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Colonel Fitzwilliam was Darcy’s cousin; he had every reason to praise him. He had come in at the door unasked, and spoken with the confidence of a man who has been waiting years to be allowed to. What was his testimony worth? A relation’s love. And yet. She was conflicted; Elizabeth had watched his face while he spoke of Wickham, and had not seen a man arranging an excuse. She had seen a man whose patience had worn through; it is very hard to counterfeit a certain kind of weariness.

There was a sound in the passage, and the front door opened to let in the cold, the rustle of Mrs. Collins’s shawl, and Mr. Collins’s voice demanding of the maid, in tones of grievous ceremony, why the front step had not been swept.

Charlotte found Elizabeth an hour later, by the fire in the small back parlour, where Elizabeth had retreated on the principle that a room without a hearth-rug could hold no memories. She came in without knocking, which was her way, and shut the door against her husband, which was her art. She had taken off her bonnet. Her hair, a little loosened by the wind, gave her a look of unaccustomed youth, and Elizabeth, who had not meant to say anything, found that she was already saying all of it.

She began at the end and went back to the beginning and forward again, and at some point began to laugh, a short, unpleasant laugh that she did not much like, and Charlotte put a cup of cold tea into her hand and said nothing at all. She heard about the bell, and the hearth-rug, and in vain have I struggled.

She heard herself repeat what she had said about the last man in the world. She said the Colonel’s name and Charlotte’s brows went up for the first time, and then she told that part too, the door, the hand against his cousin’s chest, the voice she had not known the Colonel possessed.

“Colonel Fitzwilliam’s voice struck me as a man who was perfectly sure of himself,” said Elizabeth, “and I do not believe he was in the least. I think he was frightened. I think he came in because he was frightened of what Mr. Darcy would do, or perhaps what he would say.”

Charlotte’s eyes went high. “Of what he would do to you?” She sounded concerned.

Elizabeth shook her head. She never believed Mr. Darcy would never harm her, or even consider it. “No, I think of what he would do to himself.” She stopped, and set down her cup. “Charlotte, I told him he was the last man in the world that I should ever marry.”

“You told me you thought so the first week; don’t you remember?” Charlotte shook her head, looking grave.

Elizabeth exhaled; it sounded almost like a huff. “I know what I thought. I know what I said. I meant it, Charlotte, I do not take it back, and he had said what he said about Jane, and he stood there and was pleased with himself, and I had every right to be angry.”

Her friend only nodded. “Yes.”

“Then why do I feel as though I had struck a dog?” Elizabeth’s eyebrows furrowed, and she wore a great frown.

Charlotte considered the question with the weight she gave to all questions, which was perhaps the reason Elizabeth had always trusted her with them. She was twenty-seven and plain and had bought her security at a price Elizabeth could not yet bring herself to compute; but she had never, in all their acquaintance, been a fool.

“Because you are honest,” she said at last. “I have often thought it your most inconvenient quality. You cannot keep two accounts. Whatever you have thought of him, you cannot bear that you may have been wrong in one column and right in another, and that the two must be added up together.”

“I do not wish to add them.”

“No,” Charlotte agreed. “But you will. I do not tell you to change your mind.” Charlotte folded her hands in her lap. “You were right to refuse him. You were right about the way he asked. You would have been wrong to take him because the Colonel stood up for him, and wrong to hate him afterward because the Colonel happened to be there. These things can be true together. You need not withdraw one grievance in order to admit one fact.”

Elizabeth stared into the fire. It had burned down, and what was left glowed in the grate like a red eye. She exhaled again. “I suppose that could be a very comfortable doctrine.”

Her friend smiled. “It is a very old one, Eliza. It is called being fair.”

***

At the Rosings guest-wing, some half-mile off, the candle on a writing-table had burned to a stub, and then to another, and the man sitting before it had not noticed either.

Fitzwilliam Darcy had been at it since the clock struck eleven. It was now past two. He had a quantity of good Rosings paper, and a pen that spluttered, and a floor strewn with the dead; and he had come to understand, in the course of that long night, a thing he had never in his near thirty years suspected, which was that he had no idea how to say that he was sorry.

The first draft had begun, Madam, I beg leave to explain. He had read it over and thrown it into the grate. It was an excuse. It said, with perfect clearness, that if she had but understood him she would not have thought so ill, and he knew now what she would do with a page that told her so.

The second began, I should wish you to know that my conduct toward your family was in no respect intended to; and stopped there, because she had sat in that parsonage room and told him in a clear small voice what she had thought of his intention, and he had been given a very exact picture of its value.

The third was an eloquent paragraph, upon which he had spent an hour. He read it over at the end and discovered that it was a request for absolution wearing a coat of repentance, and that the true subject of every sentence was his own suffering. He tore it in four and then, since that did not satisfy him, in eight.

He sat with the pieces in his fist. His knuckles ached; he had split the skin against the stone of the garden wall on the way back, and had said nothing to the Colonel, who had said nothing either, for which Darcy was grateful with a fierce, unspoken gratitude that he would not have admitted under torture.

A man may say a hundred true things and murder a woman with every one. He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. There was no one to see it. He had been taught very young that a Darcy does not do this, and the lesson had taken, as lessons do, and so he did it badly, in silence, with his teeth set, until it was over, and then wiped his face on his cuff like a boy and took a clean sheet.

There was nothing in him now with which to be eloquent. He found that this was the first useful thing that had happened all day. He wrote four lines and looked at them. He took out one, and the sentence that came after it, and then the word sincerely, and then he left it, because it was bare, and it was the only true thing he had written since he came into the county.

He did not seal it with the Darcy arms. He sealed it with a plain wafer, and set it by the door, and put out the candle, and sat in the dark for another hour with his split hand open on his knee.

Mr. Darcy’s letter came to the parsonage at eight, by the Rosing's groom, when Elizabeth was at the breakfast-table with a cup of coffee she had not drunk and a slice of bread she had not tasted. Mr. Collins, who was in the garden with his bees, did not see it come. Maria Lucas, who was at the window, saw it and said nothing, because she was a good-natured girl and a quick one, and because it was addressed in a hand she did not know.

Miss Bennet. Elizabeth carried the letter upstairs, since the breakfast-room had too many eyes in it. She shut the door of her chamber and sat down upon the edge of the bed with the thing in her lap and looked at it for a long time before she broke the wafer, as one looks at a letter from a hospital.