Jane was very still. “Everything?”
“Everything. The papers. The night at Northampton. The bag. Collins’s letter. The forgery. My uncle’s coach. All of it.”
“When you saytold him, do you mean—”
“I sat in the chair he had sat in and I told him. The full account, in such order as I could put it. There was no part of it I left out.”
“And he—what has he done?”
“He did not say. But I believe he has sent a letter. I heard Norton's horse go down the drive scarcely an hour later.”
Jane did not move. Her hand rose a little way and took hold of the post of the bed, and there was a silence in the room in which Elizabeth could hear, quite clearly, her sister’s breathing go unsteady and then right itself.
“You have laid it at his feet. You have put Mr Darcy in a position of concealing a felony at law for the sake of a woman on whose behalf he has no obligation of any kind. You might as well have written to Lady Catherine yourself and saved him the paper.”
“Jane.”
“I am not finished. I have been biting my tongue in this house since November, because I told myself you would come to him in your own way and your own hour, and I told myself also that a man of his sort would not be injured by a woman of our sort because I thought better of him than to believe him capable of being injured by any of the small ordinary follies I could imagine you bringing through his door. I did not imagine you bringing him a Chancery filing. I did not imagine you bringing him Collins.”
“I know you did not.”
Her voice pitched a little more. “Do you know what you have done to him?”
“Jane, I know. That is why I did not tell him for so long.”
“And then youdid tell him.”
“As you insisted, if you recall. Did you, or did you not wish me to tell him?”
“I wanted you to relieve him, not to make his burden worse!”
Elizabeth's eyes widened. “As if I could choose in which manner it would affect him! I told him because I could not not tell him, and I told him knowing what it would cost him, and I would tell him again at the same hour with the same instrument because there was no decent alternative I could find in all those weeks of looking.”
“Because a man with a London coat came to the village and you were frightened.”
“Because a man with a London coat came to the village and he came to me with it. There was no longer any way to leave him with his hands clean.—I chose the next-cleanest thing I could choose for him, which was to choose him knowing, not him finding out at some hour I had not arranged, which would have been worse.”
Jane closed her eyes. “You talk as though you have done him a kindness.”
“I have not pretended to myself it was a kindness, Jane. I called it the only choice I had.”
“No, Lizzy. You have made him the accessory of a woman he has had the misfortune to love.“
Her hears heated. “Love! Jane…”
“Oh, stop pretending, Lizzy. You let him love you without the information he required to protect himself from the consequences of doing so. And you, who should not even be out of your bed yet, have been on your feet for weeks now without telling me. Butheknew, did he not? You should have left, Lizzy. Got a carriage and left. A kinder woman would have gone back to Longbourn in the first week and borne what she had earned, and left that man with his house and his sister and his good name.”
Elizabeth stared at her sister in horror. “Jane!”
Jane waved her off and looked away, putting her fist to her mouth.
“Jane.”
“Oh, what is it, Lizzy?” she snapped.
“How long have you cared for him?”
The silence that followed was the longest of the exchange.
