Chapter Eleven
The letter from Charlotte arrived the following morning, and Elizabeth recognized, from the very first line, that its contents would trouble her considerably beyond the ordinary pleasantries of her friend's usual correspondence.
My dear Eliza,
I write to you now with a heaviness of heart I do not know how to soften with preamble, and so I will simply set down the matter plainly, trusting your good sense to receive it as it is intended, in friendship, and not as a reproach, for I do not reproach you, whatever comes of what I am about to relate.
Lady Catherine has learned, through channels I have not fully traced, that the scandal presently circulating in London traces its origin to her own parsonage, and to a proposal made beneath her own roof, or very nearly, during your visit this spring.
She is, as you may imagine, considerably more than displeased.
She has said to Mr. Collins, in terms that left him white with distress for the better part of a day, that she holds him and by extension myself responsible for having permitted the circumstances that led to this indignity, though I confess I do not entirely understand what conduct of ours she believes ought to have prevented a private proposal between two adults conducted without our knowledge until after the fact.
She has hinted, Eliza, and hinted is too gentle a word for the plainness of her meaning, that unless the matter is settled quietly, and by settled she means, I collect, that your name be kept from any further public confirmation and the story permitted to die of its own accord without your assistance in either confirming or denying it, she will find occasion to withdraw her patronage from Mr. Collins's living.
You know as well as I do what such a withdrawal would mean for us, situated as we are, with our small income and our growing family and no fortune of my own to fall back upon should the living be lost.
I do not ask you to be silent, Eliza. I would not, for the world, ask you to sacrifice your own honest account of a matter that concerns your own reputation more nearly than it concerns mine, merely to spare Mr. Collins his aunt's displeasure.
But I confess I do not know how to bear the uncertainty of it, and I write to you now more for the comfort of having told someone than from any real expectation that you can resolve a difficulty that is not, in its essentials, yours to resolve at all.
Your affectionate friend, Charlotte Collins
Elizabeth read the letter three times, and each reading left her with a heavier weight settling somewhere beneath her ribs than the one before it.
She had known, in some abstract way, that the scandal's consequences extended beyond her own reputation, had seen it already in Jane's careful letters about Miss Bingley's coldness, in her own growing awareness that a private matter, once loosed into the world, belonged no longer to the two people who had made it but to everyone whose life it touched in passing.
But there was something in Charlotte's plain, unhappy account, a friend she had known since girlhood, married now to a foolish but not unkind man, dependent upon a patroness's goodwill for the roof over her children's heads, that struck Elizabeth with a force the earlier consequences had not quite managed.
She sat with the letter a long while, turning over what it demanded of her, and found, the longer she considered it, that it demanded nothing she could honestly give.
She could not undo the scandal by silence, for the silence had already been kept, by both herself and Mr. Darcy, without preventing Lady Catherine's discovery of the truth regardless.
She could not confirm the story publicly to satisfy some abstract notion of honesty, for such a confirmation would only compound the very injury Lady Catherine threatened to punish Charlotte for.
And she could not, whatever the temptation, simply retreat from the whole business and hope it resolved itself, for Charlotte's living, and Charlotte's children's security, did not have the luxury of waiting upon a scandal's uncertain timeline to fade from fashion.
"You look troubled, Lizzy," her aunt observed, finding her still seated with the letter some time later. "Is it bad news from home?"
"It is bad news from Kent, Aunt, and I confess I do not yet know what to do with it." She handed her aunt the letter, and watched Mrs. Gardiner's face, as she read it, settle into the same troubled stillness Elizabeth had been wearing since her own first reading.
"Lady Catherine is a formidable enemy to have made, Lizzy, however unintentionally you made her."
"I did not make her an enemy at all, Aunt, not directly.
I made her nephew an unwilling correspondent in a scandal neither of us invited, and she has decided, in her own accounting of the matter, that the fault belongs somewhere convenient to punish, and Mr. Collins's living happens to be the most convenient target within her reach. "
"What will you do?"
Elizabeth was quiet a long moment, staring at the letter without truly seeing it, her mind working through the tangle of obligation and helplessness the situation presented.
"I do not know, Aunt, beyond writing to Charlotte at once to assure her of my sympathy and my determination to do whatever lies within my power, however limited that power presently seems. I cannot silence a scandal I did not create and cannot fully control.
I cannot appease a woman who has already decided, before I have said a single word in my own defense, that I am the author of her family's disgrace.
" She folded the letter carefully, with more gentleness than her frustration strictly warranted.
"But I will not let Charlotte suffer for a proposal she had no part in making, if there is any course open to me that might prevent it, whatever that course requires of me. "
She thought, though she did not say it aloud, of Mr. Darcy, who was to call upon her the following day, and wondered, with a fresh and uncomfortable clarity, whether the resolution to this particular difficulty might lie not in anything she alone could accomplish, but in whatever influence a nephew might yet hold over an aunt who valued, whatever else might be said of her character, the good opinion of her own family's consequence rather more than she valued consistency in her displeasures.