Chapter 36
The complaints from Elizabeth’s family came in clusters and bursts throughout the afternoon and into dinner.
Mama had cried twice. Lydia had declared the entire situation unfair at least three times—an unfairness she applied more to herself than to Elizabeth—and Kitty had echoed the sentiment on each occasion, adding volume in both quantity and sound to her sister’s cries.
Even Papa, who rarely troubled himself to participate in domestic upheaval, made several glib comments over the remove of the fish about the wisdom of securing what one was offered rather than the folly of chasing what one fancied.
Every comment summoned a new bout of glares from Jane, which seemed to inspire a new round of tears from Mama.
Elizabeth ate little and said even less. By the time the meal ended, she was exhausted. She needed to talk to Jane, to explain her decision. She followed her sister upstairs. “Janie, a word, if you please?”
Jane sighed and pushed her door open. They sat on her bed the way they used to as little girls when they dreamed of wearing their hair up and donning long gowns.
The room smelled of the lavender, tallow, and wood polish that clung to every room in Longbourn, but to the familiar scents was added Jane’s rosewater.
Elizabeth had always found comfort in it.
She took a deep breath, feeling the tension in her muscles beginning to relax.
“Have you come to your senses, then, Lizzy?” Jane’s tone snapped, and Elizabeth’s headache returned.
“I cannot marry Mr. Wickham, Jane, and I told him so when he proposed.”
Her sister stiffened her shoulders, the set of her mouth pinched. “Then there can be nothing more for us to discuss.”
Elizabeth caught Jane’s hand before she could rise. “You could marry Mr. Bingley—”
Jane recoiled. “I would never lower myself to accept the son of a tradesman!”
Elizabeth looked at her sister’s profile and hardly recognized the woman she saw. Had Jane always been this haughty? “His fortune is from trade, yes. But he received the education of a gentleman, the same as Mr. Wickham. He is a good man, and he admires you.”
“The Darcys would never have approved such a connection for their family.” Jane smoothed her skirt with great precision. “And I have not waited all these years—waited for you to do your duty by your family—only to accept the first offer made to me by a man of no consequence or connection.”
Pride did not become Jane. It made her harsh and small, and it struck Elizabeth how quietly it had crept in, how long it might have been there without her noticing.
There was a time when Elizabeth had believed her eldest sister to be the most genuinely good person she had ever known.
Beauty had always been Jane’s most visible quality, but it was her kind heart Elizabeth had loved most. She did not recognize Jane just now.
“Besides,” her sister continued, her tone contemptuous, “I have no wish to be pitied for accepting a lesser match than my sister has secured.”
“But I have secured nothing. Mr. Darcy is dead, and I have refused Mr. Wickham.”
“For now.” Jane finally turned to look at her, a smile softening her features and giving Elizabeth a mere glimpse of the sister she knew.
“We both know you will accept him eventually. You will accept him and manage the whole affair, and we shall all be grateful, and you will be satisfied that you have once again saved us and shown us how very dependent we are on you. How capable you are! How superior!”
The claim struck like a hand across Elizabeth’s cheek.
Everything she had done—every hour spent over the estate ledgers; every conversation with tenants, buyers, and merchants; every season of planting and harvesting, of planning and worrying—she had done because no one else would do it.
And she loved her family. She wanted the best for them.
She did not desire their praise or she would not have tried to hide her activities from them.
Quietly, she answered, “You are every bit as capable as I am.”
“Am I?” Jane scoffed. “Then why is it your name on everyone’s lips? Why is it your future they are all arranging? Everything is to secure your future. Your comfort. Your benefit.”
“I have done what I could for my family. I never demanded anyone’s help!”
“No, you simply did everything yourself and let the rest of us feel our own uselessness.” Elizabeth felt like all the air had been sucked out of the room.
Body trembling, she stood from the bed, clasping her hands together to hold them steady before turning toward her sister. “You could have helped me make Longbourn more profitable. You could have learned the same things I learned. I would have been glad—proud!—to teach you.”
“I do not want to learn those things. What possible good could they bring to us? No gentleman wants a wife who thinks she can manage his estate for him.” Her face flushed, not from embarrassment, but in anger.
The same emotion flashed through Elizabeth, who bit her tongue to keep from lashing out with a biting retort.
Still, Jane’s thinking was wrong. Slowly, coolly, Elizabeth spoke.
“You accuse me of making you feel inferior, and yet you refuse to learn the very things you credit with making me capable. Which is it, Jane? Is it that I have done too much, or that you have chosen to do too little?”
Her sister’s nostrils flared, and she looked away, her chest rising and falling rapidly with shallow breaths. “You have ruined everything.”
There was nothing more to say. After crossing the room, Elizabeth paused with her hand on the door frame.
She looked back at Jane’s figure—rigid with cold sentiment, flushed with resentment and bitterness—and Elizabeth grieved the loss of her beloved, sweet sister.
“Good night, Jane.” She closed the door behind her and stood alone in the passage.
