Swipe Left on Mr. Darcy — Blocked, Page 8
By Suha · Published
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Transcript
Panel 1: LIZZIE BENNET in the flowering garden, steady and unimpressed, hands in her jacket pockets, looking the older woman straight in the eye. Ms. de Bourgh's silver chignon and dark-emerald shoulder fill the right of the panel. LIZZIE: 'If it were impossible, you would not have driven two hours to ask me.' Panel 2: Tight close-up of MS. DE BOURGH's face, affronted, chin rising another degree, thin lips pressed flat, pale steel-blue eyes narrowing. Panel 3: LIZZIE in three-quarter view, dry and level, one eyebrow higher than the other. LIZZIE: 'You have already decided. Nothing I say matters.'
Image description
Three panels: Lizzie points out that a two-hour drive proves the match is not impossible, Ms. de Bourgh bristles in close-up, and Lizzie says her answer cannot matter.
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.