Page 96

I stop.

The room goes very quiet. Georgiana has stopped breathing behind me. Somewhere outside, on the lake, a swan is calling.

Be not alarmed, sir, on receiving this letter, by any apprehension of its containing a renewal of anything you have reason to distrust. I have no beautiful things to say to you. You have had enough of those from me. I mean only to answer, as plainly as I can, everything that was said between us at Hunsford, by you and by me. You did as much for me once. It is the least I owe you.

I sit down. I do not choose the chair. It is simply behind me.

"Brother?"

"Wait," I say. "Georgiana. Please. Stay. Only—wait."

She sits down on the window seat, very still, with her hands in her lap, and waits.

I read.

She begins with my proposal, as I began with her refusal. She takes every charge I laid against her family, one by one, and answers it. And she does not defend them. That is what stops my breath. She writes that I was right. It was not because you were wrong. It was because you were right, and I had known it all my life, and I could not bear to hear it from you.

I think of her mother, fainting onto Jane. I think of Mrs. Bennet at Longbourn asking me whether I liked a white soup, with her whole foolish, loving heart in her face.

"I was wrong too," I say aloud.

Georgiana looks up. "Brother?"

"Nothing. Go on. That is—I am going on."

She writes of Bingley. She thanks me. She has never thanked me before. She writes of Wickham, and does not spare herself one word, and I have to put the letter down on my knee for a moment because my hands are not steady.

I believed him because he was charming and you were not, and because he flattered me and you had called me tolerable. That is the whole of it. I have no better excuse. There is none.

"Oh, Elizabeth," I say. "No."

Georgiana's eyes are very wide.

Then she comes to her own words.

She has written them all down. Every one. Had you behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner. Your arrogance, your conceit, your selfish disdain. The last man in the world. She has written them out in her quick, untidy hand, exactly as I remember them, exactly as I heard them echo in my own head in the garden at Longbourn. And under each one, like an account, she has written what it was worth.

I said the last man in the world because it was the cruelest thing I could think of, and I wanted to be cruel. It was the only lie I told you at Hunsford.

The only lie.

I read it three times.

***

She comes, at last, to the garden.

You said in the garden that I pitied you. I did not. I pitied myself. I sat by your bed and was sorry for myself, because I had thought myself so clever, and I had been so blind. The first morning I was guilty. I will not pretend otherwise.

But I did not walk with you under the limes for guilt. I did not let you tell me about your mother for guilt. I did not put my hand in your hair in the carriage for guilt, nor stand on Oakham Mount and say yes for guilt.

I close my eyes.

The carriage. The weight of my head on her shoulder. The small, soft sound of kid leather sliding, and then her bare fingers in my hair. Slow. Careful. Not quite steady. As though she had wanted to touch it for a long time and had not let herself.

The hill. Do not you dare. Her hand fisted in my lapel. Her mouth.

I knew. I knew on the floor of my room upstairs, with the forget-me-nots in my palm. No one could have kissed me like that out of pity. I have known it for ten days, and sat in this chair, and looked at the lake, and refused to know it.