CHAPTER TWENTY
Elizabeth returned to Longbourn to find the household slowly, imperfectly, remembering how to breathe.
Lydia and Wickham had gone north to Newcastle within days of the wedding, and the house, though still touched by the scandal's shadow, had begun to right itself in small ways.
Mrs. Bennet had recovered enough to speak of the match with something approaching pride.
Mr. Bennet had retreated back into his library with his usual dry composure, though Elizabeth caught him, more than once, looking at her with a careful attention he had not shown before, as though he suspected some part of the crisis had touched her more deeply than she had confessed.
It was Jane's happiness, arriving a fortnight later, that finally gave Elizabeth something to hold onto beyond her own tangled thoughts.
Bingley returned to Netherfield without warning, and called at Longbourn the very next morning, and within the week the whole neighborhood understood what Elizabeth had already guessed from the particular quality of her sister's silence at supper: that he had asked, plainly, without a single qualification attached, and that Jane had said yes before he had finished the sentence.
"He did not weigh a single thing against me," Jane said, the evening of the engagement, sitting on the edge of Elizabeth's bed with her hands clasped in her lap.
"He did not speak of connections or fortune or anything I might have brought to the match beyond my own self.
He simply said he loved me, and had loved me since the very first, and asked whether I would have him. "
"And that was the whole of it?"
"That was the whole of it, Lizzy." Jane's eyes were bright. "No accounting. No list. Only the asking."
Elizabeth said nothing for a long moment, turning the words over, and felt something in her chest tighten painfully at the contrast, plain and unbearable, between her sister's simple happiness and her own tangled, still unresolved grief.
"I am glad for you," she said finally, and meant it entirely. "You deserve exactly that kind of asking, Jane. Simple, and whole, and offered without a single condition attached."
"And you do not think you deserve the same?"
The question caught her off guard. "I do not know what I deserve. I know what I was offered, twice now, and both times found wanting in some particular I was never permitted to argue against before the sentence was already passed."
Jane took her hand. "Lizzy, I do not think Mr. Darcy withheld the truth from you at your own wedding because he thought you weak.
I think he withheld it because he did not yet know how to offer you the truth without also offering an apology large enough to answer for it, and found silence easier than admitting he did not know how. "
"That is a very generous reading, Jane."
"I am aware." Jane's smile was gentle, unoffended. "It has occasionally proved true. You might consider, before you decide the account closed entirely, whether it is worth asking him directly, rather than deciding for yourself, from a distance, exactly what he meant by his silence."
Elizabeth said nothing to that, but the words settled into her over the following days, returning at odd hours, until she found herself, walking the familiar paths around Longbourn that she had walked a hundred times before, turning over not the wrong he had done but the question Jane had asked: whether she, too, had fallen into the very habit she had once accused him of, deciding, without asking, exactly what another person's silence must mean, and refusing to leave room for any answer but the worst one.
She thought, too, of the writing box, still locked, still holding both documents, his letter and her list, and found that she no longer knew, with any certainty, which one she trusted more: the careful, honest accounting he had given her on the stone bridge, item by item, or the silence he had kept afterward, protective and misguided, about the very danger that same accounting had put her in.
She did not write to him. She told herself this was pride, and knew, somewhere beneath the pride, that it was also fear, the particular fear of a woman who had twice now opened herself to a man's declaration only to find some condition attached she had not been permitted to negotiate, and who was no longer certain she had the courage to risk a third disappointment without some assurance, however small, that this time the account would be kept honestly from the very beginning rather than corrected only after the fact.
She did not know that the assurance she wanted was already riding toward her, uninvited and considerably more alarming than she expected, in the shape of a woman she had met only once before, and had never once wished to see again.