Chapter Nineteen
Longbourn, when the carriage finally reached it after a journey that felt endless, was a house holding its breath.
Mrs. Bennet had taken to her room with her nerves in open revolt.
Mary offered observations on the fragility of female virtue to anyone who would stand still long enough to hear them.
Kitty cried without knowing quite what she cried for, and Jane, pale and steady in the way she always was when the household needed steadiness most, met Elizabeth at the door with an embrace that said more than any words could have.
"No news," Jane said, before Elizabeth could ask. "Papa writes only that he has found nothing yet. Uncle Gardiner has gone to join him."
"And Colonel Forster?"
"He believes they went first toward London, not Scotland.
There is no sign they mean to marry at all.
" Jane's voice caught on that last word, and Elizabeth took her hand and held it, thinking of the letter in her writing desk, the one that had named Wickham's character so plainly, and thinking too of how much easier this whole disaster might have been to prevent had that character been known publicly months ago, before Lydia had ever set foot in Brighton.
She did not sleep that first night home.
She lay awake instead turning the whole business over, Wickham's easy charm on the road to Meryton, his careful, patient extraction of her private wound, the ten thousand pounds that had turned his attentions from her to Miss King and might, she now feared, have turned them again toward Lydia only because Lydia was near and willing and asked no inconvenient questions.
She thought, too, of Darcy, standing in the inn yard as her carriage pulled away, his face carrying something she had not had time to name before the dust of the road swallowed it.
She did not know what he would do with the knowledge she had given him.
She did not know if she had any right to hope he would do anything at all, given how thoroughly her family's disgrace now confirmed every objection Lady Catherine had once flung at her feet, every fear his own pride had voiced before he'd learned to set it aside.
The days that followed moved with an agonizing slowness that made every knock at the door a small crisis of hope and dread.
Letters came from Mr. Gardiner, brief and businesslike, reporting no progress.
Mrs. Bennet alternated between prostration and sudden bursts of energy devoted entirely to planning Lydia's wedding clothes, as though the marriage were already a settled thing rather than a desperate hope.
"They will be found," she declared, over a dinner none of them had much appetite for. "Wickham is a charming man, whatever anyone says of him now, and he will do right by her, I am sure of it."
Elizabeth said nothing. She had told Jane the whole of it now, everything the letter had revealed, and Jane's face, hearing it, had gone through a transformation Elizabeth had never seen before, her sister's endless capacity for charitable interpretation finally, entirely exhausted.
"I cannot excuse him this," Jane said, quietly, when they were alone. "Whatever I believed of him before, I cannot excuse this."
"Nor can I." Elizabeth's hands were clasped tightly in her lap.
"And I keep thinking, Jane, that if I had spoken sooner, if I had told even you the whole of what Mr. Darcy's letter contained the moment I read it, instead of waiting weeks to unburden myself, perhaps something might have reached Lydia in time.
Perhaps someone might have warned Colonel Forster to watch him more closely. "
"You cannot know that."
"No. But I will carry the wondering all the same."
She thought of her father's oft repeated dismissal in the library, his refusal to hear her concerns about Lydia's going to Brighton at all, and found she could not entirely absolve him either, though she kept that particular grief private, unwilling to add to Jane's burden what could not now be undone by blame in any direction.