Chapter 44
Elizabeth watched the blurred landscape through the carriage window. Beside her, Charlotte sat silently with her hands folded and her eyes forward. Across from them, Father sat with his hat on his knee and his gaze fixed on the floor.
He had not said a word since Pemberley’s gate.
After an hour, when the last of the park had given way to the open road, he cleared his throat.
Elizabeth waited. “I owe you an apology,” he said, raising his eyes to hers.
“Several, if I am being thorough.” She did not answer.
She had learned, from long experience, that her father rarely said the difficult thing first. “I have leaned on you since you wore your hair in braids, convincing myself that it was a compliment.” He turned his hat slowly in his hands.
“I told myself that you were capable—which you are—and that you preferred useful work to idle accomplishment—which you do. I told myself these things, not because I was a forward-thinking father allowing my daughter greater independence for her benefit, but because they allowed me to do less.” He sighed.
“I was wrong to do it. Selfish. I have known it for some time and found it more comfortable not to say so. Or to change.”
Elizabeth looked at him—truly looked, the way she had not permitted herself to do since the customs officer arrived at Longbourn and her father had sat in his chair and let the world fall in. What she saw was not the man she had been angry at for weeks. He looked smaller than she remembered. Older.
“I handled Robinson badly,” he continued.
“I treated him with contempt and then threw him out of the house for doing what any decent man would do. And I did not know who he was, which I suppose makes it worse rather than better, because it means my judgment of him was entirely my own.” He laughed—a dry, scornful sound.
“I have been a very poor judge of men this year. Of Wickham in particular.”
“Papa—”
“I am not finished.” He said it firmly. “I have no counsel to offer you about what you ought to decide. I forfeited that right some time ago. I only want you to know that whatever you decide, I will not use your family against you as I have in the past. Not your mother, not your sisters, not our debts or our difficulties or the fact that I have managed nothing and left everything to you. You will decide your own future, Lizzy. I believe you are the only person here who has earned the right to do so.”
Elizabeth pressed her lips together. She was not going to cry in the carriage. She had decided this firmly.
She was very nearly about to cry in the carriage.
“I am proud of you,” he said.
Her tears came then, fast and freely flowing.
His voice cracked. “I have always been proud of you. I do not deserve to have you as a daughter.”
She reached across and covered his hand with hers.
He looked down at it and then out the window, and they did not speak again for some time, which was, Elizabeth thought, for the best. The moment was too perfect to ruin with words.
His conscience thus unburdened, he fell soundly asleep before they reached the next village.
Charlotte waited until his breathing deepened and steadied, then shifted slightly toward Elizabeth. “What do you mean to do about Mr. Robinson?” she asked.
“I do not know.” Elizabeth knew the topic would not have been raised unless her friend had come to some logical conclusions. If Charlotte could help Elizabeth sort her tangled thoughts, she welcomed the insight. “Say what you need to say.”
Charlotte considered for a moment, carefully examining her perceptions once more before expressing them.
“He put himself in an impossible position the moment he chose to help you. Had he told you who he was when Wickham arrived, your family would have seized on the revelation and pushed for an immediate marriage. Your father would have had you both in front of a parson within the week.”
“I know it.”
“He kept his secret because telling it would have cost you your choice. That is not the behavior of a man who does not respect you.”
Elizabeth looked at the window. The glass was fogged at the edges, and the country beyond it was flat and gray and unremarkable, and she was glad of it.
She did not want anything beautiful to look at just now.
Not when she felt so bleak. “He advised me against bitterness,” she said.
“He told me resentment harms the bearer more than it harms its source. That he had learned it from his own experience.” She was quiet for a moment.
“I understand now what he meant.” Charlotte said nothing, just listened patiently.
“I am not angry at him,” Elizabeth said, and was surprised to find that it was true.
“I am…” She searched for the right word.
“I am frightened. Of being wrong. I was so certain I understood Robinson, and I did not know the most important thing about him. What else do I not know?”
“Everything that comes after,” Charlotte said simply. “Which is true of everyone. You are not less certain of him than any woman is certain of any man she agrees to marry. You are simply more aware of your uncertainty, which I would argue is an advantage.”
Elizabeth turned this over. Outside, the road ran through a bare wood—skeleton trees on either side, the occasional crow.
The carriage swayed in the familiar rhythm she had grown accustomed to, and the letter in her pocket pressed against her side with a weight out of all proportion to its size.
