Swipe Left on Mr. Darcy — Are You Sure?, Page 3
By Suha · Published
Transcript
Panel 1. The shared upstairs bedroom at night, warm lamplight against a deep blue window. Jane sits cross-legged on the floral quilt, radiant, in her soft-pink cardigan. Lizzie sits beside her, knees drawn up. JANE: I still can't believe he came back. Panel 2. Lizzie shifts to the end of the bed, hands folded in her lap, suddenly nervous, glancing at her sister sideways. LIZZIE: Jane. I'm engaged too. Panel 3. Close on Jane. Her happy smile is frozen exactly where it was, her eyes blank with incomprehension. Panel 4. Jane breaks into a relieved laugh, shoulders dropping, entirely certain this is a joke. JANE: Very funny.
Image description
Four panels in the sisters' lamplit bedroom at night. Jane sits radiant on the bed talking about Charles; Lizzie says she is engaged too, and Jane's smile freezes before she laughs it off as a joke.
About this chapter
Lizzie comes home from the leafy lane engaged to the one man nobody in that house would believe she could want, and discovers the hardest part is not saying yes: it is being believed. Jane laughs, certain it is a joke, until the whole reordered story comes out in the dark of their bedroom, and asks the one question Lizzie has never let herself answer out loud. The next morning Darcy is at the front door in his charcoal overcoat asking, of all people, for her father. Behind a closed living-room door two men have a conversation Lizzie is not in, while her mother speculates about lawsuits and Mary offers wisdom nobody requested. Then it is her turn, and Mr. Bennet, dry and unbothered for twenty-two chapters, is not dry at all: he wants to know whether his sharpest daughter has sold herself to a rich man she cannot respect. So Lizzie tells him everything, including the part that was never hers to tell, and says the words she has never once said about anybody. Her father takes off his glasses. Downstairs, Mrs. Bennet goes silent for three unprecedented seconds before the house detonates, and the chapter closes where it opened: the same porch steps at golden hour, except she is not walking up them alone.