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Elizabeth pressed her lips together and bent lower over the ribbon she was meant to be tying. If she laughed, her mother would find her a task, and she had spent the better part of the morning being found tasks. When Mrs Bennet turned to the great question of where the breakfast tables should stand, Elizabeth saw her chance. She laid her ribbon aside, took her shawl from the hook in the passage, and let herself out by the side door.

The air was cold and smelled of wet earth. She found Jane at the far end of the gravel walk, standing at the paddock gate with her hands folded on the top bar, looking at nothing in particular.

“You will catch your death out here without a shawl,” Elizabeth said, coming up beside her. “And then Mama will have real cause for grief.”

Jane smiled. “I only wanted a moment of quiet. Is that very wicked of me, three days before my wedding?”

“It is the most sensible course anyone has taken all day.” Elizabeth leaned on the gate beside her. “Saturday. I can scarcely believe it.”

“I am happy, Lizzy. Truly I am.” A small crease appeared between Jane’s brows. “Only I cannot make Caroline out. She called yesterday while you were in Meryton, and she was all that is proper. She admired my lace, asked after Mary’s playing, and said how she looked forward to our being sisters. And yet I came away feeling I had been weighed and found wanting. In all these months she has never let me believe she is glad of it.”

“There is no mystery in Caroline Bingley. She has been saying unkind things in a kind voice since we met. It is her one accomplishment, and she has polished it to a shine.” Elizabeth’s tone softened. “You cannot have looked for her blessing. Not after the autumn.”

“No.” Jane looked down at her folded hands. “I suppose I hoped that once Charles had made his choice so plainly, she might be reconciled to it. She and Louisa and Mr Hurst were against me from the very first, and Mr Darcy with them. That I have never quite been able to forget, however hard I try. Between them they very nearly talked Charles out of me altogether.” She said it without bitterness, the way she said everything. “But he came back. I only wish it had not left such a coldness behind. Louisa writes to me twice a month and contrives to say nothing at all in a great many words.”

“Then let her go on writing nothing for the next fifty years. It will trouble you less and less.” Elizabeth took her sister’s bare hand and tucked it into the crook of her arm, chiefly to warm it. “Here is how it stands, Jane. On Saturday you will be Mrs Bingley. She may sit in your drawing room admiring your lace until she is grey, and every time she does it, she will be sitting in your drawing room. Louisa is in town three parts of the year. And one day Caroline will marry some gentleman with a great fortune and no conversation, and take herself off to be disagreeable in his house instead. It arranges itself, you see, if only you give it time.”

“You make it sound almost easy.”

“I make it sound bearable, until it becomes easy.”

They began to walk back along the gravel. After a few steps Jane said, in the careful voice she used when she had been working herself up to say something, “Mr Darcy is come back to Netherfield. He returned on Sunday.”

Elizabeth stopped walking. Mr Darcy had come down with Bingley a fortnight before, and she had contrived to avoid him for the whole of it. Then he had gone up to London on business, and she had begun to breathe again. It seemed he had been back in the neighbourhood since Sunday, and she had not even known it.

“I had hoped he’d find reason to stay away.”

“He is to stand up with Charles.”

“Yes. Of course he must.” She started forward again, rather faster than before.

“Lizzy.”

“I have avoided that man for months, Jane. It has taken real ingenuity. And now I am to hand him cake across my own sister’s wedding table.”

“How do you bear it?” Elizabeth asked, and this time there was no teasing in it. “You had the worst of them all. The months in London, his sisters cutting you in the street. And yet you have forgiven him entirely. Tell me how, for I cannot find the way to it.”

“I forgave him because Charles has,” Jane said simply. “He is Charles’s dearest friend, and Charles is to be my husband, and I will not begin my marriage by asking him to choose between us. It was not so hard as you imagine. Mr Darcy believed I did not care for Charles. He was wrong. But he was not unkind.”

“He was wrong because he never troubled himself to know your character,” Elizabeth said. “That is its own kind of unkindness.”

Jane was quiet a moment. Then, gently: “Were you never curious, Lizzy? At Hunsford, when he called at the parsonage and found you alone. You wrote me pages of what you said to him, and scarcely a line of what he came to say.”

Elizabeth’s memory of that evening was still uncomfortably sharp. The low fire, the rain at the glass, Mr Darcy standing in the middle of the room and refusing to sit. He had begun on some halting speech, and she had cut clean across it with the only question that signified: whether he had parted Bingley from her sister. He had not denied it. He had drawn himself up and owned it. He had laid out all his reasons. She had never let him reach whatever else he had meant to say. She had not wished to hear it.

“He came to justify himself,” she said. “And he did it very thoroughly. There was nothing left over worth the hearing.”

Jane pressed her arm. “Then I shall ask only one favour, and you may scold me for it after. Be civil to him. Not warm. Only civil. For three days.”

Elizabeth sighed. “Very well. You shall have the most exquisitely civil sister in all of Hertfordshire. All of polite society will remark upon it.”

“Thank you.” Jane looked genuinely relieved, which was a little humbling. “And there is one mercy at least. The militia has been gone from Meryton these two months, Mr Wickham along with it. Only think of the awkwardness otherwise. Poor Mr Wickham, obliged to sit down at the same table as the man who ruined his prospects.”

“He would have borne it beautifully, too, and no one but us the wiser for what it cost him. He has more forbearance than any man of my acquaintance.” Elizabeth shook her head. “No. It is far better as it is. Mr Darcy may enjoy his time here quite undisturbed.”

A drop of rain struck the brim of her bonnet, then another, then a scattering across the gravel.

“There,” said Jane, gathering her skirts. “Now Mama has real cause for grief after all.”