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I do not sleep.

I sit up in bed with the candle on the washstand and his letter on my knees, and I read it again.

I have read it so many times now that the folds are going soft, and the seal has crumbled to a few dark flakes of red at the bottom of my workbag. I know some of it by heart. I know where the lines run close because he was angry and where they spread out because he was tired. I know where the ink goes pale, near the end, because the candle was guttering and he did not stop to light another.

I read it now as though it were a different letter.

The first time, in Lady Catherine's breakfast parlor, I read it as an accusation. Every line a charge laid against me: my blindness, my vanity, my family. I read it with my face burning.

The second time, the night after, I read it as a confession. I read it for Wickham, for Miss Darcy, for the thing he had never told anyone and had told me.

Tonight I read it, and it is only him.

It is a man who keeps his tenants' widows in coal and does not want their thanks. It is a man who would take a dismissed groom to Pemberley at double wages, and say why to all of Derbyshire. It is a man who paid an apothecary three times over and asked him to give the rest away. It is a man who walked beside me under the limes and told me about his mother's nose.

Honest. Generous. Loyal past all reason.

It was all here. It was here from the first line. Be not alarmed, madam. He was afraid even then, writing it. Afraid of alarming me. After everything I had said.

I was only too proud to see it.

I put the letter down on the coverlet and look at the Thames crack running across the ceiling, and I touch, very lightly, the place at the edge of my jaw where his fingers rested in the shrubbery.

Is it yet?

"No," I tell the ceiling. "It cannot be. Not like this. Not while he does not know."

The ceiling does not argue. It never does.

I pick the letter up again.

After a while I get out of bed, and go to the little writing table under the window, and find a sheet of Charlotte's paper and a pen. I sit down. I dip the pen.

Sir, I write.

Then I sit and look at it for a long time, while the candle burns down.

I do not know what comes after sir. I do not know how a woman begins a letter to a man she has refused, and is engaged to, and has lied to, and is falling in love with, all at once. There is no form for it in any book of letters I have ever seen.

I cross out sir. I fold the sheet over, and tuck it under the blotter, where Charlotte will not find it.

And I get back into bed, and pick up his letter, and begin it again from the first line, while outside the window the sky goes slowly gray over the Rosings woods, and somewhere a blackbird starts to sing.

Chapter Ten — Darcy

Bingley, I have been a fool.

I write it, and look at it, and do not crumple it.

That is new. I sit at the writing table in my aunt's blue bedchamber, dressed properly for the first time in ten days, in my good coat and a cravat starched to Lowe’s satisfaction, with the window open on a soft gray Monday morning, and I read the line back, and it is true. There is nothing in it I want to cross out. It is the easiest sentence I have written in a twelvemonth.

I dip the pen again and go on.

Behind me, Lowe is brushing my second-best coat with the air of a man who would like to be asked what he thinks.

"One sheet, sir?" he says presently.