Chapter Sixteen The Letter
She came downstairs for breakfast to find that he had gone.
This was Charlotte's information, delivered over the teacups with the careful absence of inflection that Charlotte used when she was managing the space around a subject rather than the subject itself.
Mr. Darcy had called early, before the household was properly assembled, and had left a letter with the housemaid for Miss Bennet, and had departed for Rosings without coming in.
Elizabeth received this. She received it with the composed quality she had spent a great deal of the previous night assembling, which meant it was not quite natural yet but was close enough to pass.
She took the letter.
She did not open it immediately. She ate her breakfast, or produced the performance of eating her breakfast, and she attended to Maria's description of the previous afternoon's excursion to the village and to Mr. Collins's opinions on the weather and to Charlotte's quiet, precise management of the morning, and she did all of this with the half of her mind that was available for it, which was not the larger half.
The other half was attending to the letter in her pocket.
She excused herself after breakfast on the grounds of a headache, which was not precisely true and was close enough to true that she did not feel the dishonesty acutely, and she went upstairs to the small room that Charlotte had given her, where the morning light came in at an angle that fell across the writing desk, and she sat down at the desk and opened the letter.
It was not long. This was the first thing she noticed, because she had expected length, expected the kind of letter that a man of his intelligence and his wounded pride would produce in the hours after a refusal of that nature, which was a long and defended and possibly eloquent letter. This was not that.
It was two pages, written in the hand she recognised from the brief notes she had seen him produce at Netherfield: clear, upright, with the specific quality of penmanship that belonged to a man who had been taught by a series of people with exacting standards and had internalised the standards without the anxiety.
It began:
Be not alarmed, on receiving this letter, by the apprehension of its containing any repetition of those sentiments or renewal of those offers which were last night so disgusting to you.
I write without any intention of paining you, or humbling myself, by dwelling on wishes which, for the happiness of both, cannot be too soon forgotten.
She read this paragraph twice.
She noted: he was not defending the proposal. He was not revising it. He was stepping past it with the efficiency of a man who had concluded that the proposal was no longer the relevant question and had another question to address.
She read on.
He addressed Bingley and Jane in the first section, and he did it in the way she had described of him in the sitting room yesterday: with precision rather than eloquence, with the quality of a man stating an account rather than constructing an argument.
He had believed the match imprudent. He had communicated this belief to his friend.
He had observed Miss Bennet's manners and concluded, from the observation, that her affection for Bingley was less engaged than appearances suggested.
He wrote this without apology but with the sentence she had not expected, which was near the end of the section and which she read three times:
I believe I may have been wrong about Miss Bennet's feelings. I offer this acknowledgment not as exculpation but because accuracy is the only thing I have to offer you that is worth anything at the present moment.
She sat with this for a moment.
She thought about Jane. She thought about Jane's face at the Netherfield ball and the letter from London and the careful absence of bitterness, and she thought that accuracy, offered plainly and without the requirement that she receive it as exculpation, was in fact more than she had expected him to produce.
She turned the page.
The Wickham section was shorter than the Bingley section, which she had not anticipated.
She had anticipated the longer treatment for the charge he would find more wounding to rebut.
Instead it was brief and it was factual and it had the quality of something being stated by a man who was not performing dignity but had it naturally and was not going to relinquish it even in a letter that cost him considerably.
He wrote that his account of Wickham would be painful to read.
He wrote it plainly: the living had been refused because Wickham had asked for money in lieu of it, had been given three thousand pounds and had renounced all claim, had subsequently spent the money and returned to claim the living anyway when it became vacant.
He wrote that Wickham had spent the intervening years in habits that Darcy declined to detail beyond saying that they involved debt and the exploitation of the trust of people who did not know his history.
He wrote one sentence about Georgiana that was the most restrained sentence in the letter and therefore the one that cost the most: that his sister, at fifteen, had been very nearly induced to elope with Wickham, and that the scheme had been discovered only by a fortunate accident, and that the particulars were his sister's to disclose or not as she saw fit, and that he mentioned it only because it was necessary for a complete account.
He wrote, at the close:
I will only add, God bless you.
And then, above his signature, one more line that she read last because it was positioned last but that she found, when she reached it, was the one she would carry the longest:
You have made plain that you formed your opinion of me early and have found no subsequent reason to revise it.
I find I cannot in good conscience allow that opinion to rest on its present foundations without noting that the foundations, such as they are, were laid in conditions that I myself created and which I would give very much to have created differently.
She set the letter down on the writing desk.
She sat for a long moment with the morning light coming in at its angle and the letter in front of her and the household going on below with its ordinary sounds.
She thought about Wickham.
She thought about what she had been told, and what she had believed, and what she had believed because she had already built the place for it to land.
She thought about the specific completeness with which she had received his account, the way it had filled the space she had made for it without having to displace anything, because the space had been prepared.
She thought about the living. About the three thousand pounds. About Georgiana.
She could not make any of this fit the man she had decided Wickham was.
