Page 48

The letter shakes in my hand.

Jane's writing is always so neat. Her lines march across the page like a row of well-behaved schoolgirls in a crocodile. Not today. Today they tumble and slope and run into one another, and there is a blot in the second line where she has pressed too hard, and another in the fourth where something wet has fallen on the ink.

He rode over from Netherfield on Wednesday morning, all alone, so early that Mama was still in her curl papers. Hill showed him into the breakfast parlor and I was there by myself, and Lizzy, I could not speak. I could not even stand up. I sat there with the toast rack in my hand like a great goose.

He said he had come from London the moment he had a letter from Mr. Darcy. He said Mr. Darcy had told him he was wrong about me last autumn, and that he had been wrong to keep it from him that I was in town, and that he ought to come back. He said it all in a great rush, standing by the sideboard, with his hat still in his hand.

And then he said, Miss Bennet, I have been a great fool, and I have been miserable since November, and is there any chance at all that you have not quite forgot me?

Oh, Lizzy.

He has called every day since. He stayed to dinner yesterday. Mama has had the good china out three times.

I put the letter down on the breakfast table and put my hand over my mouth.

"Bad news, cousin?" asks Mr. Collins, with his own mouth full of toast.

"No," I say through my fingers. "No. The best news."

Across the table, Charlotte lowers her teacup. She does not ask. She only looks at me, and then at the letter, and then at me again, with her eyebrows a very little raised.

"Mr. Bingley has come back to Netherfield," I tell her. "He has called on Jane. Every day since Wednesday."

Charlotte's face does something it seldom does. It breaks into a smile so wide and so sudden that Maria drops her spoon.

"Oh, Lizzy," she says. "Oh, I am so glad."

"Mr. Bingley?" Maria squeaks. "The Mr. Bingley? The one with the pheasants? Is he going to marry Jane?"

"He has not said so yet."

"He will," says Charlotte, with great conviction. "A man does not ride from London before breakfast to call on a lady he does not mean to marry." She looks at me over her teacup. "Not twice in one spring, at any rate."

I pick the letter up again before I can blush.

There is more. Jane has crossed the page, writing the second half across the first so that I must turn it sideways to read it, and here the hand goes small and careful again, as though she has made herself sit up straight.

Lizzy, dearest, I must ask you something, and you must not think I am cross. I am not cross. Only a little hurt, and very much puzzled.

Why did you not tell me you were engaged to Mr. Darcy?

Mr. Collins’s letter came to Mama more than a week ago. Mama read it out at dinner. I thought she would faint. She did faint, a little, onto Mary. I did not write to you then, because I did not know what to say, and I hoped you would write first. And when Mr. Bingley came on Wednesday, he said, oh yes, Darcy's letter said so too, the family that is soon to be mine. And everyone looked at me, Lizzy, because they all thought I must have known.

I did not know. I did not know you even liked him. In your last letter from Kent you said he sat in Charlotte's parlor for a quarter of an hour at a time and said nothing whatever, and that you thought he came only to save himself from conversation with his aunt.

I am so happy for you. Truly I am. Mr. Bingley says there is no better man in England, and he has known him ten years. But I wish you had told me. I have always told you everything.

Write soon, and tell me all of it. I shall not sleep until you do.

Your loving, very bewildered sister, Jane.

I put the letter down again.

The parlor is very quiet. Maria is looking at me with her mouth open. Mr. Collins is looking at me with his chest puffed out like a pouter pigeon.

"I took the liberty," he says, "of writing to your mother, cousin, the very evening I received Mr. Darcy’s gracious note. I felt it my duty. A mother ought to be informed of such things by a responsible party."

"Yes," I say faintly. "Jane mentions it."