Swipe Left on Mr. Darcy — Blocked, Page 14
By Suha · Published
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Transcript
Panel 1: Wide morning shot from the covered porch of the Bennet house: the long glossy black saloon pulls away down the leafy street past the flowering front garden. LIZZIE BENNET stands in the foreground at the top of the white porch steps with one hand on a square white post, watching it go. Panel 2: Inside the warm front hall, with its patterned runner and the staircase rising at the right. MRS. BENNET rounds on LIZZIE the instant the door shuts, eyes huge with curiosity, her phone held low at her side with only its plain back showing. Lizzie stands with her arms folded, unbothered. MRS. BENNET: 'Who WAS that?' LIZZIE: 'Someone with the wrong address.'
Image description
Lizzie watches from the porch as the long black car pulls away down the leafy street; below, Mrs. Bennet rounds on her in the hall demanding to know who that was.
About this chapter
Two days after Jane says yes to Charles, a long black car noses up the flagstone path of the Bennet house and does not belong there. Out of it steps Ms. de Bourgh — Darcy's aunt, the imperious matriarch of the estate where Lizzie once refused him — who has driven all this way on the strength of a rumour: that her nephew is about to be engaged to Elizabeth Bennet. She dismisses the household, marches Lizzie out to the garden, and lays out the case with surgical contempt: the family's disgrace, Lydia's patched-up marriage, a match that was planned for Darcy since he was a boy. Then she asks for a promise — never, under any circumstances, to accept him. Lizzie, who has spent weeks certain she'd already lost him, refuses. Not because she has any claim on him, but because she will not be told whom she's allowed to want. Every threat de Bourgh throws — censure, exile from his world, being despised by everyone connected to him — Lizzie meets and out-argues, until the old woman leaves in cold fury, taking no leave and sending no compliments to her mother. Lizzie stands in the wreckage of the conversation while her mother demands to know who that was, and then, at the kitchen window, watching the car dwindle down the leafy street, the real meaning arrives: nobody drives two hours to forbid a thing that was never going to happen. Somebody told that woman something. Which means Darcy has not, after all, closed the tab on her.