The house was quiet except for the low murmur of her mother’s voice. She would be airing her vexations to Mrs. Hill. Tired and alone, Elizabeth walked to her room, undressed, and sat in the dark by the window for a long while before she slipped into her bed.
By morning, the clouds had settled in for a campaign.
Not the dramatic, purging storms of impending winter but the low, gray, immovable kind that drained the color out of their surroundings.
Robbie was gone, and he had taken the blue sky with him.
The rain began before breakfast and did not relent.
Elizabeth was confined to Longbourn, surrounded by her family with nothing to distract them from each other.
She read—if holding up a book and periodically turning its pages could be called reading.
The words slid past her eyes and left no impression.
She was aware of the fire, of the damp cold pressing against the window glass, of her father in the chair across the room not looking at her, then looking at her, and then looking away again.
She was aware of her mother’s sighs, deployed at regular intervals like kindling to a fire.
She was aware of Lydia despairing that she would never wear a fine gown or dance at a society ball.
Kitty, who already held similar fears, grew in distress as Lydia added laments Kitty had not yet considered.
More than the others, she was aware of Jane’s disapproving frown, as though Elizabeth’s existence in the same room was the sole source of her vexation.
She raised the book to hide her face and pressed her eyes shut for a moment.
She had watched a friend leave. He had walked out the door with his few belongings and his quiet dignity, and she had not been able to say a single word to him.
Now he was gone entirely to some unknown destination, and she feared their paths might never cross again.
Why should they? He would find employment elsewhere or return to the continent; she would wait to learn what future awaited her at Pemberley.
The world that had briefly placed them under the same roof would simply carry them to different corners of it with no consideration for their hearts.
She sniffed and held her book higher. She would not cry in the drawing room.
Mary began a new piece. The notes played in her mind long after Mary finished her practice, the image of Robbie leaving forever tangled and attached to the piece.
On the second day the rain fell heavier. Papa asked Elizabeth to join him in his library. She started toward her desk but then remembered how often she had seen Robbie occupying it and could not bear to disturb the memory. Instead, she sat in the chair opposite her father and waited.
“Mr. Wickham has been good enough to offer his company on our journey north,” he said, without preamble. “There is no reason why we should not benefit from his protection since we must all go to Pemberley, and so I accepted his offer.”
Well, then you may marry him, she thought. Three days in a carriage with Mr. Wickham. Three days of his easy smiles, light conversation, and deliberate pursuit, her decided refusal ignored as if she could be persuaded otherwise. “Did you suggest this arrangement, or did he?” she asked.
“He did.” Of course. What else would she expect—that her father would take the initiative for once? Elizabeth bit her lips and tried to gain control of her impertinent thoughts. They would do nothing to improve her situation.
Papa continued, “He hopes, and it is a hope I also entertain, that you only lack more time in his company to see clearly how you must proceed.”
“Papa,” she kept her voice level, “I have told you my answer regarding Mr. Wickham. I will not change my mind.” Her mother and younger sisters believed she was still considering the offer, but she had told her father the truth of the matter.
“And I have told you that I do not believe you have given him proper consideration.” He sighed deeply, the bone-weary sigh of a person too exhausted to argue. “I am trying to secure your future, Lizzy. All of your futures. I am doing what I can.”
“I know it.” And she did know it, which made it so much harder to stand by her decision. “But I cannot change my heart by wishing it otherwise. I do not think you would truly wish me to.” She watched him, wanting more than anything for him to wish for her happiness more than anything else.
He studied her for a long moment. Then he picked up a letter from his desk and said, “Wickham will meet us at the coaching inn at seven. We depart at half past.” That was that, then. Thus dismissed, she rose, smoothed her skirt, and returned to the hall.
That night, her packing already done for a trip she now dreaded, Elizabeth sat at her window and pressed her forehead against the cool pane. The rain streaked down the glass in long, crooked lines. She reached out to trace one and thought of the sea.
Robbie had described the Mediterranean Sea to her—bright blue and enormous and nothing like anything in Hertfordshire, nothing like anything she had ever seen.
He had described learning to swim in it, and she had laughed and demanded to know why anyone with sense would willingly submerge themselves in the ocean.
His eyes had creased at the corners, and he had said, very seriously, that once you stopped fighting the water and let it hold you, there was nothing in the world like it.
She could nearly hear his voice. She could nearly see his smile—the particular one, not the polite one he wore for the household, but the one that arrived slowly, as though it had considered the matter and decided she was worth it.
She let herself dream for a little while.
The blue water. His hands steadying her once she convinced him to teach her to swim.
The impossible lightness of floating as he had described it. Then she let the dream go.
Tomorrow she would climb into a carriage with her father and Mr. Wickham, and she would be carried north toward a life she had been thrust into with no say of her own in the matter.
She did not know what she would find there.
She did not know what the will contained or who the heir would prove to be or what would become of her.
She knew only that she was very tired, that she missed someone she had no right to miss, and that the rain showed no sign of stopping. She extinguished her candle, lay down in the dark, and listened to it fall.