CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Longbourn, when Elizabeth reached it three days later, was a house in mourning without a death to mourn, every room touched by the same dull, exhausting dread.
Her father had gone to London and returned, defeated, his usual dry composure worn through in places she had never seen exposed before.
Her mother kept to her room, alternating between hysterics and demands for wedding clothes no one yet believed would be needed.
Jane bore the whole household's grief with her usual steadiness, though Elizabeth could see, in the small hours when the rest of the house finally slept, how much the effort of that steadiness cost her.
"There is still no word," Jane said, the night Elizabeth arrived, the two of them sitting up together long past midnight.
"Papa believes she is somewhere in London.
Uncle Gardiner has gone to search, but London is so very large, Lizzy, and Lydia has no money, no notion of caution, nothing to protect her but the goodness of a man who has already proven himself to have none. "
Elizabeth did not sleep that night either.
She lay awake turning over every conversation she had ever had about Wickham, every warning she had heard and half dismissed, every moment she had defended his charm against her own better judgment, and found the guilt settling into her like a stone she could not set down.
"I ought to have told everyone what I knew," she said to Jane, somewhere near dawn. "I kept Darcy's letter private out of pride, out of some notion that his confidences were mine to guard, and my silence has cost Lydia everything."
"You could not have known she would encounter him again so soon, or that Brighton would put them in each other's way."
"I knew his character, Jane. I knew it entirely, and I said nothing beyond a private word of caution to Lydia herself, which she was far too silly to heed. If I had spoken plainly to my father, to Colonel Forster, to anyone with power to prevent it."
Jane took her hand and said nothing further, because there was nothing to say that would undo the guilt, only things that might, eventually, soften it, and neither of them was yet ready for softening.
The days that followed brought no relief, only a slow, grinding accumulation of small dreadful facts.
Colonel Forster's letters confirmed the couple had been traced as far as London and no further.
Word came, eventually, and worse than before, that Wickham's debts in Meryton alone amounted to a sum that would ruin any tradesman fool enough to have extended him credit, and that no marriage had yet taken place, nor showed any sign of being intended.
Mr. Collins, with his usual gift for saying precisely the cruelest thing in the most pious possible language, wrote to offer his condolences on a scale that suggested he considered Lydia already dead to decent society, and advised Mr. Bennet to throw off his unworthy child from his affection forever.
Mrs. Bennet took what small comfort she could in imagining Elizabeth's own prospects entirely ruined by association, a fear she voiced loudly and often, blaming everyone in the household but herself.
Elizabeth bore it all with what composure she could muster, but found her thoughts returning, again and again, to a man riding away from her carriage window without looking back, and to the last thing he had said to her before he went: I ask nothing of you in return, not even that you forgive me for it.
She had not heard a single word from him since.
She told herself this was proper, that a man could not be expected to correspond with a woman under such circumstances without inviting exactly the kind of scandal her family could least afford, and told herself, too, that his silence likely meant he had abandoned whatever inquiries he had promised, that the crisis had proven, as thoroughly as anything could, the truth of everything he had once listed against her family.
She did not believe either explanation fully, and found, lying awake yet another night with the house silent around her, that some stubborn, unreasonable part of her still trusted him, entirely against her own better judgment, to do exactly what he had said he would do, quietly, and ask nothing in return.
She took out the writing box that same night, for the first time since Derbyshire, and read the list over once more by candlelight.
Five items answered, honestly, without a single figure attached to the answering.
One item left, the manner of the whole, and she found, reading it now against everything that had happened since, that she was no longer certain the sixth item stood at all.
She locked the box away again before she could decide, and lay in the dark listening for a letter that did not come, and did not know, closing her eyes at last toward a thin gray dawn, that the very man she was thinking of was at that same hour standing in a mean London street, negotiating with the devil himself on her family's behalf, and telling no one, least of all her, exactly what it was costing him to do it.