Chapter Twenty
On Sunday morning, Elizabeth was at the window of her bedchamber attempting to read a book when she heard the latch and turned to see her sister entering the room.
Jane’s expression was not worry exactly, because Jane turned worry into something gentler than its ordinary form.
Yet her expression still communicated that she had been thinking about something for several days and had decided the time for thinking was over.
Jane closed the door behind her, then sat on the edge of the bed. Elizabeth put down the book.
“How long has it been like this?” Jane said.
Elizabeth swallowed hard. For Jane, who generally approached difficult things with the utmost delicacy, the directness of her question was itself a form of urgency.
“Like what?” Elizabeth said, and heard, even as she said it, how thin it was.
Jane looked at her with a kind of compassionate patience that said more clearly that words that she could not be deceived.
“It has been some time, I think. Since our afternoon with Miss Darcy at Netherfield,” she said.
“No, actually, earlier still. But it is growing worse and worse and — Lizzy, I have been watching you and growing more concerned every day. I am asking you plainly. Are you content?”
The question landed with the weight of a carefully chosen word, which was Jane’s method.
Not happy, which would have been easier to deflect.
Not well, which Elizabeth had answered so many times that the answer had worn smooth.
Content. Which meant: is the life you are living bearable to you, and are you living it by choice, and do not tell me you are managing.
Elizabeth looked out at the garden, cold and lifeless.
“No,” she said. “I am not.” Merely speaking it aloud made the weight of her sorrow ease a little.
“Something is weighing on you,” Jane said gently, but inexorably.
“I do not think it is simply your natural disquiet at entering into marriage under such circumstances. There is yet something more that is preying on you. Dear Lizzy, I wish you would not keep it to yourself. And do not tell me it is nothing, for I know very well that it is not.”
“Very well,” Elizabeth said, letting out a long breath. “You are quite right. There is something I have not told you. I have been deciding whether to, for some time.”
Jane waited.
“The compromise was no accident.” Elizabeth looked at the garden as she said it, not wishing to see Jane’s reaction to hearing of such wickedness. “Nor did the door lock by itself. It was all arranged deliberately.”
Jane pressed her fingers to her mouth. “You are certain?”
“Yes.”
“How long have you known?”
“Since before Christmas. I overheard something I was not meant to hear, and then I asked a question I was not supposed to ask, and the answer was — sufficient.”
“Who?” Jane asked quietly.
“I cannot tell you that.”
Jane absorbed this. “Because you do not trust me with it?”
“Because I trust you completely, and because telling you would make you responsible for knowing it. It is bad enough that I know.” Elizabeth looked at her. “I am sorry. I know that is not satisfying.”
“It is not,” Jane said honestly. “But I understand it.” She was quiet for a moment. “You cannot use the information to ease your discontent?”
“No. I must not. The cost would be too high.” Elizabeth paused, choosing her words carefully. “It is not enough to know what happened and how. To clear my reputation, I would have to prove it.”
“Surely you could do that if you know the guilty party,” Jane said.
“I believe I could,” Elizabeth said heavily.
“The problem lies in what would happen if I did. The damage would be devastating. Some would fall to a guilty party, but would be still worse than they could deserve. Worse still, some would fall to the innocent. I cannot do that. Not for my own freedom.”
“Even though your own freedom —” Jane took a breath. “Even though the cost to you is considerable.”
“Even then.”
“Lizzy. You have been carrying this alone for much too long.” Jane looked at her with a blend of sorrow and reproach. “You might have told me sooner.”
“I did not want to distress you.”
“You did not want to burden me.” Jane made a slight sound that was not quite a laugh. “Which is a different thing, and I wish you would stop doing it.”
“It is rather ingrained,” Elizabeth said.
Jane looked down at her hands. When she looked up again, her expression had settled into something steadier. “And Mr Darcy? Does he know any of this?”
“He knows the investigation has stalled. He does not know why,” Elizabeth paused. “I told him I thought we had exhausted the lines of inquiry.”
