Swipe Left on Mr. Darcy — Are You Sure?, Page 7
By Suha · Published
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Transcript
Panel 1. Morning at the front of the Bennet house. Darcy walks up the curving flagstone path toward the porch steps, tall and formal in his charcoal-grey overcoat, alone. Panel 2. Mrs. Bennet peers out between the front curtains, eyes enormous and appalled. MRS. BENNET: Oh, not that man again. Panel 3. Lizzie stops dead halfway down the staircase in the front hall, one hand on the dark handrail, going completely still. Panel 4. The open front door. Darcy stands on the threshold, stiff and serious, looking past everything at Lizzie only. DARCY: Is your father at home? Panel 5. Tight close-up of Lizzie on the stairs, stunned, breath caught.
Image description
Five panels the next morning. Darcy walks up the Bennet flagstone path in his charcoal overcoat, Mrs. Bennet spots him from the window in dismay, and at the open front door he asks whether Lizzie's father is home while she freezes on the stairs.
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.