Mr. Bennet went very quiet. He did not shout. He did not lecture. He looked at Lydia with an expression that Elizabeth had never seen on his face before and never wanted to see again: the look of a man who had been negligent and knew it, who had treated his youngest daughter's wildness as entertainment rather than danger, and who was now seeing the cost.
He shut himself in his library. Elizabeth heard the lock turn.
She sat in the garden with Truffles. The pig was in her lap, pressed close, her body tense from the shouting inside the house. Elizabeth stroked her ears and thought.
She thought about the pig trembling against her leg in Meryton. The flat ears. The frightened squeal. The snap of teeth when Wickham reached toward her. The way Truffles had pressed herself against Elizabeth's opposite ankle, as far from the man as she could get.
The pig had known. From the very first moment, from the very first meeting, Truffles had known what George Wickham was. She had tried to tell Elizabeth with the only language she had: fear. She had trembled and snapped and refused to enter rooms he occupied and flinched when his voice carried from the parlour, and Elizabeth, clever Elizabeth, Elizabeth who prided herself on reading people, had chosen to believe the charming man and ignore the frightened pig.
She thought about who else Truffles had judged. She made the list in her head, because making lists was how she managed things she did not want to feel.
Bingley: loved. The pig had greeted him with cheerful enthusiasm, the way one greeted a person who was exactly what they appeared to be.
Darcy: adored. From the first moment. Without reservation. Without conditions. With the absolute certainty of a creature who had been held in gentle hands and had decided, on the basis of that single act, that this was the man to follow.
Wickham: feared. Not disliked. Not indifferent. Feared. The deep, instinctive fear of a prey animal recognising a predator.
Bingley was good. Darcy was good. Wickham was dangerous.
The pig had been right about all three. Elizabeth had been wrong about all three.
Her prejudice had blinded her. Not Darcy's prejudice. Not the prejudice of Meryton society. Her own. Her pride in her own judgment had been as destructive as Darcy's pride in his station. She had looked at Darcy's stiffness and decided he was cold. She had looked at Wickham's warmth and decided he was good. She had been wrong both times, and her wrongness had nearly cost her sister everything.
If Harriet Forster had not found that note. If Kitty had not been crying. If the alarm had been raised an hour later instead of when it was. Lydia would be in Brighton now, or on the road to it, in a coach with a man who had no intention of marrying her and every intention of using her up and moving on.
Elizabeth held the pig tighter.
"You tried to tell me," she whispered. "You tried to tell me and I would not listen."
Truffles grunted softly and pressed her snout against Elizabeth's neck. The pig's body was warm and steady, the heartbeat slow and even against Elizabeth's chest. An anchor. The one constant in a world that Elizabeth had built on assumptions that were crumbling.
In the days that followed, the truth about Wickham unravelled through Meryton like a pulled thread. Colonel Forster's investigation found debts in every shop in town and a commission purchased on credit he could not cover. Darcy, when he learned of the elopement attempt, wrote to the Colonel directly with an account of Wickham's history — the living, the money, the pattern.
Her father told her. He called her into the study and closed the door and read her the relevant passages from Colonel Forster's letter, which contained Darcy's account in full. Wickham had been given three thousand pounds in lieu of the living and had spent it within a year. The denied legacy was a lie. Everything Elizabeth had believed was a lie told by a man who was very good at telling lies. And everything the pig had known was right.
Elizabeth sat at her desk that evening and wrote a letter to Mr. Darcy. It was honest and raw and it contained the word "fool" applied to herself four times, which seemed insufficient. She read it, crumpled it, and threw it in the fire. She would not write it. She would stand in front of him and say it:I was wrong. About you, about Wickham, about everything. The pig knew and I did not listen and I am done not listening.
She suspected the courage would be harder to find than the words.
In the meantime, the household reassembled itself around the crisis. Lydia was confined to the house. She raged about the confinement for two days and then went quiet, which was more alarming than the raging. Elizabeth found her on the third day sitting in the window seat with her knees drawn up, staring at the garden with an expression that was neither angry nor defiant but simply lost.
"He told me I was special," Lydia said. She was not talking to Elizabeth, exactly. She was talking to the window, or to the air,or to whatever part of herself was trying to understand what had happened.
"You are special," Elizabeth said. She sat beside her sister. "You are also fifteen, and he is a liar, and those two things together are dangerous."
"I thought he loved me."
Elizabeth thought about Darcy. About the man who could not say the right thing in public and who carried pigs inside his coat when nobody was watching. She thought about what love looked like when it was real, and how it looked nothing like what Wickham had offered, which was flattery dressed up in a red coat.
"Love does not ask you to run away in the middle of the night," she said. "Love does not hide. Love does not require a coach booked in secret and a note left for your sister instead of your parents."
Lydia said nothing. Her eyes were wet. She turned her face to the window.
Elizabeth put her arm around her sister's shoulders and held her. Truffles, who had followed Elizabeth up the stairs, pressed herself against Lydia's feet. Lydia looked down at the pig with wet eyes.
"Truffles bit Mr. Wickham once," Lydia said. "At Longbourn. On the ankle. He was sitting on the sofa and she went right for him. I thought it was funny."
"It was funny."
