Chapter Fourteen
She walked the letter's contents over and over for the length of two hours, until the path beneath her feet had become entirely familiar and the words in her mind had begun, finally, to settle into something she could examine rather than simply survive.
Wickham first. She thought of the quarter mile of road where he had asked her, so carefully, so patiently, exactly what Darcy had done to earn her disapproval, and how readily she had handed him the wound, and how precisely he had known what to say to deepen it.
He does not lack the wit to know exactly how much a remark like that will wound, before he makes it.
She had thought, at the time, that his sympathy was simple kindness.
She saw now, with a coldness that made her stomach turn, that it had been calculation.
He had taken her private grievance and used it, gently, skillfully, to secure her trust and darken her opinion of the one man positioned to expose him.
She thought of Miss King, and the ten thousand pounds, and understood, at last, exactly what kind of man had walked beside her that afternoon with such easy, unhurried charm.
Jane came next, and here the reckoning was harder, because it required her to hold two things at once that did not sit comfortably together: Darcy's genuine error, and his genuine honesty in confessing it.
She had wanted, standing at the gate yesterday, to believe his cruelty toward Jane and his cruelty at the assembly were the same thread, proof of a single unchanging fault in his character.
The letter did not let her keep that comfortable simplicity.
He had been wrong about Jane, plainly and admittedly wrong, but the wrongness had come from a genuine, if arrogant, misreading rather than the same careless indifference that had produced the assembly's cruelty.
It did not excuse him. It only meant the excuse she had wanted, that he was simply and entirely without feeling for anyone outside his own comfort, would not hold.
And beneath both of those reckonings sat the one she found hardest to look at directly.
He had remembered. Word for word, as precisely as she had.
He had carried the weight of that single sentence in silence, the same silence she had kept, for the same reason she had kept it, because some hurts are too large to say aloud until someone else says them first. She had spent four months believing herself alone in that particular grief, and the letter told her, plainly, that she had not been alone at all.
She returned to the parsonage well past midday, and Charlotte took one look at her face and asked no questions, only pressed a cup of tea into her hands and left her to the quiet of her own room.
She read the letter twice more before dinner. By the third reading, she found she could no longer summon the anger she had carried to the gate that morning, though something colder and more complicated had not yet resolved itself into anything she could name.
Colonel Fitzwilliam called the following afternoon, alone, and something in his manner suggested he suspected more than he had been told.
"My cousin leaves tomorrow," he said, after the usual pleasantries had been exhausted. "Rather earlier than planned."
"Does he." Elizabeth kept her voice even. "I hope nothing is wrong."
"I could not say. He has been unusually silent since yesterday morning, which for Darcy is saying a great deal, as he is rarely what one would call talkative to begin with.
" Fitzwilliam's eyes held a careful, searching quality that told her he had guessed considerably more than his casual tone admitted.
"I do not suppose you know anything of what troubles him. "
"I could not say either, Colonel."
"No," he said, with a small, knowing smile that suggested he did not believe her for a moment, "I did not think you could."
He did not press further, though she caught him glancing at her once or twice with an expression that suggested he was quietly, privately, rearranging some assumption he had held about his cousin's recent moods, and she was grateful he did not voice whatever conclusion he reached.
She did not see Darcy again before he left Rosings.
She told herself this was for the best, and found the telling considerably less convincing than she had hoped it would be, and spent her last three days at Hunsford walking the grove alone each morning, half hoping and half dreading that she would find him waiting at the gate, and finding, each time, only the empty path and her own unsettled thoughts for company.