She had not opened it. She was not sure why, only that opening it had felt like the next thing, and she had not yet been ready for that.
Until now. She was ready now. She broke the seal.
The handwriting was not what she expected. She had anticipated the formal script of Mr. Wrayburn detailing her role in Mr. Darcy’s will, but this was scratchy, personal, written with great effort by a tired hand.
Miss Bennet,
Pray, take pity on a dead man and read this letter with an open mind and compassionate heart. I promise I will ask nothing more from you, not being alive to do so.
I owe you an apology to which I will give some explanation so that you can understand the motivation behind my choices and my son’s actions. This I reveal to you with the express purpose of swaying your opinion in his favor.
When you were eight years old, I decided your future because I saw something in you that I did not see in the daughters of families far above yours in rank and connection.
You stood between a cruel man and someone weaker, and you did not calculate the cost first. I have met very few people of any age or station who act before they calculate, and fewer still who act rightly when they do.
I told myself I was doing you a service.
I have come to understand that I was doing myself one.
I wanted that quality for my son and for Pemberley, and I took the most direct route to securing it without sufficient regard for whether you wished to be secured.
For this, I must apologize. You deserved to be asked.
I will tell you what I can about my son, because I suspect he will not tell you himself—not because he is incapable of speech, but because he does not know how to speak well of himself, which is a fault I must own as largely mine. I regret that I did not praise him much, if at all.
He left England at eighteen years of age because I had given him no reason to stay.
I had favored another boy's company over his own, rewarded another's accomplishments while finding fault with his, and when he finally defied me in the matter of your arrangement, I called it rebellion when it was, in fact, the most honorable thing he had ever done.
He was willing to forfeit everything he stood to inherit in order to give you your freedom.
I was too proud to see it as anything other than defiance.
He defended another before calculating the cost fully, and he was right to do so. The irony is not lost on me now.
By the time I understood my error, he was gone. And then he was so thoroughly gone—a different name, a different life, a different country—that I realized how completely I had driven him to erase me from his life. That moment, when he forsook his name, brought me to my senses.
I watched him, as best I could, through Reynolds and through friends on the continent.
I watched him build a life from nothing and earn the trust of men who owed him nothing.
He became someone I would have been proud to claim had I been wiser earlier.
I cannot take credit for any of it. He became the man he is despite me, not because of me.
My regret is that I will not see him again. By the time you read this, I will be gone, and the conversation I owed him will remain unfinished on my side. I am sorry for that too. I would have told him how proud of him I have been these many years.
I am not writing to tell you what to decide.
I have made enough decisions on your behalf already.
I am writing to tell you that my son is worthy of the chance I did not give him.
If the years have made him anything like the young man I watched from a careful distance, he will spend the rest of his life proving himself to be a worthy husband.
That is all I know how to offer you. That, and the assurance that he was loved, even when I did not know how to say so.
Yours, with apology and hope,
George Darcy
Elizabeth folded the letter with care, dabbing her eyes dry with her handkerchief and looking blankly out the fogged window.
She thought about the regret of a man who had died before he could finish the most important conversation of his life.
She thought about eighteen-year-old Fitzwilliam Darcy, leaving his ring on his father’s desk and walking out of a house he would not see for ten years.
She thought about her own father, asleep across from her with his hat on his knee and his hands open in his lap, finally saying the things she had needed to hear him say for a long time.
Things Robbie would never hear from his own father.
She thought about Robbie. For you, I would wait longer. She did not know when she would see him again. She did not know if he would follow her or give her the full, patient, endless space he had offered. She hoped that he would not be too patient.
She thought he would understand. She thought he understood most things about her, which was both unsettling and comforting.
Longbourn still needed her. The seed money, the accounts, her uncles…
There was real work ahead before she could think of anything else.
She would not go to Darcy with her hand out.
Her pride would not permit it, and her judgment agreed with her pride for once.
She would see her family established and would earn the ground under her own feet before she stood on his.
But after that… After that, she thought, and for the first time in her life, she let herself imagine it without immediately reaching for an objection.
Charlotte, who had been looking out the window with the absolute captivation of a woman seeing something fascinating in a cloudy, gray field, said quietly, “Well?”
Elizabeth tucked the letter into her pocket. “Ask me again,” she said, “when we are home.”
Charlotte turned from the window. “Of course,” she said, and looked back out at the countryside rolling past.
Elizabeth leaned her head against the glass, closed her eyes, and let the carriage carry her home.