She could not make the man who had sat beside her at the Phillipses' and opened a door with such careful, controlled precision have been carrying this and been what he appeared.
She could not make it fit, and the not-fitting was the specific sensation of a true thing that contradicted a false thing, which was different from the sensation of a false thing contradicting a true one, and she was honest enough to know the difference when she felt it.
She believed the letter.
She believed it in the specific way you believed things that you did not want to believe but that had the texture of truth, which was not the comfortable texture but the other kind, the kind that sat in you without softening.
And then, below the Wickham information, below the acknowledgment about Bingley and Jane, below all of the specific and factual and carefully offered content of the letter, she found the thing she had not been expecting to find.
The foundations, such as they are, were laid in conditions that I myself created.
She thought: what does he think he created?
She thought: he means the manner. The pride. The six weeks of standing apart in Hertfordshire rooms. He is accountable for those things and he knows it and he is saying so.
She thought: does he mean the doorway?
She sat very still with this question.
She thought: he cannot mean the doorway. He does not know about the doorway. There is no version of the events as he experienced them in which the doorway is a condition he created, because the condition required her to be there and she was there without his knowledge and she has never told anyone.
And yet.
The foundations were laid early. He had said it.
She had formed her opinion early and had not revised it.
He knew this much, or had intuited it. He did not know how early.
He did not know what precise moment had done the laying, what exact sentence had been the first stone of the structure she had built and then defended for six months.
She picked up the letter again.
She read the whole of it one more time, slowly, and at the end of the reading she set it down and sat with it for a long time.
She thought: I have been wrong about Wickham.
She allowed this thought its full dimension.
She did not soften it. She had been wrong about Wickham because she had received his account of Darcy through a filter that was already shaped to receive it, and the filter was the doorway, and she had built the filter herself, and she had been very careful about maintaining it.
She thought: was I wrong about what I heard?
She thought: no. I heard what I heard. I heard every word.
She thought: was I wrong about what it meant?
She thought: I do not know.
She sat with the not-knowing for a while, which was unusual for her, and which she found, in the particular way of unusual things that turned out to be necessary, important to sit with rather than resolve too quickly.
She did not resolve it.
She put the letter in the small interior pocket of her travelling case, which was where she kept things she was not done with.
She washed her face and went downstairs and said to Charlotte that her headache was better and she would be glad of the walk to the village if Maria was still planning to go.
Charlotte looked at her once, with the quiet attention she had been applying to Elizabeth since March, and said that Maria would be very glad of the company.
The last dinner at Rosings that evening was arranged exactly as all the previous dinners at Rosings had been arranged, which was by Lady Catherine's requirements, which were precise and had not varied since the death of Sir Lewis de Bourgh and showed no intention of varying now.
Elizabeth sat at Lady Catherine's table and attended to Lady Catherine's conversation and to Colonel Fitzwilliam's warm, easy management of the evening's sociable requirements and to Mr. Collins's enthusiasm for everything that was placed before him and to the quiet, watchful quality of Miss de Bourgh at the far end of the table, who had, Elizabeth had come to think, considerably more intelligence than she was given credit for and had arranged her silence as a very comfortable habitat.
Darcy was present.
He was present in the way he was present at social gatherings when he had decided what his relationship to the room was going to be, which was managed and contained and technically adequate to every social requirement without making any of the requirements particularly easy.
He spoke when he was spoken to. He attended to Lady Catherine.
He said something to Fitzwilliam that made Fitzwilliam smile in a way that told Elizabeth it was either dry or genuinely funny, and she was not close enough to hear which.
He did not look at her directly during dinner.
She did not look at him directly during dinner.
She was aware of him with the specific and involuntary peripheral attention that she had been applying to him for months, and she was aware that the awareness was different now, that it had a different quality from the awareness she had brought to dinner at Rosings in the first weeks.
It had less of the watching-a-specimen quality.
It had more of something that she was not prepared to name yet.
At the conclusion of the evening, in the entrance hall where the carriage was being called and the coats were being found and Lady Catherine was delivering her final opinions on the week to Mr. Collins, who received them with the gratitude of a man who found all opinions from that quarter valuable by definition, Darcy crossed the hall toward the door.
He passed her.
He stopped.
He said: "I hope your journey back to Hertfordshire is comfortable."
She said: "Thank you. I hope you have a pleasant remainder of your stay."
They looked at each other for the length of two full seconds.
She thought: there is everything in this room that was not said, and we are both standing in it, and neither of us is going to say it tonight.
He bowed.
She curtsied.
He went through the door into the April evening.
She stood in Lady Catherine's entrance hall for a moment, with the sounds of departure going on around her, and she thought about the letter in her travelling case and the question she had not yet answered, and she thought: not tonight. Not yet.
She got into the carriage.
She looked out at the Rosings park moving past the window as the carriage pulled away, and she said nothing, and she held the question in the way she had been holding things for six months, with the specific care of someone who knew the value of what she was carrying and was not yet certain what to do with it.