“She is very good at this,” Elizabeth said. “She always has been. The things she says are never entirely false, which is what makes them so difficult to dismiss. Chatterton’s reputation is real. Lydia’s history is real, as you well know. Everything she uses is real, and none of what she implies is.” A pause. “I say this not to excuse what you did. Only to make sure you understand what was done to you, and by whom, and why.”
With that she left him. He was a grown man, and she had said what she had to say, and the rest was his.
Darcy was in the corridor outside.
“Well?” he said.
“I told him the truth,” Elizabeth said. “What he does with it is his affair.”
“You told him more than you needed to,” Darcy said.
“Perhaps,” she said. “He needed it.”
“Should I…” Darcy gestured toward the door.
“Absolutely not. Let him sit with it.”
Darcy inclined his head, and she smiled, wearily, up at him. “I am going up now, dearest. I shall check on James.”
“I will join you shortly.”
Through the door of Lydia’s sitting room, as she passed, she could see the light still burning, and the shape of her sister at the writing desk, perfectly still, not writing.
Elizabeth did not knock. She checked on her sleeping son, went to her own room and sat, waiting for Darcy. She did not feel, quite, that she had done enough, and understood that there was nothing more she could do, and found these two things very difficult to hold simultaneously.
