“He is not a lunatic, Lizzy. He is a man in the throes of a passion.” Charlotte tapped her chin thoughtfully. “I must say, I am impressed. I always thought him a bit stiff, but there is a poet hidden beneath that sombre waistcoat.‘Warden of my prison’? That is very good. Very dramatic.”
“It is mortifying!”
“It is an advantage,” Charlotte corrected, her tone shifting to the businesslike register she used when negotiating the price of turnips with the local farmers.
She stood up and gently urged Elizabeth to sit in the armchair, adopting the tone of a very sensible general addressing a panicking foot soldier.
“Lizzy, you must reconsider the formidable master of Pemberley,” she stated plainly. “You have read this. You know the truth of Mr Wickham now and you know Mr Darcy is exonerated in the affair.”
“Yes, but Jane—”
“Forget Jane for a moment,” Charlotte interrupted, waving a hand. “Look at the man himself. He is handsome, he is intelligent, and he possesses an obvious, almost frightening devotion to you. And, I cannot stress this enough, the undeniable comfort of ten thousand pounds a year.”
Elizabeth reeled from this practical advice. She stared at Charlotte, a cold shiver tracing its way down her spine. The sensible, grounded woman standing before her was using excellent vocabulary, but the underlying arithmetic was identical to the hysteria that routinely echoed through the halls of Longbourn.
“Charlotte,” she whispered, aghast. “You sound exactly like my mother. You are merely substituting ‘pin money’ with the word ‘advantage’.”
“Your mother lacks tact, Lizzy, but her mathematics are sound,” Charlotte replied without an ounce of shame. “I am a practical woman. I married Mr Collins because he offered me a comfortable home and security from becoming an impoverished spinster. You have been offered an estate that dwarfs the county of Hertfordshire, a man of consequence, and a love that has driven him to the brink of literary madness.”
“I cannot marry a man whose actions I condemn! He separated Jane and Mr Bingley! He broke her heart!”
“Yes,” Charlotte conceded calmly. “He did. And that is unfortunate, but let us look at this logically.”
She began to pace the room, taking over Elizabeth’s abandoned trench in the floorboards, transitioning fully into a master tactician.
“Mr Darcy holds influence over Mr Bingley, does he not?” Charlotte mused.
“Yes. He admitted as much.”
“Then the solution is simple.” She stopped pacing and looked at Elizabeth with the bright eyes of a puppet master. “You marry him.”
“Charlotte—”
“Listen to me. You accept him and you become Mrs Darcy of Pemberley. You secure your future, your family’s future, and your own comfort.” Charlotte smiled with a calculating expression. “And once you are his wife, holding this degree of power over his heart, you could effortlessly steer Mr Bingley back to Hertfordshire and Jane.”
The silence in the room was absolute.
Elizabeth stared at her friend, the ruthlessness taking her breath away. It was brilliant. It was logical. It was Machiavellian.
“You are suggesting,” Elizabeth said, her voice dangerously low, “that I use Mr Darcy’s affection for me to manipulate him into forcing his friend to marry my sister.”
“I am suggesting you use the tools available to you,” Charlotte corrected smoothly. “Mr Darcy manipulated Mr Bingley away from Jane. A future Mrs Darcy could easily manipulate him back. It is poetic justice. And everyone gets what they want. Jane gets Mr Bingley. You get ten thousand a year. And Mr Darcy gets the warden of his prison. Truly, Lizzy, it is a flawless strategy.”
“It is abhorrent,” Elizabeth huffed, vehemently rejecting the idea while springing from the armchair.
“It is sensible.”
“It is hypocritical!” Elizabeth shouted, refusing to play with Mr Bingley’s affections in the exact same manner she had just so fiercely condemned Mr Darcy for doing. “How can you even suggest it? I spent yesterday evening excoriating him for playing God with their lives! I told him he was wrong to interfere! And now you wish me to marry him, solely to put the strings on my own fingers and dance the puppets myself?”
“You would be doing it for love,” Charlotte argued. “He did it out of pride. There is a difference in the motive.”
“There is no difference in the act! If I marry him to use his influence, I am no better than he is. I am worse! I would be selling myself to secure a husband for my sister. That is not marriage, Charlotte, that is a transaction. A cold transaction.”
“All marriages are transactions, Lizzy.” There was a hint of steel in Charlotte’s tone. “Some of us trade our youth for a vicarage. Some trade their silence for a carriage. You are being offered the opportunity to trade your stubbornness for a kingdom. I urge you not to be foolish.”
Tears of frustration pricked Elizabeth’s eyes. “I am not foolish for wishing to maintain my own integrity. I cannot love a man I do not respect. And I cannot respect a man I intend to use as a political instrument.”
“But do you respect him?” Charlotte pressed, pointing to the letter. “A man who loves you enough to write that?”
