh. “Would you ever have told me the truth? Had I never found the letters, would I simply have remained in ignorance?”
“Oh, Lizzy!” Jane rose and came to stand behind her. “Pray do not despise me, for I do not think I could bear it.”
It was not an answer and yet it was. No, Jane had not intended for her to ever know the truth. Not intentionally, at any rate. It was a painful realisation.
It was a most peculiar feeling, the sense of life having gone utterly topsy-turvy.
She had just married Darcy. She was falling in love with Darcy.
And Jane and their mother had proved false in a grievous and egregious manner.
She lay her forehead on the cool glass before her and closed her eyes, wishing for something she knew not how to name.
“Lizzy?” Jane was still behind her, still sounding uncertain.
“I do not know what is to gain from telling Mr Bingley,” said Elizabeth, her eyes still closed.
And it was true: Mr Bingley had been tricked, thoroughly tricked, but at the basis of the trickery was truth.
He had lain claim to Jane’s virtue, no matter that Mrs Bennet had encouraged it, and he ought to have married her, baby or not.
Alas, if Mr Bennet’s treatment of their mother over the years was any indication, marriages which began as lustful missteps did not lead to mutually respectful and loving unions. There was already a chance of unhappiness, but if Bingley learnt he had been lied to, it would surely become certain.
“You have followed our mother’s lead into a marriage that I dearly hope will not turn out to be styled after hers. I cannot think you would be happy in that.”
“I never meant it to go this way,” Jane said sorrowfully. “If only he had not stayed away! Then none of this would have happened!”
Elizabeth stiffened and opened her eyes. Such a statement could only enhance her ill feeling. It seemed Jane meant to blame others, not herself; it seemed she, and likely their mother too, had persuaded themselves that they had been required to do as they did.
“I daresay we must all look ahead, not behind,” she said briskly, stepping away from the window and her sister’s nearness.
“And if there was not a child, it does not change the fact that there might have been. He took your virtue, Jane, and he has paid accordingly. I only hope it is not a payment that he charges to your debt in the years to come.”
“He had been very kind these past two weeks, but now he has spent the first hours of our marriage drinking himself to near insensibility at his own wedding breakfast.”
“It is not an auspicious beginning to be sure,” Elizabeth owned. “Perhaps it is a sign that he has done what he did not wish to do, or perhaps he is simply the sort of man who drinks at his own wedding breakfast.”
“That is the worst of it,” Jane cried out.
“I shall look at him every day for the rest of my life and I shall not know whether he is happy or whether he is enduring, and I despise that. We are married, and I love him. I do love him, that at least is perfectly true. I loved him before and I love him now, and now I cannot…” She trailed off, giving her sister a hopeless look, no doubt wishing for Elizabeth to heal the wounds that she herself had inflicted.
More gently than she felt, Elizabeth said, “I do believe he loved you too, and what remains of that love is within him still. It might be a little or it might be substantial; it will be up to you to stir it up within him, to feed and nourish it into a fine, stout love.”
Jane met her sister’s gaze and nodded. They were two sisters who had shared a wedding day and who stepped into futures unknown.
One had married a man who loved her, even if she did not love him; one had married a man she loved, but with knowing not if he ever loved her or could fall in love with her again.
Elizabeth’s home, she was confident, would be happy.
How the Bingley home might fare was less certain.
“Our husbands await us, Jane,” Elizabeth said. “Let us not tarry any longer.”