Chapter Fifteen
Longbourn welcomed her home with its usual noise, though Elizabeth found she carried something back from Kent that could not be shared over breakfast in the family's usual currency of jokes and gossip.
She had four months' worth of a wound she had never fully voiced, and now a letter's worth of confession she could show no one, and the combined weight of it sat differently in her than any secret she had ever kept before.
She found Jane alone in their room on the second evening, mending a hem by candlelight, and something in the quiet of it, the two of them together with no mother's voice to interrupt, made the words rise up before Elizabeth had entirely decided to speak them.
"Jane. I must tell you something, and I find I do not know how to begin it properly, so I shall simply begin it badly instead."
Jane set down her needle. "You look as though you have not slept in a week."
"I have not, quite." Elizabeth sat on the edge of the bed, her hands folded very tightly in her lap. "Do you remember the assembly, when we first came to know Mr. Bingley's party? What Mr. Darcy said of me."
"Of course. Though you always told it so lightly I confess I never thought much more of it."
"I told it lightly because I could not bear to tell it any other way.
I have never told you, Jane, not truly, how much it wounded me.
I have never told anyone. I made a joke of it that first morning at breakfast because a joke was easier to carry than the truth, and then everyone else made it into something else entirely, Mamma's grievance, Mrs. Long's gossip, and somewhere in all of that noise I lost the chance to simply say, plainly, that it hurt me more than I ever let show. "
Jane's hands had gone still in her lap. "Oh, Lizzy."
"I have carried it four months exactly, word for word, and I never told a single soul the whole of what it cost me, not even you, and I think that was its own kind of foolishness, to armor a wound so completely that it could not heal, only harden."
"Why did you never say?"
"Because saying it aloud made it real in a way I did not want it to be.
Because I have always been the sister who laughs things off, and I did not know how to be anything else, even to you.
" Elizabeth's voice caught, unexpectedly, and she had to stop a moment before continuing.
"And because Caroline Bingley used it against you, Jane.
Against your happiness with Mr. Bingley.
My private wound became her evidence that our family lacked delicacy, and I have been sick over that since Lucas Lodge and never told you why. "
Jane crossed the room and sat beside her, taking both her hands. "You should have told me. Whatever else, Lizzy, you should have told me that."
"I know it now. I did not know it then."
They sat together a long moment, the candle burning low, and Elizabeth felt something in her chest that had been clenched for four months begin, finally, cautiously, to loosen.
"There is more," she said, quietly. "About Mr. Darcy. About Mr. Wickham too, though I can tell you very little of that part, only that I was entirely wrong about him, and dangerously so."
"Wrong how?"
"He is not what he seemed. I cannot say more than that, Jane, I have given my word, but I would ask you to be careful of him, and to trust me on it without asking why."
Jane studied her a moment, and did not press, because Jane had never in her life pressed for more than she was offered. "And Mr. Darcy?"
Elizabeth was quiet a long moment, turning the letter over in her mind, the assembly, the hallway at Netherfield, the gate at Rosings, the whole tangled length of it.
"He proposed to me, at Rosings," she said, finally.
"And I refused him, rather cruelly I think, and told him exactly what I thought of his part in separating you and Mr. Bingley.
And the next morning he gave me a letter explaining everything, and Jane, I do not know what to think anymore.
I do not know if I hate him or if I have stopped hating him entirely, and I find I cannot tell the difference some days. "
Jane's eyes went wide, and for a moment neither of them said anything at all, the candle guttering low between them, the whole of Longbourn asleep around this one small room where, for the first time in four months, Elizabeth had finally set the whole weight of it down and let someone else help her carry it.