Swipe Left on Mr. Darcy — It's a Match, Page 1
By Suha · Published
Transcript
A single wide panel. Golden morning light falls on a quiet, tree-lined lane in front of the Bennet house: two storeys of pale grey-green clapboard, a deep covered porch on square white posts, hanging flower baskets, a flagstone path curving through flower beds. Lizzie Bennet sits alone on the top of the three white porch steps in her open olive-green utility jacket and blue jeans, elbows on her knees, looking down the lane. It is completely empty. No car, no one coming. CAPTION: 'Nobody drives two hours to forbid a thing that was never going to happen.' CAPTION: 'So where is he?'
Image description
Lizzie Bennet sits alone on the porch steps of her family's grey-green clapboard house in the golden morning, looking down an empty tree-lined lane.
About this chapter
Two days after Ms. de Bourgh's black car reversed out of the flagstone path, Lizzie is still standing at the front of the house doing arithmetic she doesn't want to do: nobody drives two hours to forbid a thing that was never going to happen. Which means somebody told that woman something. Which means Darcy hasn't closed the tab on her, and the waiting is unbearable. Then a car that isn't that car pulls up at the curb, Mrs. Bennet detonates, and Charles Bingley is in the front hall beaming at Jane with the whole rest of his life in his face. Behind him, silent, stiff, looking at nobody but Lizzie, is Fitzwilliam Darcy. Twenty minutes of the most excruciating small talk in the county follow, her mother gushing at Charles and pointedly freezing out the man who quietly saved this family, until Mrs. Bennet, engineering for Jane, accidentally engineers for Lizzie too: a walk, Jane and Charles drifting far ahead, and Lizzie alone on the leafy lane with the last man she ever told she could never want. Four minutes of silence later she does the bravest thing she has ever done and speaks first: she knows about Lydia. All of it. He tries to deflect, her aunt was never supposed to tell her, and then stops on the path and says the thing she has been unable to let herself imagine: he didn't do it for her family. His feelings haven't changed. One word from her and he will never raise it again. So Lizzie, who prides herself on reading people and got the only two that mattered completely wrong, tells the truth for once with nothing clever in it, and asks him to ask her again. The chapter closes on the same frame it opened, the same porch steps and the same golden lane, except she isn't watching an empty street any more.