He walked down the corridor to the library. He closed the door. He sat in the chair where the pig used to sleep at his feet, and pressed his hands against his face, and the anger drained out of him like water from a basin, leaving him empty and cold and clear.
He was not finished. Caroline was dealt with, and the dealing had been necessary, and he did not regret it. But the Caroline problem was the smaller problem. The larger reckoning was not with her. It was with himself.
He sat in the library and looked at the wall and thought about every failure, one by one, the way a man counts coins he has lost. The assembly. The visits. The card party. The dinner. Every time Elizabeth had been watching, and every time his mouth had produced the safe sentence instead of the true one. He had been kind to the pig in private and cold to the woman in public, and the distance between those two men was the distance he had to close.
Caroline had removed the pig physically. Darcy had removed it with words. He was just more polite about it.
He thought about the pig in the cold pen at Haye Park. The way she had pressed against his chest and closed her eyes and trusted him completely. The pig had never needed him to be impressive or articulate or correct. The pig had needed him to show up.
He was going to show up. In front of everyone. Regardless of the cost.
He sat in the dark library for a long time. The candle burned down to a stub and guttered. The house settled around him, the old boards creaking, the wind pressing against the windows. From somewhere in the building, he heard a door close, and then another, and then silence.
CHAPTER 21
Elizabeth
Wickham's mask came off on a Sunday.
Elizabeth was in the garden. It was late morning, cold and clear, and she was sitting on the bench with Truffles curled in her lap and a book open on the armrest that she was not reading. She had been not-reading a great deal in the three days since Truffles' return. She picked up books and opened them and stared at the pages and thought about Darcy's face in the lane, and the books sat unread and the thoughts went round and round.
Truffles was pressed against her stomach, warm and solid. Since the ordeal, the pig had not left Elizabeth's side. She followed her through every room. She slept pressed against Elizabeth's legs instead of at the foot of the bed. She startled at loud sounds and flinched when doors opened suddenly. The shock was fading, but slowly, and Elizabeth held the pig a little tighter each time she felt the small body tense.
But she was recovering. That morning, Truffles had stolen a turnip from the kitchen and carried it to Mr. Bennet's study, where she deposited it on his open copy of Gibbon and stood back with the expression of a creature presenting tribute.
Mr. Bennet had examined the turnip, examined the pig, and said, "I accept your offering, madam, but I note with some concern that you have placed it on the fall of Constantinople." He had given her a corner of his toast and she had eaten it on the carpet and fallen asleep with her snout on his shoe.
Elizabeth, passing the study door, had felt something in her chest unclench for the first time in days. The pig was herself again. The pig was going to be fine.
She was scratching Truffles behind the ear, in the spot that made the pig's eyes close, when Lydia burst through the back door.
Lydia's bonnet was askew. Her face was flushed. Her voice was at a volume that would have carried across county lines.
"I was going to Brighton! Mr. Wickham said he would take me to Brighton! He said we would be married, and then we would go to Brighton, and it would be the most wonderful —"
"What?" Elizabeth stood up so quickly that Truffles tumbled from her lap with an indignant squeal. "Lydia, what are you saying?"
The story came out in pieces, the way all Lydia's stories came out: breathless, disordered, and with a complete absence of the self-awareness that might have made the telling less catastrophic.
Wickham had been cultivating her for weeks. He had told her she was beautiful, which was the one thing Lydia wanted to hear and the one thing that could make her follow a man anywhere. He had told her she was too spirited for Hertfordshire, too alive for a country village, too extraordinary for the small life her parents had planned for her. He had painted Brighton in thecolours of freedom and adventure, the sea and the balls and the regiment, and Lydia, who was fifteen and had never been told no in a way that stuck, had believed every word.
He had proposed running away together. An elopement. He had made it sound romantic instead of ruinous. He had not mentioned marriage first. He had not mentioned anything that a responsible man would mention to a fifteen-year-old girl he was luring from her family.
Lydia had agreed. She had packed a bag. She had written a note to Kitty, not to her parents, because the note was an invitation rather than a farewell, and she had been caught only by accident. Colonel Forster's wife, Harriet, who had been charged with chaperoning Lydia at a card party, had found the note in Kitty's hand. Kitty, who was crying, had given it up immediately. The alarm had been raised. Colonel Forster had confronted Wickham at the barracks, and the elopement had been prevented.
By hours. The coach had been booked. The post-boys had been paid. Wickham had been waiting at the inn with a valise and a smile and a plan that ended with a girl's ruin and her family's money.
Lydia did not understand why everyone was upset. She stood in the Longbourn parlour with her arms crossed and her chin thrust forward and her eyes bright with the furious bewilderment of a girl who had been offered an adventure and did not understand why the adults were so determined to deny it.
"He loved me. He was going to marry me."
"He was not going to marry you," Elizabeth said. Her voice sounded strange to her own ears. Flat and calm and very far away. "He was going to take you to Brighton and ruin you, and then he was going to leave."
"You do not know that!"
"I know exactly that."
Mrs. Bennet had hysterics. Real hysterics, not the theatrical variety she deployed for Jane's colds and Lizzy's refusals. She collapsed on the settee and wept and gasped and pressed her handkerchief to her mouth and said "Ruined! We are ruined!" until Mary fetched the smelling salts.
