Page 60 of A Most Favourable Match

“I must greet father,” Elizabeth said when Jane seemed likely to guide her upstairs first.

“Come up and join me after that. I shall help you with your hair.”

“Make sure she puts on a becoming dress too, Jane,” Mrs Bennet urged. “Do whatever you can to make Lizzy presentable. I am sure Mr Bingley will be here at any moment, and her covered in road dust, me halfasleep, and the young ones out. What will become of us all, I’d like to know? When Charlotte Lucas takes my place here, and we are all thrown into the street…”

∞∞∞

“How awful!” Jane said, her face growing pained in the looking glass behind Elizabeth as she finished her account of Mr Darcy’s narrative about George Wickham. “They are serious charges indeed, and I do not think we can doubt their veracity.”

“No, Mr Darcy would not make up such stories involving his sister,” Elizabeth agreed. “Nor is he a liar, I must say, for all that I find other aspects of his character unpleasant. He is too partial to the truth, rather than not partial enough.”

“What will you do?” Jane asked, taking up a hairpin and continuing in her task of tidying Elizabeth’s hair. “Will you tell our sisters and our neighbours?”

“I do not see how I can. Mr Darcy has not authorised me to share the information, and I would not like to make Miss Darcy an object of public gossip. Yet neither can we let Lydia and Kitty run about unguarded with such a man.”

“No. It puts you in a very difficult position, Lizzy. It is hard to know why Mr Darcy felt the need to tell you anything, given that you cannot act. What made him do it, do you think?”

At this, Elizabeth turned bright red, findingherself unable to turn away from her sister’s enquiring gaze before the looking glass.

“Mr Darcy proposed to me in London, Jane, or at least I think he did. I rejected him.”

“Oh, my!” Jane gasped, dropping hairpins on the floor and then stooping to retrieve them. “I had no idea of his feelings.”

“Nor I,” Elizabeth responded. “It was the strangest, strangest thing…He wrote that he wanted me to judge him only for things that were true.”

“He thought to change your mind by telling you of Mr Wickham’s wicked history?” Jane questioned with considerable puzzlement.

“I don’t know what he thought,” Elizabeth returned with a shrug, still blushing and finding it hard to meet Jane’s eyes, particularly as she had omitted all mention of Mr Darcy’s interference in Jane’s engagement, and his likely responsibility for its ending. “He is a most unpredictable man, but I think him an honest one.”

Jane considered all this in silence for another minute. “I think that Mr Darcy’s motives in telling you of Mr Wickham were noble. He thinks to protect the young ladies of the district through your knowledge and tactful intervention.”

Noble? Elizabeth could not bring herself to apply that description to someone who had done any injury to her sister, even if he did have other strengths of character.

“No, it is you who are noble, Jane, for not holding any grudge against Mr Darcy after he was so rude about your engagement from the first. Mother has not forgotten that, and nor have I.”

“You ought not to hold that against Mr Darcy, Lizzy,” Jane said. Elizabeth looked at her curiously. Her sister’s expression was strange, but not unhappy. She did not know what to call it.

“Informing you of Wickham’s character shows him to be a man of principle, I feel,” Jane went on. “Have you considered, too, that he may have been right about my engagement? Maybe Lord Grantchester and I were badly suited. Mr Darcy has known him much longer than we have, after all.”

“You are far too good, Jane,” Elizabeth protested, standing and turning to face her sister. “Your heart is broken, your future blighted, and still you insist on thinking the best of Mr Darcy. I do not know how you can bear it!”

Jane put her arms about Elizabeth, as if to comfort her, rather than seeking any comfort for herself. “My heart is not at all broken, Lizzy. That is the strangest thing,” she admitted. “I feel that Lord Grantchester and I have done the right thing, even though I do not understand it.”

“But surely, you loved him?” Elizabeth asked, bewildered. “You could never have accepted him if you did not.”

“Lord Grantchester is a good man, and he was kind to me,” Jane said. “I liked him a great deal, and Ithink I mistook that for love. Still, there were always moments while we were engaged when I felt…wrong. I looked at him and felt that he was somehow not meant for me, even if he was so handsome, so amiable, so honourable.”

“I cannot understand this,” Elizabeth protested weakly. “I truly thought you both loved one another.”

“Maybe Lord Grantchester convinced himself that he loved me too, and realised exactly what I have realised in these weeks at home at Longbourn with so much time to rest and think. I have no better explanation for my feelings or for his wishing to break our engagement. Do you?”

Elizabeth marvelled at Jane’s calmness, now soothing her own upset too. As for Jane’s question, it would not do to answer it seriously.

“What if he has some terrible, incurable disease, like the hero who left his bride at the altar in that dreadful novel I had from the library last winter?” Elizabeth joked instead. “Or he runs mad at the full moon and must be locked in the attic?”

“Or he has a mad wife already, hidden away somewhere at Grantchester Abbey?” Jane giggled and then covered her mouth with her hand as if shocked by her own irreverence.

Heavy footsteps hurried up the stairs and could now be heard crossing the landing. Soon, a breathless Mrs Hill knocked on the door of their bedroom and put her head inside.