“Mrs Marsden. Miss Bennet. Forgive the intrusion. I am at my cousin’s service this morning.”
Cousin… not a magistrate. Not a constable. Not…
The relief Elizabeth had begun to allow herself at the wordcousinchecked itself almost at once. Darcy’s cousin was, by the same arithmetic, Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s nephew; and whatever was now to happen in this parlour was to happen in front of a man whose family had a stake in his marriage, well-attested.
Jane drew breath—short, and not Jane’s—and turned again to Darcy. She set both hands hard to the back of the chair beside her and stood for some seconds with her head down. Elizabeth could see only the part in her hair and the white of her knuckles on the chair-back.
When Jane lifted her face she did not look at the Colonel. She looked at Darcy. “You should not be in this room with her, sir. Not at this hour. Not with the door closed. Not with your cousin standing in it as a witness to what you mean to do.”
“Mrs Marsden,” Darcy protested.
She drew breath. “I know what you mean to do, sir. I have known it some days. I told her last night I had known it. I told her also that I would not be present for it, and I find this morning that I have not the character to keep my word. Forgive me. I have come down. Here I am.”
Darcy did not move. Elizabeth could not. The Colonel did not so much as breathe.
Jane drew breath. It did not entirely come.
“I cannot stay here, sir. I cannot stand in this room with you and her and a man who has come overnight on business none of us has been told the name of, and pretend it is decent. It is not decent. None of it has been decent. And I am afraid—I am afraid of what I shall say next if I am made to stand here another minute, and afraid of what I shall do, and afraid of myself for being afraid of it. Please let me go.”
“Jane —”
“No, Lizzy. You have not the right to ask me this morning.”
Elizabeth tried to stand. The leg protested instantly. Darcy moved without thought. So did Jane. The Colonel put out a hand toward the back of a chair.
In that single ugly instant—the three turning together at her pain, Darcy’s hand out, Jane’s face changed by alarm before resentment returned, the Colonel a step nearer than he had been—everything Jane had said was proved again.
Jane made a sound almost a laugh and almost a sob. “You see? You need not argue the point. The room argues it for you.”
Darcy said, “Mrs Marsden—if my being in this room makes it harder for you, I will go. I beg you to stay with your sister. The morning has not gone as I had intended.”
Jane shook her head.
“It is not your being in the room, sir. It is the room. It is the house. It is what I am in it. I cannot answer for myself another quarter hour.”
“Where will you go?” Elizabeth said, and the word was very nearly a sob. “It is just past dawn. You have no carriage —”
“I shall walk. The Hadleys will take me in. I have known them since November, and they will not turn me out for being early.” She turned toward the door.
“Jane —”
Jane stopped with her hand on the latch but did not look back.
“I love you,” Elizabeth said. “Whatever I have done badly, do not forget that.”
Jane bowed her head once. “I know.”
Then she went out.
“Wait… Mrs Marsden? Come back!” The Colonel went out after her. Elizabeth heard him take his coat from the hall—the small sound of cloth lifted from a peg—and then the outer door, and then the cold air for the second it took for the door to be closed against it.
The door closed after the Colonel.
Darcy did not move from the threshold. He looked at her, and looked at her, and said nothing.
The tears were down her face before she had marked their beginning. The hands on the chair-arm gave up the chair-arm at last and went to her face. Her sister had walked out into the cold to go two fields off because the room she had been keeping for four months had at last broken her, and there was no piece of what had broken Jane that did not belong, by one road or another, to Elizabeth.
She heard him take half a step into the room toward her. She heard him stop.
