“The debt itself was real. The use made of it was not. Collins hinted that if matters were not composed within his sense of propriety, questions might be asked about my father’s management, my mother’s ability to pay, the terms by which Jane had been settled on Mr Marsden, and whether certain household goods at Longbourn had been retained under a valuation too convenient to female distress. He found that legal process, even proved unsuccessful, can ruin a woman who has no place to defend herself except the house being taken from her.”
“And your uncle?”
“Fought what he could. Argued. Appealed to Collins’s vanity and to Charlotte’s better sense where he could. But he had trade to mind, a family of his own, and not enough ready money to purchase peace for all of us against every species of clerical extortion. Then Jane married Mr Marsden, and for a while everything rearranged itself around hope again.”
She stopped. Darcy waited.
“It is fashionable in novels to make the husband in such a marriage either ideal or intolerable. He was neither. He was a decent man, older than Jane by some years, too pleased at having brought some comfort to a woman in difficulty, and not strong against weather or the chest complaint that took him. Jane did not love him as a woman ought love the man she marries. They got on well enough, or so it seemed to Mama. Jane was grateful to have a home. In her circumstances gratitude was almost the same currency as survival.”
Darcy’s face did not change. Only his eyes lowered briefly.
“It was in that season that I did the thing I came north not to answer for. I will tell it to you in the order it happened. My uncle still trying. My mother frantic. Collins more poisonous because thwarted. One particular paper becoming central. And the thing I did with that paper, which cannot be undone.”
She stopped. She was not yet ready to name it. She set the piece of it aside and went on.
“Jane had been largely lost to us by then. You understand, perhaps, how a house closes around an illness—the wife of a failing man does not answer the letters she once answered, and the family, once reassured that she is tolerably looked after, ceases to press her. My mother stopped writing when Jane stopped replying. My sisters were young enough not to press the matter. I had a handful of brief letters from her across the two years of her marriage—enough to know she was in Derbyshire, enough to know the house was quiet,enough to know Mr Marsden had been failing through the autumn. I had not told my uncle what I knew of her situation. I had not told anyone. Jane’s silence was her one privacy in the marriage, and I was not going to spend it for her.
“My uncle’s plan for me, when flight became unavoidable, was Scotland. He put me on a coach with a manservant he trusted, because if anyone came asking after me, the story nearest the truth was to be that I had been sent safely out of reach. I did not go to Scotland. I rose before dawn at an inn and left the man sleeping, and after that I travelled alone. I went south first so Hertfordshire might suppose me gone one way. Then north when south grew too obvious. I meant to reach Jane, if I could. I thought—I had nothing sounder to think—that a sister in a quiet Derbyshire house married to a failing man would be the last place Collins would look, and that if I could get to her I might rest for a space and write to my uncle from there.
“I arrived at Merebank on the afternoon you found me in the snow, believing I was coming to a house that contained my sister and a sick brother-in-law. I learned on the path up from the road that Mr Marsden had died five days before I arrived. Jane had not written of it. I had not known. We buried the news, she and I, in the first quarter hour of my being carried into her house.”
She rose, bracing on the table. He started forward. She lifted one hand to stop him. The crutch was against the far wall. She did not need the crutch. She wanted the bag.
“Stay there.”
He stayed.
She rose—slowly, with the crutch, the leg protesting the demand—went to the chest, and reached behind it into the narrow recess where the bag had been since the afternoon of the lane. She brought it back to the table and set it down, then sat again, more heavily than before.
“Here it is,” she said. “Since you might as well see.” She drew the packet out and laid it on the table between them.
“Collins had no legal standing to make what he made of an unresolved debt. He had only the standing of a man whom frightened women had no resources to refuse. My uncle believed—God forgive him, and me far more—that if a certain letter of acknowledgment existed among the older papers, declaring that old debt satisfied by payment through his hand and releasing further claim against the Bennet household goods, several wolves would lose the scent at once. The man who had held the debt was dead. His son wasin London. Records were disordered. Such a letter, if produced, would not easily be contradicted.”
She drew a breath. “My uncle did not forge it. I did.”
Darcy did not start or curse or move. He sat very still. “Explain.”
“I had seen the old man’s hand once or twice on receipts. Not enough to imitate well to an expert. Enough, I thought, to satisfy confused household papers if the matter never reached hostile scrutiny. My uncle argued against it when my meaning was clear. Then for it. Then against it again. In the end the thing was mine because my desperation was mine, and because men, however good, often let women commit terrible acts under the excuse that they merely fail to prevent them.”
His mouth moved, small and terrible, as if to shape a smile it could not produce.
“Do not admire me for it,” she said. “I had no grand principle. I was frightened and angry and sick of being bartered by men who called their appetites duty. I wrote the acknowledgment. Then copied the lender’s son’s style upon the outer note that purported to have forwarded it. Then, because one false paper begets others, I altered a date on a related account memorandum, and carried with me, when I fled, the packet that would either support the lie if needed or damn me entirely if exposed.”
She unwrapped the linen and laid the papers out one by one under the thin February light from the window.
“The acknowledgment. The forwarded note. The altered memorandum. And this.” She touched the sealed slip still unopened. “A letter from Collins, which I kept because if I burned it I should lose the only proof his threats had shape enough to drive anyone mad.”
Darcy did not reach for them at once. His hand closed and opened on the arm of the chair. “May I read the letter?”
“Yes. I should have given it to you two months ago.”
He picked up Collins’s letter and broke the seal with a careful impatience.
Hunsford ParsonageKent
Madam,
Though your former conduct toward me deprived you, through youthful self-will, of the protection it had been in my power and Christian inclinationto extend, I remain unwilling to see the widow of a respectable man and the daughters of my late honoured cousin reduced, by feminine imprudence and pecuniary misapprehension, to consequences more publicly mortifying than need be.
