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"I do not care! Jane says—" He gulps for air. "Jane says Lizzy has not stopped crying since you left. Jane says she sat on the floor of their room all night with her back against the bed and would not let anyone light a candle. Jane has never once in her life said anything to me in a temper, and she said, Charles, if your friend leaves without seeing her, I shall never forgive him."

I look at him.

Bingley. Who I persuaded, last autumn, that Jane Bennet did not love him. Who went to London because I told him to and moped there for five months because I did not tell him she was in town. Who came back to her because I wrote him one sheet of paper saying I had been a fool.

I was right, then, when I wrote it. I had been a fool.

I wonder if I am being one now.

"Tell Miss Bennet," I say, "that I am sorry to have distressed her sister. Tell her that I wish her every happiness, and you also. Tell her I shall be at the wedding if she will have me there."

"Darcy—"

"Let go of the window, Bingley."

He lets go. He stands in the gateway in his slippers, in the gray dawn, with his mouth open. The carriage pulls away. I do not look back.

***

It is two days to Derbyshire.

I do not sleep at the inn at Northampton. I lie on my back in the dark and look at the ceiling, and there is a crack in the plaster that runs from corner to corner, and I think, absurdly, of the Thames.

I think of Hunsford.

At Hunsford, I was humiliated in a parlor, by one woman, with no one else to hear. I walked back to Rosings in the dusk and did not let my face show anything, and no one knew. I wrote her a letter and rode out with it, and if I had not met that bough, I should have handed it to her and bowed and gone away, and she would never have spoken of it, and no one would ever have known what a fool I had been.

This is worse.

This time everyone knows. Everyone. My cousin. My other cousin. My aunt, very likely, by now. Her father. Her sister. Her friend at the parsonage. My valet. A country apothecary. I lay in a bed in Kent and told them all how happy I was. I walked in my aunt's park and told the woman who had refused me about my mother's nose. I wrote to Bingley and showed her the letter like a boy bringing home a prize. I laughed in Wickham's face. I danced with Anne in a back parlor. I stood in Mr. Bennet's library and asked him for a daughter who had already told me no, while he sat there and looked at me over his spectacles and knew.

The whole of Kent and Hertfordshire has watched me, for six weeks, at the center of a play. And I was the only person in it who did not know it was a play.

And the worst of it, the very worst, lying in the dark at Northampton with the crack running over my head, is that I would give anything I own, Pemberley and all, to be back in it.

***

Pemberley rises out of the trees on the second evening, gold in the last of the sun, standing in its own reflection in the lake.

Georgiana runs down the steps to meet me. She has grown again, in the three months since I saw her. She throws her arms round my neck and then stands back and looks at my face, and her own face goes uncertain and frightened.

"Brother? Brother, what is it? Your letters said you were—you said you were going to be married—"

"Not now, Georgiana."

"But—"

"Not now. Forgive me. I am very tired."

She looks at me. She is sixteen, and shy, and afraid of disappointing me, and I have just made her afraid of something else entirely. I see it in her eyes. I cannot help it. I kiss her forehead and go in past her and up the stairs.

In my own room, the room I have slept in since I was twelve, Lowe has already brought up the trunk. He has unstrapped it and set it open at the foot of the bed, and then, very quietly, he has gone away and left me alone.

I stand and look at it for a long time.

Then I kneel, because I must do something, and begin to take things out. Shirts. Neckcloths. The blue coat, folded with tissue between the sleeves. The brown coat I wore into Meryton.

The coat I wore in the garden at Longbourn is at the bottom. Lowe has folded it with especial care, the collar turned just so. I lift it out, and something catches the light from the window.