Chapter Thirteen
She did not sleep, and did not pretend to try. She walked instead, before the household had stirred, taking her usual path toward the grove with no real hope of calm, only a need to move her body since her mind would not be still.
He was there before her, standing at the very spot where he had proposed the day before, and for one unsteady moment she thought he meant to try again. Instead he simply held out a letter, sealed and thick, his hand not quite steady.
"Will you do me the honour of reading this," he said. "I ask nothing further. Only that."
She took it because refusing seemed, suddenly, more effort than accepting, and he bowed and turned back into the trees before she could decide whether to speak at all, leaving her alone on the path with two full sheets of his close, careful hand and the whole of the morning ahead of her.
She broke the seal standing where she was.
Be not alarmed, madam, on receiving this letter, by the apprehension of its containing any repetition of those sentiments which were so disgusting to you last night.
She read the first lines twice, bracing for justification, for the careful architecture of a proud man defending himself. What she found instead, further down the page, stopped her entirely still in the middle of the path.
Two offences you laid to my charge, of very different magnitude.
The first, that I detached Mr. Bingley from your sister.
The second, older, and I think you have never once forgotten it though you have never once let me see how deeply, that I spoke of you at the Meryton assembly in terms no gentleman ought to have used of any woman, least of all one who has since shown me, at every turn, how little my first judgment of her deserved to stand.
Her hand tightened on the paper.
I will not pretend I do not remember saying it.
I told myself for months that it was a careless remark, forgotten as soon as spoken, the sort of thing a tired man says in a crowded room and thinks no more of.
I have since learned, from your own words to me yesterday and from things Colonel Fitzwilliam let slip without knowing their weight, that you have carried it precisely, word for word, since the night I said it.
I did not know, until you quoted it back to me at Rosings, that I had wounded you so exactly, nor how long that wound had gone untended by the very man who caused it.
I offer no excuse for it. I was tired, and unwilling to be there, and Bingley would not cease pressing me toward the dance floor, and I wanted the conversation to end more than I wanted to consider who might hear me end it.
That is the whole of my reasoning, and I set it down plainly because I think you have earned plainness from me, however late it comes.
She had to stop reading. She stood in the grove with the letter trembling slightly in her hand and something in her chest cracking open in a way she had not permitted since the night of the assembly itself, four months of careful armor giving way not to an apology exactly, though it was that too, but to the plain, unhidden fact of being seen.
He had known. Not guessed, not assumed. Known, precisely, the shape and weight of what he had done, and had carried that knowledge in silence just as she had carried the wound in silence, and neither of them had said a true word about it until yesterday's quarrel forced it into the light.
She made herself continue.
I will address now the matter of your sister, which I understand troubles you far more, and rightly so.
I believed, when I observed her at Netherfield, that her regard for Bingley was not equal to his for her.
I watched her closely, and her composure, which I now understand to be simply her nature rather than any want of feeling, led me to a conclusion I was too certain of and too little inclined to question.
I persuaded Bingley of her indifference, and I concealed from him, when we were in town, that your sister was also in London that winter.
This last I did deliberately, and I do not think it can be excused by any error of observation, only by a want of proper consideration for what concealment might cost her.
I am not proud of it. I set it down because you deserve the whole truth, not the comfortable half of it.
The rest of the letter turned to Wickham, and she read it standing perfectly still, the morning cold forgotten entirely, as the whole architecture of the story she had believed for months came apart and rebuilt itself into something considerably darker and sadder than she had imagined.
Wickham's true character. The living resigned for a sum of money, and demanded again, and refused.
Georgiana, fifteen years old, nearly ruined by a man who had known exactly what he was doing and had done it anyway.
I set this last matter before you with great reluctance, for it touches my sister's history in a manner I would not willingly expose to any stranger.
But you asked me once, in anger, why I spoke of Mr. Wickham with such heat, and I think you are owed the answer, even at the cost of my sister's privacy.
I trust to your discretion in this, as I have trusted to nothing else in a great while.
She finished the letter standing in the same spot where she had begun it, the morning sun fully risen now, the whole shape of the last four months rearranging itself around her like furniture moved in the dark.
She did not know, yet, what to do with any of it.
She only knew that she could not stand in this grove and pretend, any longer, that indifference was still available to her.