“Say it.”
“I think you should tell him.”
Elizabeth closed her eyes.
“Tell whom what?”
“Whatever it is that keeps altering every room you are in. Whatever it is he knows enough of to be frightened and not enough of to act justly toward. Whatever it is you half-trust me with and half-hide. I think you should tell him before all of us are made meaner by not knowing.”
The sentence struck with the force of love sharpened by exhaustion. Elizabeth could not answer.
“Lizzy.” Jane had not lowered her voice. “He is not a stupid man. He has not been a stupid man at any hour since you entered his house on a hurdle in January. He has watched you all winter with an attention he has been restraining from the question he could see wanting to be asked, and the restraint has cost him something every day he has paid it. Do you think he is blind? Do you think he accepts at face value the story of a Hertfordshire lady who arrived in his valley on the ice with a leather bag she will not open? Do you think he does not read the looks you give him, and the looks you do not give him, and whatever it was that happened on the path yesterday that brought you home in a state it has not been in my power to name?”
“Jane.”
“I am not finished. If you can go to him—if you have not done something so terrible you cannot go—then go. Tell him. Put down what is between you and let him weigh it. He is a just man and a generous man, and he has been, for two months, the only person who could have extracted the truth from you by pressure and has not done so. You owe it to him. You owe it to me. You owe it to the sister who has had to watch you become a creature who writes and burns letters in the fire rather than answering a question anyone in this house would be willing to hear.”
Elizabeth did not speak.
She could not. Jane had given her the exact piece of advice she could not take, and Jane did not know—could not know—why she could not take it. Jane had heard the whole of Longbourn three weeks ago in this very parlour, the forgery and the papers and Collins and the uncle’s coach and the silver and the night in Northampton. What Jane did not know was the single fact that had been placed in Elizabeth’s hand yesterday morning on the path beside the mere—that the man in whose house Jane was asking her to confide was Collins’s patroness’s nephew.
She had wanted to tell him. She had wanted it for weeks, and more sharply after the walk than before it, because after the walk she had understood at what cost he had been waiting for her to tell him. Her silence was not self-protection. The cost of telling was not hers.
He had, by birth, two routes she did not. Nephew to Lady Catherine…Lady Catherineof all people! He could write to his aunt, return the filing through Wainwright, deliver her to Tilney, and walk out of the matter under the protection of a name no magistrate wouldtrouble. The Earl of Matlock was his uncle. His aunt would write him the longest letter of her life in approval. It was, strictly, what his honour required—and it was the course by which she was most efficiently destroyed.
Or he could shelter her, and stand against his aunt, his family, his sister’s standing, and the legal peril of being taken for a man who harboured a felon on his land. His connections, which would have protected him for the first choice, would not protect him for the second.
Either way, the choosing would cost him. She did not know which he would choose, and had learned, since the walk, to be honest enough with herself to say so. To put the means of the choice into his hand was already to have hurt him, before any answer followed, and whichever answer he gave, the choosing itself would leave a mark on him that would outlast whatever came after.
She almost thought he should be permitted the first choice. It would be the cleaner course. Georgiana would be the safer for it. The valley would continue whatever it had been doing without the Bennet problem attached to it. If asked to will it, she thought she could have willed it for him.
But she could not sit in his parlour and put the means of it into his hand. The love she had for him—she permitted herself, on the blank third sheet, to name what it was, since there was no one in the room to hear her—had arranged itself into a creature that preferred to carry the cost itself rather than make him the instrument of either her ruin or his own.
She could not give Jane any part of this. Jane, hearing it, would understand at once why telling Darcy had become impossible, and that piece of knowledge would take from Jane the one thing Jane had left, which was the belief that the house they were living in was safe.
Elizabeth would not take that from her. Not today.
“I cannot tell him. Not yet. And I cannot tell you why not yet. I am asking you to trust me on both, for a little longer.”
Jane was silent. When she spoke it was quieter than before.
“How much longer?”
“I do not know.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It is the only one I have.”
Jane closed her eyes.
She kept them closed long enough that Elizabeth had begun to compose an apology before Jane opened them again. When Jane did open them, her face was composed in the particular composure that belonged to exhaustion rather than peace.
“Very well. I will not press you today. I will almost certainly press you tomorrow. You should know that, so that you may arrange whatever further defences you are planning.”
“Jane —”
“I am not finished. There is one further thing I mean to say and I mean to say it now while I can still manage the pitch.”
