Truffles stirred. A small, sleepy sound. A rearrangement on the blanket.
"He is not what you think," Elizabeth whispered. "He is not what either of us thought."
The pig did not respond. The pig was asleep, dreaming of warm boots and bread crusts and a voice that said things that mattered only in the dark.
Elizabeth lay still. She could feel the thought trying to unfold itself, the way a letter unfolded when the seal was broken, and she knew what was inside.
If Darcy was not what she thought, then she had been cruel to a man who was merely afraid. If she had been cruel to a man who was merely afraid, then her judgment — her wit, her sharpness, her certainty — had not protected her from error. It had caused it. And if she followed that thread one step further, to Wickham, to Jane's quiet warning about Lydia, to everything she had dismissed because it did not fit the story she preferred, then the error was not a single misjudgment. It was a pattern. And the pattern said that Elizabeth Bennet, who prided herself on seeing clearly, had seen what she wished to see and called it sight.
She could not face that. Not tonight. Not yet. To be wrong about one man was embarrassing. To be wrong about everything — about Darcy, about Wickham, about her own cleverness — was a kind of collapse she did not know how to survive while still being herself.
So she stopped. She folded the thought back along its creases and pressed the seal shut and put it away, and she told herself that she would open it later, when she was stronger, when the cost of being wrong was not quite so total.
She lay in the dark with this weight on her chest, and she might have stayed there all night, pinned under the accumulatedevidence of her own wrongness, except that Truffles chose that moment to dream.
The pig's legs twitched. Her snout worked. A small, urgent grunt escaped her, then another, then a rapid sequence of squeaks that sounded like a pig negotiating terms with an invisible turnip. Her back legs kicked against Elizabeth's shin. Her whole body shuddered with the intensity of whatever she was chasing in her sleep — bread crusts, probably, or Darcy's boot, or that one patch of sunlight in the Longbourn garden that she defended from cats with the ferocity of a general holding a bridge.
Elizabeth watched her. The pig's ear flapped. Her tail uncurled and recurled. She let out a snore of such volume and conviction that it vibrated the bedframe.
Elizabeth laughed. She did not mean to. It came out before she could stop it — a short, watery sound, half laugh and half something else, muffled against the pillow. It was not a happy laugh. But it was a laugh, and it broke something loose, the way laughter always did, and she pressed her face against the pig's warm side and closed her eyes and thought:Whatever else I have got wrong, I did not get you wrong. You are exactly what I thought you were. You are ridiculous, and you are mine.
She fell asleep with her hand on the pig's back, and the pig's legs still twitching, and the weight still there but bearable now, because the pig was warm and the pig was absurd and the pig did not care about sealed letters or patterns of self-deception or the terrible cost of being wrong about everything. The pig cared about turnips and boots and the person whose hand was on her back, and that was enough. For tonight, that was enough.
CHAPTER 16
Mr. Darcy
Aweek after the dinner at the Phillipses', Darcy knew he had failed. He had composed fourteen alternate responses to Caroline's question about the pig —Surely you agree, Mr. Darcy, that such displays are beneath the dignity of good society?— and abandoned the exercise when he realised that eloquence in hindsight was its own form of cowardice. He needed to act, not rehearse.
The Cowper book sat on his bedside table. He opened it sometimes, in the evenings, and read Elizabeth's margin notes. Her handwriting was small and slanted and occasionally illegible. She had written "ha!" beside a passage about vanity. She had underlined a line about the comfort of solitude and written "not always" in the margin. She had drawn a small pig beside a verse about faithful creatures, and the small pig looked remarkably like Truffles, complete with floppy ears and a curled tail.
He closed the book every time he reached the pig. He opened it again the next evening.
He confided in Bingley. Not about Elizabeth specifically, not about the Cowper book or the fourteen alternate responses or the fact that he was losing sleep, but about the general feeling of being trapped between what he felt and what the world expected.
They were in the drawing room after dinner. Caroline and Louisa had retired. Bingley was sitting with a glass of port and the dazed expression of a man who had called at Longbourn that afternoon and spoken with Jane Bennet for an hour and was still thinking about it.
"I don't understand the problem," Bingley said. "If you care about someone, you say so. What is the difficulty?"
"The difficulty is that saying so has consequences."
"Yes. The consequence is that they know. That seems rather the point."
"And if they do not wish to know? If one's attentions are unwelcome? If one has given offence so grave that no declaration, however sincere, could undo it?"
Bingley considered this. He considered it the way Bingley considered most things: briefly, with goodwill, and without the torturous self-examination that Darcy brought to every decision.
"Then you apologise," he said. "You apologise sincerely and you do better. It is not complicated, Darcy."
"It is extremely complicated."
"It is only complicated because you make it complicated. You are the most intelligent man I know and also the most hopeless in conversation. You can read Latin and Greek and manage an estate of ten thousand a year, and you cannot tell a woman you like her without making it sound like a lease agreement."
Darcy stared at his friend. Bingley stared back with the cheerful directness of a man who had no idea how much damage his honesty could inflict.
"That is unkind," Darcy said.
"It is accurate, which is worse."
