Chapter Fourteen
Elizabeth received the letter the following morning, and recognized, from the particular quality of her own reaction upon seeing his hand on the direction, how thoroughly her feelings toward its author had shifted since the last occasion she had opened a letter bearing that same careful script.
She read it in the privacy of her own room, the door closed against her cousins' curiosity, and found herself, by the letter's final line, obliged to sit down upon the edge of her bed, her composure considerably more unsettled than she had expected a single page of correspondence to produce in her.
She did not answer at once. She sat with the letter a full day, turning over what she wished to say in reply, conscious that whatever she wrote would matter a great deal more than the ordinary courtesies of correspondence generally required, and it was not until the following evening, the house quiet around her, that she finally took up her own pen.
Dear Mr. Darcy,
I have read your letter several times since its arrival, and find myself, each time, less certain how to answer it adequately, for you have offered me an honesty I do not know how to match with anything less than an equal honesty of my own, however much easier it would be to reply with the careful, guarded civility that has governed most of our exchanges since Hunsford.
I will tell you, then, plainly, what I have not yet told you, and have scarcely admitted fully to myself: the public nature of this business has cost me a great deal more than I anticipated when I first refused you, and considerably more, I think, than the private refusal itself ever would have, had it remained the private matter it ought to have stayed.
I did not mind, particularly, the loss of your good opinion when I believed I had never truly possessed it, nor even the discomfort of having spoken to you with more anger than the occasion, in its essentials, required.
What I have minded, what has cost me sleepless nights and a composure I have had to labour considerably to maintain in company, is the discovery that a woman's honest refusal of an offer she is fully entitled to refuse can be turned, by strangers with nothing better to occupy their curiosity, into a story that no longer belongs to her at all.
I have been called, in the drawing rooms of this city, a fortune hunter, a schemer, an invention of my own imagining designed to raise my consequence by claiming a conquest I never made.
I have watched my dearest sister's prospects grow uncertain through no fault of her own, and my dearest friend's security threatened by an aunt who has decided, without troubling herself to learn the truth of the matter, that the fault belongs somewhere convenient to punish.
Through all of this, Mr. Darcy, I have found myself, again and again, thinking not of my own injured pride, which I confess has recovered rather more readily than I expected, but of you, and of the letter you wrote me at Hunsford, and of the growing, uncomfortable suspicion that the man I refused in April bears less resemblance, with every week that passes, to the man who has since tried, in whatever ways lay within his power, to set right what circumstance and his own past conduct set wrong.
I do not know, yet, what I wish to say beyond this.
I find I am no longer angry with you, Mr. Darcy, and have not been, if I am entirely honest, for some weeks now.
What I feel in the place where that anger once stood, I have not yet found the courage to examine closely enough to name with any confidence.
But I did not wish you to think, reading my silence these past weeks as anything other than what it was, that your letter went unappreciated, or that the sentiments within it were received with anything less than the seriousness they deserved.
I remain, with a regard I find myself less able to disguise with every passing week, your sincere friend,
Elizabeth Bennet
She sealed the letter before she could permit herself to reconsider its contents, and sent it the following morning, and found, in the days that followed its sending, that some heavy weight she had been carrying since Hunsford, unnamed and largely unacknowledged, had lifted itself, at least in part, the moment she had finally set the truth of her own feelings down plainly, for the first time, in words she could not later pretend she had not meant.