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Miss Charlotte Heywood was furious. This was not an emotion that she was very familiar with, she tended much more towards hot, quick flashes of anger, easily expressed and as easily flushed away, but this was an icy fury that sat inside her, gnawing away at her insides with no prospect of release.
How dare he? What was he even thinking? After all that had passed between them, he had appeared on the cliffs where she was walking and told her: “I have fought in vain to deny it, but I am in love with you”. And she, having longed to hear (some of) those words from his lips, in a moment of madness had kissed him. And now, as she stalked away from him, with her chin in the air, willing her body to obey her, willing him not to see the shaking of her shoulders, she was coldly, icily furious.
Why had he ‘fought to deny it’? Was Charlotte Heywood not good enough for him? If he was really in love with her, as he claimed to be, how could he play fast and loose with her emotions as he seemed determined to do?
First he had sent her away, in the summer, talking of his shame and regret, sending six months’ wages behind her, trying to pay off his own guilt. She had never felt so belittled in her entire life, and she didn’t want his money, the only reason she hadn’t sent it back was because she did not want to enter into correspondence with him. She hadn’t spent it, it was burning a hole in the bottom of her trunk. She had imagined giving it to Mr Coram’s foundling hospital, or to the Sons of Africa, but she could not see a way for him to know she had done so. She had fantasised about putting the whole lot in the collection plate at church, but Mr Colbourne did not attend church, so that was no good either, she was stuck with the money until she could think of a gesture that he couldn’t miss.
And since she had come back to Sanditon, what of Mr Colbourne then? Impossible to deny that he had sought out his brother to help Georgiana, and the elder Mr Colbourne as good as told her that he believed it was done for her sake. And the way he pressed his hand against hers at the recital - her cheeks grew hot when she thought of it, and she squashed, again, the memory of how for her time had stopped in that moment. It was not fair, he was not behaving fairly to her, to cast her off and then, when it was much too late, to say he regretted it.
No, she had sworn at the start of the summer that she would never put herself into a man’s power again, after Sidney, and she would stand by that. She had made a choice, a conscious choice, to live out her life in Willingden, near her family, with poor sweet Ralph, who hadn’t the power to hurt her. Mr Alexander Colbourne would not make a liar of her. Mr Alexander Colbourne, with all of the confusing back and forth of rejection and desire that he conjured up within her, would have to live with the fact that he would not be spending any days in her company ever again.
And she would never, ever allow her mind to dwell on his face as he said those final words…
“Stay… stay and make a life with me…”
She could not. She would not. It was over.