Swipe Left on Mr. Darcy — Mutual Friends, Page 11
By Suha · Published
Log in to see this page
Page 11 of Mutual Friends is for signed-in readers. Logging in brings you straight back here — and an account is free if you do not have one.
Transcript
Single panel in a quiet, elegant, cool hallway gallery of the manor, dim evening light. Lizzie Bennet leans her shoulder against the wall, exhaling with a small, relieved, wry smile, holding her phone up in one hand near her face. The phone is seen from behind — only its flat rear casing and camera are visible, the screen turned away toward her; texting her sister. Lizzie: 'Still alive. Send snacks.'
Image description
In a quiet elegant hallway, Lizzie leans against the wall and holds her phone up, its back and camera toward the viewer, with a relieved wry smile.
About this chapter
With Jane finally at peace and her own verdict on Darcy set in stone, Lizzie takes a weekend train out to visit Charlotte — now married to Mr. Collins and installed in a tidy cottage on the grounds of his employer's grand estate. Lizzie arrives braced to pity her best friend, certain she'll find her diminished and trapped. Instead she finds Charlotte quietly, unromantically content: she has carved out a livable arrangement, her own mornings and her own space, while Collins fusses over curtains and name-drops his imperious patron, Ms. de Bourgh. When the household is summoned to dinner at the big house, Lizzie meets Ms. de Bourgh herself — a cold, appraising matriarch who interrogates Lizzie's family and prospects and expects total agreement. Lizzie, politely, refuses to give it, and earns a startled, narrow-eyed once-over. By the end of the evening Lizzie has made her peace: Charlotte's chosen life is survivable, even good, and the visit is going to be fine. Then the estate's front door opens and the patron's newly arrived nephew steps into the hall — Fitzwilliam Darcy. The one certainty Lizzie came here to keep, that she was finally, permanently done with him, collapses on the spot. The mutual friend was him all along.