Page 46 of Shipwrecked with Mr Darcy

She did not look up. “I know.”

“You know what I did. You do not know why.”

“You thought she did not care for him. You said as much in your letter.”

“I thought she did not care for him because her face did not show it. She was composed in his presence, and smiled at him the way she smiled at everyone. The particular quality of her regard was not, to my eye, distinguishable from her general civility.” He was pulling weeds from the herb garden while he spoke, the work giving his hands occupation while his mouth did something considerably more difficult. “I was wrong.”

“Yes.”

“I was wrong because I assumed that a woman's feelings must be instantly legible to a man who had barely spent ten minutes in her company. I applied to your sister a standard I would not have applied to myself. The presumption was wholly mine, and Jane Bennet's happiness was the price of it.”

Elizabeth turned a fig. She was precise and unhurried, maintaining her composure while the conversation clearly produced something that was not calm.

“What did you tell him?” she asked.

“That her feelings were not engaged. That her composure in his company suggested regard without attachment. I also told him that an alliance with her family would bring difficulties he could not afford.” He pulled the weeds from the soil with force. “I told him the truth about her family because the truth was convenient. I told him a lie about her heart because the lie was also convenient. I did not distinguish between the two, because doing so would have required admitting that my motives were wholly selfish.”

She looked at him. Her dark, direct eyes held his across the herb garden. Her attention was neither anger nor forgiveness, but something far harder than either.

“What were your motives?”

He pulled a weed. The root was long and came out of the soil slowly, trailing dirt. “If Bingley married your sister, I would have been connected to your family. If I was connected to your family, I would have been continually in your proximity. If I was near you, I would have been forced to confront feelings I was entirely unprepared for. I separated Bingley from your sister because I could not separate myself from you. One seemed easier than the other. I was a coward, and my cowardice wore the face of good advice.”

The silence that followed was heavy.

“You broke her heart to avoid confronting your own,” Elizabeth said.

“Yes.”

“That is worse than what I thought.”

“Yes.”

“I thought you were merely proud. I thought you looked at my family, found them wanting, and decided your friend deserved better. That was arrogant, but it was at least about him. You are telling me that it was always about you, and what you could not bear to feel.”

“Yes.”

She was quiet. A lizard darted across the flat rock between them, oblivious to the conversation, quite untroubled by moral reckonings.

“Jane cried for two months,” Elizabeth said. Her voice was steady, merely reporting a fact. “Not where anyone could see. Jane does not cry where people can see. She cried in her room at night, and I heard her through the wall. I could not comfort her. My inability to ease her pain was the worst thing I had ever felt.”

“She stopped eating properly,” Elizabeth continued. “My mother did not notice because she was too occupied with her own disappointment at losing Mr Bingley's five thousand a year. My father noticed and said nothing; his method of addressing family distress is to retreat to his library and hope the distress resolves itself. People stop crying eventually, though that is hardly a resolution. I noticed. I brought her tea and sat with her, but I could not tell her the truth, because I did not know it.”

He had stopped pulling weeds. His hands were dirty and perfectly still. The things she was saying landed on him with the brutal weight of stones.

“I am sorry,” he said.

“I know you are sorry. You have been sorry since your letter. Being sorry is not the question.”

“What is the question?”

She put down the fig she was holding and wiped her stained fingers on her dress. She looked at him with the full, unhesitating directness that was her most formidable quality. It was the quality he loved most, yet at this particular moment, he wished she would set it aside. But she was Elizabeth Bennet, and she did not retreat.

“The question is whether you would do it again.”

“No.”

“That was fast.”