"No, Mr. Darcy," she said, shaking her head. "You do not get to look surprised."
He looked away as though unable to meet her eyes.
"Miss Bingley mocked me with it at the ball. She told me that you had known about my hearing from the night of the Meryton assembly. That you had been observing it deliberately. That your interest in me, your calls at Longbourn, your acquaintance with me, all of it, was for the sake of your sister." She kept her voice even. It cost her something. "Is that true?"
Darcy opened his mouth to speak, but Elizabeth raised a hand.
"Do not tell me it is complicated, sir. Do not manage this the way you manage everything else. I am asking you a direct question, and I would like a direct answer."
"It began that way," he said slowly.
The words landed exactly as she had known they would.
They still took her breath away.
"It began that way," she repeated. "You saw something in me that reminded you of your mother. You decided I would be useful to Georgiana. And so you sought my acquaintance, asked your sister to befriend me, called at Longbourn, walked with me in the garden, sat with me on this mount..." Her voice remained steady. She was proud of that. "And none of it was what I believed it to be?"
"That is not—"
"You confirmed it just now."
She did not raise her voice.
She did not need to.
"You said it began that way. Which means that for some portion of the time I have known you, I was being studied. Observed. Used." She looked at him. "I have spent my entire life ensuring that no one could see what I did not wish them to see. I have been careful and thorough, and never once careless. Yet you saw it in a single evening and said nothing. You watched me for weeks and said nothing. And I had no idea." Her voice tightened despite herself. "That is not a small thing, Mr. Darcy."
"No," he said quietly. "It is not."
"You knew my secret." She looked out over the valley. "You knew the one thing I have never told anyone. The thing I have spent years concealing. And you used it."
"I did not use—"
"What would you call it, sir?"
Darcy was silent.
"I should very much like to know," Elizabeth continued, turning back to him, "what you would call seeking out a woman's acquaintance because of a condition she has worked her entire life to hide, without telling her that you know, without asking herpermission, and without once considering what it might mean to her to discover that the attention she had been..." She stopped.
She was not going to finish that sentence.
"What would you call that?"
Darcy looked at her with an expression she could not read.
"I would call it wrong," he said quietly. "I would call it a failure of honesty which I cannot excuse. I would call it my mistake."
Elizabeth held his gaze.
"That is not enough," she said. "For a man whose mother endured the same thing, I would have expected greater kindness. And for a man I trusted, however foolishly, I would have expected him to keep my confidence rather than repeat it to Miss Bingley. She has never liked me, and now you have handed her a weapon."
The colour drained from Darcy's face.
Elizabeth did not wait for a reply.
She turned and started down the path.
"Miss Elizabeth."
