Chapter 15 #2
"I did not say he was improper. I said Lydia does not understand." Jane set her embroidery down. "Papa does not notice. Mama encourages it. And you..." She hesitated.
"And I?"
"You have been rather occupied with your own thoughts lately."
Elizabeth knew what Jane meant. She knew because Jane was right, and because being right about Elizabeth was one of Jane's persistent and inconvenient qualities.
"I am perfectly attentive."
"You are perfectly miserable," Jane said, gently. "You have been miserable since the Phillipses' dinner, and you will not say why, and I think it has something to do with Mr. Darcy."
Elizabeth's spine straightened. "It has nothing to do with Mr. Darcy."
"Then why do you leave the room every time he arrives?"
"Because I do not enjoy his company."
"You enjoyed it at Netherfield."
The sentence landed like an arrow. Elizabeth opened her mouth. She closed it again. She picked up Truffles, who had been sleeping on the blanket at the foot of the bed, and held the pig against her chest like a shield.
"Netherfield was different," she said. "I was wrong about Netherfield."
Jane reached out and scratched Truffles behind the ear. The pig's eyes closed. "Were you? Or are you wrong now?"
Elizabeth did not answer. Jane did not press. They sat together in the candlelight while the pig snoozed between them, and the silence was the kind that sisters share when one of them knows a truth the other is not ready to hear.
After Jane left, Elizabeth lay in the dark with Truffles warm at her feet. She thought about what Jane had said. She thought about what she could not stop thinking, no matter how firmly she told herself she was done.
Truffles stirred. A small, sleepy sound. A rearrangement on the blanket.
"He is not what you think," Elizabeth whispered. "He is not what either of us thought."
The pig did not respond. The pig was asleep, dreaming of warm boots and bread crusts and a voice that said things that mattered only in the dark.
Elizabeth lay still. She could feel the thought trying to unfold itself, the way a letter unfolded when the seal was broken, and she knew what was inside.
If Darcy was not what she thought, then she had been cruel to a man who was merely afraid.
If she had been cruel to a man who was merely afraid, then her judgment — her wit, her sharpness, her certainty — had not protected her from error.
It had caused it. And if she followed that thread one step further, to Wickham, to Jane's quiet warning about Lydia, to everything she had dismissed because it did not fit the story she preferred, then the error was not a single misjudgment.
It was a pattern. And the pattern said that Elizabeth Bennet, who prided herself on seeing clearly, had seen what she wished to see and called it sight.
She could not face that. Not tonight. Not yet. To be wrong about one man was embarrassing. To be wrong about everything — about Darcy, about Wickham, about her own cleverness — was a kind of collapse she did not know how to survive while still being herself.
So she stopped. She folded the thought back along its creases and pressed the seal shut and put it away, and she told herself that she would open it later, when she was stronger, when the cost of being wrong was not quite so total.
She lay in the dark with this weight on her chest, and she might have stayed there all night, pinned under the accumulated evidence of her own wrongness, except that Truffles chose that moment to dream.
The pig's legs twitched. Her snout worked.
A small, urgent grunt escaped her, then another, then a rapid sequence of squeaks that sounded like a pig negotiating terms with an invisible turnip.
Her back legs kicked against Elizabeth's shin.
Her whole body shuddered with the intensity of whatever she was chasing in her sleep — bread crusts, probably, or Darcy's boot, or that one patch of sunlight in the Longbourn garden that she defended from cats with the ferocity of a general holding a bridge.
Elizabeth watched her. The pig's ear flapped. Her tail uncurled and recurled. She let out a snore of such volume and conviction that it vibrated the bedframe.
Elizabeth laughed. She did not mean to. It came out before she could stop it — a short, watery sound, half laugh and half something else, muffled against the pillow.
It was not a happy laugh. But it was a laugh, and it broke something loose, the way laughter always did, and she pressed her face against the pig's warm side and closed her eyes and thought: Whatever else I have got wrong, I did not get you wrong.
You are exactly what I thought you were. You are ridiculous, and you are mine.
She fell asleep with her hand on the pig's back, and the pig's legs still twitching, and the weight still there but bearable now, because the pig was warm and the pig was absurd and the pig did not care about sealed letters or patterns of self-deception or the terrible cost of being wrong about everything.
The pig cared about turnips and boots and the person whose hand was on her back, and that was enough. For tonight, that was enough.