“Which was not true.”
Elizabeth felt guilt rise up in her chest. “No, it was not.”
“So he believes the matter unresolved.”
“Yes.”
Jane was quiet for a long moment. “He has behaved well throughout all of this, I think,” she said.
“He has behaved,” Elizabeth said carefully, as if her words were fragile, “with more consideration than the situation required of him. That is all I will say.”
“That is not all you could say,” Jane observed mildly.
“No, but it is all I am going to.”
“You are very sure?” Jane pressed gently.
Elizabeth looked away, not wanting her sister to see the tears rising in her eyes. “I am. I must be. Because any alternative would cost more than it would gain. Because —”
She stopped.
“Because?” Jane asked.
“Because I made a decision and I am holding to it.” She heard the incompleteness of this and did not supply the rest, and Jane, who heard it too, did not press. That was the mercy of being known very well by someone who also loved you.
Jane looked at her hands in her lap. Outside, a robin appeared on a near hedge, alert and briefly vivid.
“Lizzy,” Jane said, and then stopped and began again. “I have been afraid of this. Since before you told me what you knew. Since the engagement itself. That you were carrying something you had not chosen and carrying it in a direction that was not your own.”
“The direction is quite my own,” Elizabeth told her. “I chose it.”
“You chose it from within a set of options that someone else constructed for you.”
“But I still chose it.”
Jane shook her head. “That is not the same thing.”
“Perhaps not. But it is what I have, and I will not spend the remainder of the engagement lamenting what could have been.”
Jane’s expression softened into a mix of admiration and grief, the expression of someone watching a person they love do something brave at great cost.
“I think,” Jane said after a moment, “that you have decided endurance is the noblest course. You are probably right, but I think it is costing you more than you are saying — and I think you will not tell me how much because you do not want me to feel responsible for it.”
“As indeed you are not,” Elizabeth said firmly.
Jane looked at her for a long moment. Then she took her hand, and they sat like that for a while in the way they had sat together since childhood, when the world had been smaller and their problems had been more easily solved, and the window had looked out onto the same garden and the same grey winter light.
“Do you care for him?” Jane asked softly.
Elizabeth looked at the garden for a long time.
“Yes,” she said. “Rather more than is comfortable.”
Jane’s hand tightened on hers, briefly.
“And does he —” Jane began.
“Please don’t,” Elizabeth said. “I know what you are going to say, and I cannot — not today. I am managing, Jane, and I need to keep managing, and the direction you are headed will make that rather harder.”
Jane’s beautiful face, usually so full of light and happiness, pinched into a frown. “I worry you are so practiced at managing that no one can see you are not. Not really.”
“That is rather the point of it.”
“I know.” Jane looked at her with the expression of someone arriving, reluctantly, at the limits of what she could offer.
“I only want you to know that I see it. Whatever you will not say to me. I see it, and I am sorry. It seems to me that you are doing something very brave, and I am not certain you should have to.”
Elizabeth looked at her sister, thinking of the particular quality of Jane’s goodness, which had never been the uncritical goodness people assumed it was, but something more effortful and more clear-eyed than it appeared.
And in the light of that goodness and fellowship, and the places to which it could not reach, she felt all the loneliness of her position.
“I know you see it,” Elizabeth said. “That is enough.”
It was not enough, and she knew it, but the alternative was to sit at the window and grieve for something she had not yet lost. Grief required certainty, and Elizabeth was not yet willing to be certain.
Jane stayed until the church bells rang.
They went down to breakfast together, and Elizabeth did her best to appear warm and present and entirely composed.
If Jane had asked only a very little more, she would have had to either lie, or let part of the dreadful secret slip.
It was half a relief and half a loss that she had not.
Elizabeth did not think she could bear to think of what would have happened next, and so she did not examine it further. She had become very good at not examining things of late, and that skill, at least, seemed to be improving.