Chapter 5 The Letter
The letter arrived on a Tuesday.
Elizabeth found it on the hall table, addressed in a hand she had never seen but recognized immediately: bold, angular, precise, every stroke deliberate. Mr. Darcy's handwriting looked exactly like Mr. Darcy -- controlled, commanding, and vaguely intimidating.
She took it to her room. Closed the door. Sat on the edge of her bed and turned it over in her hands, studying the seal -- dark red wax, the Darcy crest pressed deep -- as though the exterior could prepare her for the contents.
It could not.
Miss Bennet,
I write to you because there are things I cannot say aloud.
I have tried. Three times I have begun letters to you, and three times I have consigned them to the fire.
This will be the fourth attempt. If it fails, I shall abandon the enterprise and accept that there are truths I am not capable of delivering.
You have heard Mr. Wickham's account of our history.
I will not insult your intelligence by asking what he told you; I know what he tells everyone.
He has had years to refine the narrative, and he tells it beautifully.
He always has. George Wickham is the most accomplished storyteller I have ever met, and his favorite story is the one in which he is the victim.
The truth is this.
My father did love Wickham. He saw in him a charm and an ease of manner that his own son lacked, and he was not wrong.
Wickham was everything I was not: warm, open, effortlessly liked.
My father intended the Kympton living for Wickham, as Wickham has doubtless told you.
What Wickham has not told you is that upon my father's death, he wrote to me and declined the living.
He said the church did not suit his temperament (a rare moment of honesty) and requested instead a sum of money -- three thousand pounds -- to study law.
I agreed. I gave him the money. He did not study law.
He spent the money in eighteen months. On what, I will spare you the details. When the Kympton living fell vacant two years later, Wickham wrote again, this time requesting the living he had previously refused. I declined. He has been telling his version of events ever since.
This much I could have told you at dinner. This much is history, verifiable through correspondence I retain and can produce at your request. But there is more, and it is this that I have struggled to write, because it involves a person whose privacy I am bound to protect.
My sister, Georgiana.
Elizabeth's hands tightened on the paper.
Last summer, Georgiana was at Ramsgate with her companion, Mrs. Younge, a woman I had hired on Wickham's recommendation -- the significance of which I did not then appreciate.
Wickham followed her there. He courted her with every weapon in his considerable arsenal: flattery, attention, the memory of their shared childhood, the assurance that my father would have wished them together.
She was fifteen. She was lonely. She believed him.
He persuaded her to elope.
By the grace of God, I arrived at Ramsgate two days before the planned departure.
Georgiana, in tears, confessed everything.
I confronted Wickham, who made no pretense of affection once the prospect of her thirty thousand pounds was removed.
He left Ramsgate that night. Mrs. Younge was dismissed.
Georgiana has not spoken his name since.
She is sixteen now. She is shy and sweet and so afraid of her own judgment that she can barely speak to strangers.
She plays piano with a proficiency that should bring her joy but instead brings her comfort, because music is the only language in which she feels safe.
I have failed her in ways I will not detail here, but I am asking you to believe me when I tell you that the man who charmed you on the streets of Meryton nearly destroyed the most innocent person I have ever known.
I have told you this at great personal cost. Georgiana's reputation would be ruined if this became known.
I am trusting you with my sister's most painful secret because you deserve the truth, and because I cannot bear the thought of you believing Wickham's version of me for the rest of our lives together.
But that is not why I am writing this letter.
Elizabeth turned the page. Her heart was beating so fast she could feel it in her fingertips.
I am writing this letter because there are things I need you to know about the man you are going to marry. Not the man Wickham described, and not the man you believe me to be. The man I am.
I am proud. You are correct about this. I have been raised to believe in the weight of my name, the significance of my position, the importance of maintaining a standard that I now recognize was often a wall I built to keep the world at a safe distance.
I have judged others harshly and frequently without cause.
I have allowed my discomfort in social settings to be read as contempt, and I have not always corrected the impression.
Your family has tested me. This is also true.
But not in the way you imagine. They have tested me because they have shown me something I have never seen in the drawing rooms of my acquaintance: genuine feeling, unfiltered and unashamed.
Your mother's enthusiasm is excessive, but it is not false.
Your father's wit is sharp, but it comes from a deep intelligence.
Your sisters are wild, but they are alive in a way that the young women I have known -- trained to perform composure as though it were a virtue rather than a prison -- have never been.
I was not prepared for your family. I was not prepared for you.
Elizabeth, I have spent the weeks since our first meeting in a state of confused misery that I suspect would amuse you if you knew its extent.
