Page 26 of Shipwrecked with Mr Darcy

“Yes.”

“You separated them.”

“Yes.”

The word was steady and offered no defence. She hated the simple admission because it denied her an argument. Darcy was not resisting; he was sitting across a fire, agreeing with her. The agreement was maddening. She could not fight it.

“My sister loved him,” Elizabeth said. The words were unplanned, rushing out after a week of suppression. “She loved him, and you decided she did not. You looked at her composure and read it as indifference. You were wrong, and your error cost her everything.”

Darcy did not speak.

“You did not know her. You saw a gentle, reserved woman who was pleasant to everyone, and concluded she could not possibly feel deeply. You took that conclusion to your friend and told him to leave. He left, and my sister spent four months pretending she was well when she was entirely broken.”

Her voice was unsteady. She was aware her hands were clenched on her knees and her shoulders were tight. The control she had maintained for seven days was fracturing over Jane. It had always been Jane.

“The letter I found in her room,” Elizabeth said. “Half-written. To Miss Bingley. Asking, in the politest possible language, whether Miss Bingley's brother had been well, and whether his business in London had concluded, and whether there was any prospect of the Netherfield party returning to Hertfordshire. She did not finish it. Finishing it meant admitting she still hoped. Jane would rather suffer in silence than admit to an unwanted hope.”

The fire cracked. A log shifted and sent sparks up through the chimney. Darcy was looking at the fire, not at her, and his face in the shifting light was very still.

“You did not know about that letter,” she said. “You did not know about the mornings she spent walking to Meryton and back, hoping for post that did not come. You did not know that she stopped playing the pianoforte because she had played duets with Miss Bingley and the instrument reminded her. You did not know any of it, because you did not trouble to look.”

“No,” he said. His voice was quiet. “I did not.”

“You looked at her face and called her composure indifference. The arrogance of that judgement, Mr Darcy—the absolute certainty that you could read a woman's heart from across a ballroom—is what I cannot forgive.”

The wind moved through the scrub outside the tower. A lizard clung frozen to the wall above the archway.

Darcy spoke. “You are right.”

He offered no elaboration, qualification, or counterargument. She had been bracing for counterarguments, rehearsing her responses during long afternoons of gathering figs and carrying water. Her case was sound, her arguments were ready, and he was using none of them.

“I was wrong about your sister,” he said. “I knew it before I left England. I knew it when I wrote the letter, though I did not say so plainly enough. I told you her composure suggested indifference. I believed it when I said it, but I was wrong.”

His hands rested on his knees, mirroring hers. She noticed the posture and wished she had not.

“On the ship,” he said. “Before the attack. I wrote to Bingley.”

Elizabeth went still.

“I wrote a letter telling him the truth. I confessed that I had concealed your sister's presence in London, and that I had advised him to leave Hertfordshire based on an incorrect judgement of Miss Bennet's feelings. I advised him to return when circumstances allowed.”

“You wrote to him.”

“Yes.”

“Telling him to go back.”

“I told him the truth. What he does with it is his concern. The truth was mine to give; I gave it too late and poorly, but I gave it.”

She stared at him. The firelight flickered between them. His face was steady, tired, and entirely undefended. The letter to Bingley was an unexpected fact she did not know how to accommodate.

“The letter was on the merchant ship,” she said. “It may not have survived.”

“It may not.”

“It may never reach Mr Bingley.”

“It may not.”