I thought about it, thinking of various ideas for a response and discarding them. I thought that I might make up someonethat didn’t exist, but I thought that would be too obvious. She clearly knew I was lying, and I thought back on my speech about polite lies.
I obviously did not understand how they worked.
I had observed people making them and observed how they were received.
If I had made this one properly, it would have been received differently, but I had been too obvious about my intention not to socialize with my aunt.
I was going to have to go, that was all there was to it.Wewere going to have to go. But I also could not admit that I had been lying. My aunt and I both knew I was lying, but I had to pretend I hadn’t been. I would have to write back and say it was of no consequence who we had been engaged with, because the invitation had fallen through, and we were free now, and we would be quite pleased to dine with her on that evening.
In order to do all of this, however, I was going to have to tell Elizabeth of what I had done, and she was going to be hurt, and I did not wish to do any of this.
Days passed.
I might have done nothing, nothing at all, let the day of the dinner itself pass away and have simply avoided all of it, rudely, which would have had such consequences as I could not even anticipate, for I had never done such an audacious thing before, but I was spared from this, well, sort of spared, because Elizabeth found the second letter from my aunt.
She was sorting through my writing desk to write a letter home to her sister. She and her sister Jane exchanged letters at a rate that was truly fantastic. She had two a week from her sister, sometimes three. I had forgotten the letter was there when I told her to simply go and find some paper in my desk.
She came back with several sheets of blank paper for her own letter and with the letter from my aunt. “We are not engaged anywhere, Fitzwilliam,” she said.
“Oh, Lord in heaven,” I breathed. “You found that.”
She turned it over in her hands. “And you will still say you are not ashamed of me, I suppose.”
“I am not,” I said quietly, fervently. “Elizabeth, I love you. I am in love with you.”
“I think you believe all of that,” she said. “I think somehow you do not understand that you are, in fact, ashamed of me.”
“No,” I said, sitting up straight, adamant. “I am not. We did have a dinner engagement—”
“Fitzwilliam!”
“I accepted and had forgotten to tell you of it. It was with a friend from my Cambridge days, but he has taken ill, and so I did not tell you of that because it was off. No dinner after all. And I simply thought that we would be uncomfortable with my aunt, so I wished to leave it as it was, that we would not go.”
She eyed me, nervously dragging her teeth over her bottom lip. “Truly? You would not lie to me?”
I met her gaze. “Truly.”
She searched my expression. Then she looked away.
Had I convinced her? I felt a stab of guilt, having lied to her like that. It was all unraveling, was it not? My happiness with her? I should have known it could not last. When did anything that good and pure and wondrous ever last? Life was not that way. It was not pure bliss. It was tangled and complicated and shot full of difficulty.
“Well, I think we must go,” she said. “I shall write back to your aunt. It’s proper for me to handle these correspondences, you see. Wives handle dinner invitations. Certainly, you know that.” She wasn’t looking at me.
Damnation. I swallowed. “Elizabeth, I am sorry. I am ever so sorry.”
“About what?” She looked up at me, a smile on her face, plastered there, quite wide.
Another stab of guilt. I hated myself.
“You are so very concerned with propriety,” she said. “You must know I am the one to answer these sorts of correspondences. I am surprised it was not addressed to me, in fact.”
I sucked in a noisy breath.
“Anyway,” she continued, “I shall simply explain to her what occurred and I shall tell her we are now free and would be pleased to accept her invitation if we are still welcome.”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s quite what should be done.”
“Good, then,” she said. “I must say, I shall be pleased to have somewhere to wear all these dresses you had made for me. You must wish someone to see them since you spent so much on them.”
