Page 74 of Pride, Prejudice, & Pretense

"Yes, soon." Darcy shut the computer. When he looked at Lizzy, she thought he might revive the conversation Charlie had interrupted, but he didn’t.

He just stared at her, his eyes full of emotion. What she had said during their conference with Charlie had made it clear she was going to pursue the mission, and Darcy seemed to accept it. "Take tomorrow, stay inside, and rest. If Wickham calls, try to get some indication of where you're going the next day so we can plan, get ahead of him. Remember, if he calls during the day, you'll be here, butFannywill be at work. Bingley'll make sure the fake phone tree's in place so Wickham will believe he’s called the library.”

"Right," Lizzy said, feeling tired again, heavy. She had chosen the mission. Precipitously. For all sorts of reasons…all sorts of confusing reasons.

She walked to the door with Darcy, who stopped before he opened it. Gently, he put his hand behind her head and tugged her lips to his. "We're committed," he told her when their lips parted. "Together."

He closed the door, and she wiped tears from her eyes. She had kept them from forming until the door shut.Fitzwilliam.

Chapter Eighteen: Compunction

Lizzy's tears stopped long enough for her to remove her makeup and clothes and to put on something to sleep in. She wadded up the clothes she’d just shed and threw them into a shadowy corner of her closet to hide them from her sight, hoping to keep them from reminding her of Wickham and that horrible dizziness she had felt—her heart capsizing and sinking in a kitchen vortex of shame and disgust.

She was not entirely sure why she cried once Fitzwilliam closed the door. Shewassure that her heart had swollen and beat faster at his parting words. And then everything had seemed impossibly too much.

Mission impossible.Idiotic cliché.

Fitzwilliam’s words had been a promise—and a promise of a promise all at once. A promise about the mission, but not merely a mission promise, professional. Sealed with a kiss.Committed. Together.

With him. Not Ned. Not Agent Darcy. Fitzwilliam.

Fitzwilliam paid attention to his words. He spoke deliberately and reservedly. Even exhausted and emotionally spent, he was careful. It felt like he was projecting beyond the mission, speaking beyond it, his words both encircling them now and reaching ahead of them. They couldn't talk about this explicitly until they were done with the Wicker Man, done with Wickham.

It was too early for her to feel this way, for him to feel this way, and it was absolutely the wrong setting for the birth and the growth of such feelings.Mission impossible.But hearts had schedules of which missions knew nothing. Sometimes your eyes obscure your vision.

She turned off the lights and stretched out on the bed, staring up at the darkened ceiling as if its pattern of shadow and dim street lights might suggest a path forward hieroglyphically. But she found no answers, no directions there.

As she finally began to relax, she saw her father's face in the shadows above her.Why is my past presenting itself to me now? Why is he so much on my mind?

Because it had been him, his life and especially his death that had started her in this life, that had sent her into the dark.

God, I loved him so much when I was little!And she had.So much.

As she grew older, she began to see him for the man he was.But I never stopped loving him.His habitual center of personal energy was his satirical view of life, his merciless satire of others and also of himself. He had good principlesin some sense,but they were on the periphery of who he was. Although he could sometimes acknowledge that he was in the wrong, he could not bring himself into the right?not by main strength anyway, although sometimes events would conspire to move him there.

By the time Lizzy was in college, she loved and was chagrined by him almost equally. He was the head cheerleader of her plan to become a professor and devote her life to books. He had done the same, but as an amateur, fortressed in his study, armored by pages. Her father had created her self-compunction. She had delighted in her father's satire and irony as a girl, encouraging it, imitating it herself, and internalizing it. By doing so, she had delighted him.

Later, she began to wonder if her growing difficulties with people?her reluctances with Jim Haden, for example?were the consequences of having made her father's habitual center of personal energy her own. Her worry about whether she could get a job teaching literature or succeed at it if she did was her deepest worry about herself. She might retreat into her booksmuch as her father had, hiding in them. She had done that in high school, dodging much of the storm and stress of those years in the carrels of the school or the public library.

Fanny Prince really was not a stretch for me. Fitzwilliam’s aim was true.

Maybe she had chosen the Company to try and force herself into closeness with life, connect with it in its raw form and do some good—to create a new center of energy for herself, a new set of ideas to live by and live for.

But working for the Company turned out to be aboutsurvival, not about living. It was like that brutal pun inWalden:"The people who aresaid to livein Concord." The suggestion was that they didn't live there—or anywhere. "The people who aresaid to livein the Company."

Lizzy’s job distanced her from life by means of darkness and shadows?a deep cover between her and life. Her attempt to escape her father's influence had led her into a gloomy version of the very cage she feared. Cut off. Undercover. Cloaked in fiction after all. Pages. The pages of Company files rather than the pages of books.

But this mission,Fitzwilliam,had put her into contact with herself, life, her life, and what she wanted. Wantednow. Non-fiction.

It was perhaps late in the day for conversion, but Lizzy felt like that was what was happening to her. Deep and impactful change. She was in transition from disunity to unity, many to one. She had not yet reached unity, but it was, nonetheless, pulling her forward. Perhaps what she had thought was exhaustion after her last mission had been, in large part, a rising disrelish for the half-life she was leading.

She wanted a different life.

No, I wanta life.

That hope carried her to sleep.

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