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I remember everything now.

"You said no," I say.

Chapter Twenty-One — Elizabeth

"I did," I say. "And then I read your letter."

He is standing over me in the dark. I can see only the shape of him against the lighted windows of the house, tall and very still, and the white of his shirt where his coat should be. His coat is round my shoulders. It is still warm from him. I have never been so cold in my life.

"My letter," he says.

"It was in your coat. When I found you in the lane. It had my name on it." I am talking too fast. I cannot stop. "I took it before anyone came, so that Lady Catherine would not find it. And then I sat in her breakfast parlor waiting to hear if you would live, and I read it."

"While I lay upstairs."

"Yes."

"Not knowing I had written it."

"Yes."

He makes a sound. It is not a laugh this time. I do not know what it is.

"And what did you make of it?"

"That I had been wrong." I stand up. His coat slips on my shoulders and I clutch it closed. "About Mr. Wickham. About Jane. About you. About everything. That I had been blind and proud and cruel, and I had said unforgivable things to a man who had done nothing to deserve them but tell me the truth too plainly. Till this moment I never knew myself. I said that aloud, Fitzwilliam. In Lady Catherine's breakfast parlor. To her clock."

"How very affecting."

I flinch. It is Mr. Wickham's phrase. I do not think he knows it.

"And then," he says, "you came upstairs."

"Mr. Pettigrew said—"

"I know what Pettigrew said. You have told me what Pettigrew said." His voice is very low and very even. It is the voice he used in Charlotte's parlor, at the end. You have said quite enough, madam. "I am asking what you thought. When you came into that room, and I was lying there with my head broken, telling everyone that you loved me. What did you think?"

I open my mouth.

"I thought," I say, "that you had ridden out in the wet to bring me the truth. And that you had been thrown, doing it. Because of me. Because of what I had said." My voice cracks. "I thought that I had very nearly killed you."

"So you were sorry for me."

"I was—"

"You pitied me."

The words go into me like cold water.

"No," I say.

"You pitied me." He takes a step back from me, along the gravel, out of the reach of my hand. "You had refused me. You had told me I was the last man in the world, and you had meant it. And then you read my letter and found out you were wrong about Wickham, and you felt guilty. And I was lying in a bed with my wits knocked out of me, babbling about engagements, and you thought, poor man. Poor proud fool. I cannot tell him now. It would be too cruel."

"That is not—"

"And so you played along." His voice does not rise. That is the worst of it. It gets lower, and colder, and more precise, every word set down like a stone. "With a madman. Because you felt guilty. You sat at his bedside and held his hand and made up a pretty story for him, the way one tells a fairy tale to a sick child. And then you went on making it up, every day, for six weeks, because it was easier than telling him the truth."

"It was not easier! Nothing about it was easier—"