Chapter Twenty-One
Elizabeth did not sleep well that night, turning the whole of Fitzwilliam's revelation over in her mind until sleep became a pursuit she abandoned somewhere near dawn, rising instead to sit at her window with a shawl about her shoulders, watching the grey London morning gather itself into full daylight while she gathered, alongside it, a resolve that had been building through the sleepless hours.
She would not wait for him to come to his senses.
She had spent the whole of this business, from Hunsford onward, reacting to circumstances not of her own making, defending herself in drawing rooms she had not chosen to enter, answering accusations she had not invited, and she found, this particular morning, that she was thoroughly weary of the pattern.
If Mr. Darcy believed her capable of the vanity Caroline Bingley had apparently ascribed to her, capable of parading his private letter for her own consequence, then he did not know her at all, whatever regard he claimed to feel, and she would not permit that misunderstanding to stand unchallenged simply because propriety generally required the gentleman to make the first move in such matters.
She wrote to him that same morning, a letter considerably shorter than her previous correspondence, and considerably more direct.
Mr. Darcy,
Colonel Fitzwilliam called upon me yesterday, and in the course of his visit, I learned the likely cause of your silence these past several days.
I understand you have heard some account, from a source I believe I can guess at without difficulty, suggesting I have shown your letter about London as proof of an attachment secured, in terms that paint my defense of your character at Mrs. Fenwick's gathering as calculated self-interest rather than the honest sentiment it was.
I will not waste ink defending myself against an accusation you did not have the courage to bring to me directly, Mr. Darcy.
I will say only this: I have never shown your letter to any living soul, nor spoken its contents to anyone beyond the barest acknowledgment, to my own aunt, that such a letter existed and had done a great deal to change my understanding of you.
What I said at Mrs. Fenwick's, I said because I believed it true, and because I found I could not stand by and let your character be maligned by strangers when I possessed evidence enough to defend it honestly.
If that defense has cost me the very regard it was meant, in some part, to honour, then I confess I do not know how to reconcile the man who wrote me two letters of genuine feeling with the man who would abandon our understanding on the strength of Miss Bingley's unverified account, without troubling himself to ask me directly whether it bore any resemblance to the truth.
I do not write this to reproach you beyond what the circumstances plainly warrant. I write it because I find I would rather know the truth of your present feelings, however disappointing, than continue in an uncertainty I have grown considerably too weary to sustain.
Elizabeth Bennet
She sent it before her courage could fail her, and spent the remainder of the day in a state of restless activity, unable to settle to any occupation for more than a few minutes together, her mind returning, again and again, to the letter and to what answer, if any, it might produce.