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"I said no," I whisper. "I said no, Jane. I said you were the last man in the world. I said it cruelly. I meant to be cruel. I wanted to hurt you, because I thought you had hurt Jane—" I stop again. "Because I thought you had hurt my sister. And you had, but you did not know it, and you did not know me, and I did not know you. And then you rode out to give me a letter and you fell, and you woke up and asked for me, and I could not tell you, and then I did not want to. And I let you believe it. For a month. I let you tell me about your mother and your sister and your trout, and I let you kiss me on Oakham Mount, and every single day I knew, and I said nothing."

I am crying. I did not know I had begun.

"And the proposal I told you about," I say, "in your aunt's bedchamber. When you asked me to tell you how you said it. The workbasket and the green wool and I would rather be laughed at by you than admired by the whole world. You never said any of it. I made it up. Every word. I gave you the words I wished you had said." I wipe my face with the back of my hand. "And then you said them anyway. Not those words. But you said them. You have been saying them every day since. And I do not know how to tell you that I am sorry, and that I love you, in the same breath, without you thinking that one of them is a lie."

The room is very quiet.

Jane has stopped being Mr. Darcy. She is only Jane again, sitting on her bed with my pillow clutched in her arms and the tears running down her face.

"Oh, Lizzy," she says.

"Was it very bad?"

"It was very true." She holds out her hand. I go and sit beside her, and she puts her arm round me. "Say that. Just that, tomorrow. Exactly as you said it now. He will understand."

"Will he?"

Jane is quiet for a moment.

"He sent Charles back to me," she says at last. "All by himself. Because you told him I walked out before dawn to cry." She leans her head against mine. "A man who can do that, Lizzy, can understand anything. It may take him a little while. But he will."

***

He is especially tender that evening.

I do not know if he knows. I do not think he can. But he comes into the drawing room before supper with Mr. Bingley and the Colonel, and he looks across the room and finds me at once, the way he always does, and something in his face goes soft and bright, and he comes straight to me through Mama's chairs and Lydia's work basket and Kitty's sketching things, without seeing any of them, and takes my hand and kisses it in front of the whole family.

Mama sighs aloud. Lydia makes a noise of disgust. Papa, by the fire, lowers his newspaper an inch and looks at me over the top of it, very steadily, and then raises it again.

At supper he sits beside me and does not say very much. He does not need to. His knee is against mine under the table, as it was at Charlotte's breakfast, and every so often, when Mama is telling Mr. Bingley about the wedding breakfast, or Lydia is complaining about the militia leaving for Brighton, he looks at me sideways, and smiles, as though we share a secret.

We do share a secret. Only he does not know what it is.

I cannot eat. I push my mutton about my plate, and watch his hands, and think: tomorrow. Tomorrow I will take him up Oakham Mount, and I will tell him, and he will never look at me like this again. Not like this. Not with this perfect, open, unguarded tenderness, as though I were the one good thing he had found in the world and he could still hardly believe his luck.

Tomorrow he will know.

Tonight he does not.

And I find, sitting at Mama's table with his knee against mine and the candles lit, that I cannot bear to waste it.

***

After supper I take him into the garden.

Nobody stops us. Mama is too busy with Mr. Bingley. Papa only looks up from his chessboard, where he is setting out the pieces for the Colonel, and says, "Mind the step, Lizzy, it is dark," in a voice so mild that I know he knows exactly what I am doing, and why.

It is a warm night. The first really warm night of the year. The sky is deep blue going to black, with a few stars pricking through over the elms, and the air smells of the stocks Mama planted along the walk, sweet and heavy, and somewhere in the shrubbery a nightingale has started.

We walk to the end of the garden, where the old stone seat is, under the lilac. He sits down. I do not. I stand in front of him in the dusk and look at him.

"What is it?" he says. "You have been looking at me all evening as though you were trying to learn me by heart."

"I am."

"Why? I am not going anywhere."

I do not answer. I put my hands on either side of his face, and tip it up toward me, and look at it in the last of the light. The strong nose, too long, like his mother's. The faint shadow of the bruise at his temple, almost gone now. The mouth that I used to think was hard and cold, before I knew how it felt to kiss it.