Page 91

It is the pin.

Her pin. The small plain pin from her collar, still fastened through the buttonhole, where she put it on Oakham Mount with her own fingers, and smoothed the lapel down over it, and said there.

And caught in the pin, crushed flat against the cloth, dry and brown and brittle as old paper, are the forget-me-nots.

I have worn them every day since. I did not know I had. I must have put on that coat every morning for a week and never once looked down. And Lowe must have seen them, every morning, brushing it. And left them there.

I kneel on the floor of my room at Pemberley with the coat across my knees, and I look at them.

They are so small. They have lost all their blue. One more day and they will crumble to dust.

Now you shall not forget this one.

I did not. I have not. I remember it all. I remember the larks going up, and the wind in her hair, and her bonnet in the gorse bush. I remember her hand on my lapel, and do not you dare, and the way she pulled me down to her. I remember her trembling. I remember that she said yes, and that I thought, for the first time in my life, that I was a man someone could say yes to.

She was not pretending on that hill.

I knew it then. I knew it with my whole body. No one could have kissed me like that out of pity.

I sit on the floor of my room for a very long time, with the forget-me-nots in the palm of my hand, while the light goes out over the lake.

Chapter Twenty-Three — Elizabeth

Be not alarmed, sir.

I write it at the little desk under our window, by one candle, at two o'clock in the morning, and then I put down the pen and stare at it.

It is the fourth night since he left. I have not slept in any of them. I have tried. I have lain in my narrow bed and closed my eyes and seen him walking out of Papa's library with his coat buttoned and the dead forget-me-nots in his buttonhole, and heard his footsteps going away down the gravel, steady and unhurried, until I could not hear them anymore.

Tonight I gave up trying, and got up, and lit the candle, and found paper.

And those are the first words that came.

"Lizzy?"

Jane's voice, from the other bed. Thick with sleep.

"Go back to sleep, Jane."

"What are you writing?"

I look down at the page. "A letter."

"To him?"

"Yes."

The bedclothes rustle. Jane sits up. In the candlelight her hair is down around her shoulders and her face is soft and creased from the pillow, and she looks at me with such tenderness that I have to look away.

"What does it say?"

"Four words, so far." I turn the paper toward her. "His began the same way. Be not alarmed, madam. He wrote it at midnight at Rosings, the night after I refused him. He told me so, in the garden. Not in so many words. But I saw it in his face when the memory came back. The candle. The pen."

"Oh, Lizzy."

"He answered everything I said to him. Every charge. He did not leave one out. He wrote it all down plainly, Wickham and Miss Darcy and you, and gave it into my hand, and asked for nothing back." I pick up the pen again. "So I am going to do the same. I am going to answer everything he said to me. And everything I said to him. And I am not going to leave one word out. Not one."

Jane is quiet for a moment.