Chapter Eleven The Letter from Jane
It arrived on Thursday, the fifth day.
She was at breakfast with her aunt when the letters came, and she knew by the handwriting on the outside that it was Jane before she opened it, and she felt the small warm recognition she always felt when she saw Jane's hand, because Jane wrote with the particular careful neatness of someone who thought about the person who was going to read the letter while they were writing it and wanted the experience of reading to be pleasant.
She opened it.
She read the first page.
She looked up from the letter. Her aunt was watching her over the rim of her own correspondence with the quiet attention of a woman who had seen something shift in her niece's face.
"Is everything well at Longbourn?" her aunt asked.
"Quite well at Longbourn," Elizabeth said. Her voice had its ordinary quality. She was very good at giving her voice its ordinary quality when she needed to.
She read the rest.
Jane's letter had the characteristic of its author, which was that it communicated difficult information in the kindest possible sequence.
The kindest possible sequence, in this case, was: the Netherfield party had been in town for several weeks.
Miss Bingley had called once on Jane in London, briefly, and had made clear by the warmth of the once and the absence of a second time that the friendship was not going to be continued on any basis Jane might have hoped for.
And Bingley. Bingley had not written. Bingley had not called.
The absence had the shape and duration of something that had been decided rather than something that had simply not yet happened.
Jane wrote this without bitterness, which was the most painful possible way to write it.
She wrote that she did not blame anyone and saw no reason to assign fault where the situation might simply be one of those things that appeared promising and resolved differently, and the careful, deliberate lack of bitterness in every sentence was the truest thing about the letter, which was that Jane was telling the truth about the facts and absolutely not telling the truth about what it had cost her to receive them.
Elizabeth set the letter down.
She sat for a moment with the specific kind of stillness that preceded the kind of anger she permitted herself only when anger was the accurate response and she was quite certain she had all the available facts. She was assembling the available facts.
Bingley had withdrawn. The withdrawal had been managed by silence rather than communication, which was the mode of withdrawal that was both technically blameless and most specifically unkind. The Netherfield party had been in London. Darcy had been in London.
She thought about the ball. She thought about Bingley's face at the ball, which had been the face of a man who knew exactly where he wanted to be and found himself there.
She thought about Darcy's face at the ball, the expression she had not been able to read, the one that arrived when he looked from her family to her, and which she had thought at the time might be judgment.
She had been right, she thought, that it was judgment. She had been wrong about what it had been judgment of.
He had interfered. She did not have evidence of this in any form she could produce to a reasonable observer.
She had the sequence: Netherfield party in London, Bingley withdrawing, the timing, the specific completeness of the silence.
She had the intelligence she had observed in the library and in the bookshop and in every conversation she had been compelled to have with the man, and she applied that intelligence now to the question of whether it was credible that he had not seen what Bingley's feelings were, and what he might have thought of the Bennet family's suitability to receive them.
She thought of the Netherfield ball. She thought of Mrs. Bennet's voice at a volume that had carried to the room's far corners.
She thought: yes. It is credible that he interfered.
She thought: and the bookshop does not change this.
She thought: a man can be worth forty minutes of conversation about geological time and still be capable of separating a man she loved from a woman she loved.
These things were true simultaneously. She held them simultaneously. She was very good at holding difficult things.
What she was less good at, and knew she was less good at, was holding them without the frame she had built in the Meryton assembly passage, which had the effect of making Darcy's interference with Bingley something she received as confirmation of a character she had already determined, rather than as new information to be weighed alongside everything else.
She knew this about herself. She was aware of it. She was aware of it with the specific and somewhat futile quality of awareness that you had of the things you did that you could see clearly and were doing anyway.
She picked up the letter again and read it a third time.
Jane, she thought. Jane who did not blame anyone and saw no reason to assign fault.
Jane who was in London being graciously managed out of Bingley's life by a woman whose hostility she had always been too kind to correctly identify, and Jane who had written to Elizabeth rather than to their mother because she knew their mother's response and could not afford to receive it right now.
"I think," she said to her aunt, in the ordinary voice, "that I may need to write some letters this afternoon."
"Of course," her aunt said. She did not ask what the letters were about, which was one of the reasons Elizabeth loved her.
She wrote to Jane. She wrote carefully, because Jane needed care right now more than she needed Elizabeth's unfiltered response to the situation, which was not what careful looked like.
She wrote warmth and steadiness and the specific reassurance of a sister who was not going to pretend this was not what it was but was also not going to make it worse.
She did not write: I think Darcy is responsible.
She wrote: I think time will show the situation more clearly, which was true if not the whole truth.
She wrote to her father's request about a second book, because she had promised to find it.
She did not write anything about the bookshop.
She had known, walking home from it, that there was a sentence she would leave out of the account she gave her family, and she knew what the sentence was: that she had spent forty minutes with Darcy in a conversation that had been more genuinely interesting than anything she had experienced in six months, and that she had laughed in a way she had not laughed in a room with a man in she could not exactly calculate how long.
She left the sentence out. She was leaving it out now and she would continue to leave it out, because the sentence did not fit the frame and the frame was what she had decided and she was keeping the decision.
She thought: I decided in a passage in Meryton and I have decided again now, on the evidence I have about Bingley, and these decisions are consistent with each other, and consistent decisions built on real observation are not prejudice.
She thought this firmly.
She thought: Charlotte's letter.
Charlotte had written three weeks ago with the formal repetition of her invitation to Hunsford in March.
Elizabeth had accepted it then in a quick, grateful impulse toward distance from Hertfordshire.
She had been less certain of it since. Hunsford meant Collins, and Collins was a daily tax on her patience that she was not sure she had the budget for at present.
But Hunsford also meant Charlotte, and Charlotte had said something at the breakfast table in Longbourn that had not stopped sitting in the back of Elizabeth's mind since: that some of us can only afford to find it manageable.
She thought Charlotte might have more useful things to say at present than she was prepared to hear here, from a safe distance, in a letter.
She sealed Jane's letter.
She looked at the window of the Gracechurch Street sitting room, which gave onto the street and its London life moving past it with the indifference of a city that had other things to concern itself with than one woman's particular arrangement of thoughts.
She thought about the enclosure of common land.
She stopped thinking about the enclosure of common land.
She went downstairs and told her aunt she would be very glad of the walk her aunt had mentioned yesterday, and they went out into the February afternoon, and Elizabeth attended to the city and her aunt's conversation and the cold air on her face with the deliberate application of a woman who had decided to be present in the world she was in and not the one she was thinking about.
It worked, more or less, for the length of the walk.
On the coach back to Longbourn two days later, she sat with Jane's letter in her lap, which she had read four times now and which had not changed on any of the readings, and she looked out at the winter landscape moving past the window and composed in her head the account she would give her father of London.
The lecture. The Gardiners. The city in February and its specific quality of life.
She thought about the forty minutes.
She thought: I will not mention the bookshop.
She looked out at the hedgerows and the pale winter fields and the familiar landscape of home reassembling itself on all sides of the coach, and she felt it close around her with the combination of warmth and constriction that home always had, and she held the sentence she was not saying and the letter on her lap and the forty minutes that she was not thinking about, and arrived at Longbourn ready to be glad to be there and finding, at the moment of arrival, that she was.
This was what she was good at.
She was very good at it.