You bewitch me. This is not a word I use lightly or have ever applied to another person.
You bewitch me. Your wit, your courage, your refusal to defer to anyone including me, the way you laugh as though joy were an act of defiance -- all of it has worked on me like a fever I cannot break.
The night of the ball, I did not follow you to the library to retrieve a book.
I followed you because I could not stop myself.
I had spent the entire evening watching you, and when you left the room, the room emptied.
I have no better explanation than that. The room emptied, and I followed you, and when I kissed you it was not an accident or a lapse in judgment.
It was the most honest thing I have done in years.
I know you did not want this engagement. I know you accepted it under duress. I know that my behavior in the library stripped you of a choice you deserved to make freely, and I will carry the guilt of that for the rest of my life.
But I need you to know that this is not, for me, an arrangement of convenience or a debt of honor.
I wanted you before the library. I wanted you before the ball.
I had already decided -- against every rational argument my mind could produce -- that I would speak to you.
That I would find a way to tell you what you do to me.
That I would risk your rejection, your laughter, your magnificent contempt, because the alternative -- a life in which I never told you -- was worse.
The compromise did not force my hand. It freed it.
You asked me in the garden for honesty. This is the most honest I know how to be.
I am not asking you to love me. I am asking you to see me.
Yours, Fitzwilliam Darcy
Elizabeth read the letter three times. She read it once quickly, her eyes skipping ahead, devouring information.
She read it again slowly, stopping at each sentence, letting the weight of it settle.
She read it a third time with her hand pressed over her mouth, because somewhere during the second reading she had started crying, and she did not know when it would stop.
Wickham.
The living refused and then demanded. The money taken and squandered. Georgiana -- fifteen, lonely, trusting -- lured to the edge of ruin by a man whose smile Elizabeth had found so warm, so genuine, so perfectly calibrated to win her trust.
She felt sick. Not because Wickham had lied to her -- people lied, this was not new -- but because she had wanted to believe him.
She had seized on his story with a hunger that shamed her now, grasping at any evidence that supported the version of Darcy she had constructed, the cold villain whose pride excused her from examining her own feelings.
She had been wrong. Not merely mistaken, but willfully, eagerly wrong, and the realization sat in her chest like a stone.
And then the rest of it. The confession that was not a confession because it asked for nothing, demanded nothing, simply laid itself bare and said here. This is what I am. This is what you do to me. Look, if you dare.
You bewitch me.
She pressed her fingers against the words. The ink did not smudge; it was too dry, too deliberate. He had written this carefully, painstakingly, choosing every word as though his life depended on it. Perhaps it did.
The room emptied, and I followed you.
She thought of all the times she had dismissed him.
The slights she had delivered with the confidence of a woman who believed she understood the world and everyone in it.
The certainty with which she had categorized Fitzwilliam Darcy as proud, as cold, as beneath her contempt -- and all the while he had been watching her with those dark eyes, burning with a feeling so fierce he could not contain it, and she had not seen it because she had not wanted to.
I am not asking you to love me. I am asking you to see me.
She folded the letter carefully, pressing the creases sharp with her thumbnail.
She placed it in the drawer of her writing desk, beneath a stack of Jane's correspondence.
She stood. She washed her face. She looked at herself in the mirror and did not recognize the woman she saw there, because that woman looked frightened, and Elizabeth Bennet was not afraid of anything.
Except, apparently, the possibility that she had been wrong about the man she was going to marry. And the possibility that the ache she felt when she thought of him was not fury or resentment or bodily betrayal but something far simpler and far more dangerous.
She walked to Oakham Mount alone, climbing the familiar path through brown bracken and bare trees, the November wind sharp against her tear-stained face.
At the top, she stood and looked out over the county that had been her whole world, and she thought about Darcy's letter, and about Wickham's charming lies, and about a fifteen-year-old girl in Ramsgate who had trusted the wrong man, and about a twenty-eight-year-old man who had trusted Elizabeth with the truth of it.
She stood there for a long time.
When she came down, the sun was setting, painting the sky in shades of amber and rose that reminded her of firelight in a library, and she did not know what she felt, but she knew that it was no longer hatred, and the absence of hatred was a void large enough to swallow her whole.
That night, she took the letter out and read it again. Just the last page. Just the confession.
The compromise did not force my hand. It freed it.
She pressed the letter against her chest and closed her eyes and let the tears come, because she was alone and it was dark, and nobody would know that Elizabeth Bennet, who had never wept for any man, was weeping for this one.
Not because he had hurt her. But because she finally understood that he never meant to.