She Was The One Insult He Could Not Take Back (Pride, Passion & Promises #6)
Chapter One The Assembly
The evening had been, on the whole, exactly as advertised.
The assembly rooms at Meryton were not large, but the neighbourhood had conspired to fill them beyond their natural capacity with approximately a hundred people who had, to varying degrees, been anticipating this particular Tuesday for the better part of a fortnight.
The candles were lit. The musicians were present and, for the moment, in tune.
Every family of consequence within five miles had sent its daughters in their best muslins and its sons in their least rumpled coats, and the aggregate effect was one of cheerful, determined festivity that stopped just short of desperation only because the punch had been well made and the Netherfield party had arrived.
Elizabeth Bennet stood near the middle of the room with Jane on one side and Charlotte Lucas on the other, and she was happy.
It was a simple, uncomplicated happiness of the kind that required no particular cause beyond the present one: the room was warm, the music had just changed to something livelier, and Jane was wearing the blue gown that made three different young men forget how to hold their punch glasses.
Elizabeth had noticed all three and was quietly cataloguing which of them would recover his composure first.
"The tall one," Charlotte murmured without looking up.
"I had the fair one," Elizabeth said. "You see how much better we are at this than they are at dancing."
Jane turned to them with an expression of gentle reproach that had absolutely no effect on either of them.
The Netherfield party occupied their corner of the room the way money tended to occupy any space it entered: with an authority that pretended not to know it was there.
Mr. Bingley was already three minutes into being universally liked.
Elizabeth observed this with genuine appreciation.
There was a rare skill in being liked this fast and this thoroughly, and Bingley had it without apparent effort, which was the rarest version of the skill.
He had already spoken to Mrs. Long. He had already laughed at something Mr. Lucas said.
He was, by any reasonable measure, a success.
The party that surrounded him was less uniformly beloved.
His sisters moved through the room with the particular forward tilt of women who were assessing everything and had already assigned most of it to a category labelled beneath our notice, though they were far too well-bred to say so in those exact words.
Miss Bingley was handsome in the way that required acknowledgment and then left you feeling oddly tired.
And then there was Mr. Darcy.
Elizabeth looked at him the way she looked at everything new: directly and with a species of candid curiosity that her father had never managed to discourage and her mother had never noticed.
He was tall. He was well made. He wore his coat the way men wore things when they had never had occasion to wonder whether they could afford them, and his face, in the candlelight, was the face of a person who had been brought up to believe that holding an expression was a kind of concession.
He was, she decided, exactly what had been described in the letters and at the dinner tables and across the hedgerows of Hertfordshire for the past two weeks.
Proud. Not unpleasantly so, perhaps, at this distance.
But proud in the way that had nothing to do with you and everything to do with himself, which was the particular species of pride that Elizabeth had always found faintly absurd.
She looked away. There were other things to look at.
The evening proceeded in the sociable and agreeable fashion that a good assembly always promised.
Elizabeth danced twice with the same young officer who had three weeks earlier said something amusing about Ovid and had spent the time since proving it was an accident, though she found she did not mind because he was a good dancer and she had low standards for the quality of conversation during a reel.
She ate two of the small iced cakes that Mrs. Long always brought and regretted nothing.
She watched her mother manoeuvre Jane within fifteen feet of Mr. Bingley with the strategic concentration of a general who had spent three decades on a single campaign.
It was during the pause between the second and third sets, when the room had achieved that particular quality of noise and warmth that made the air itself feel inhabited, that Elizabeth decided her sash needed straightening.
This was not strictly necessary. The sash was perfectly well.
But the room had grown very warm and Elizabeth had spent the last ten minutes standing in an extremely small radius while Mrs. Bennet gave Charlotte Lucas her considered opinion on the cut of Miss Bingley's gown, and there was a passage off the main room that Elizabeth happened to know was cool and quiet and led, if you kept walking, to the side door where the Lucases' carriage driver always stood to smoke his pipe.
She did not mean to stop in the passage.
She meant to walk through it and back. The sash was genuinely a little loose, as it turned out, and she paused in the dimmer stretch just before the passage turned toward the side door, and she was reaching behind herself to attend to the matter when she heard Mr. Bingley's voice.
He was around the corner. Close. The angle of the wall and the noise of the room had made her invisible to anyone coming from the main hall, and Bingley was not looking in her direction because he was looking at the room, gesturing back toward it with the enthusiasm of a man who had been enjoying himself for an hour and had lost none of the momentum.
"Come, Darcy," she heard him say, with the particular coaxing energy of someone who was used to applying it to a single target and having mixed results. "I must have you dance. I hate to see you standing about by yourself in this stupid manner. You had much better dance."
She did not move. It was not a choice, exactly. It was what happened in the two seconds before choice became available.
"I certainly shall not." Darcy's voice. She had not heard it before. It was lower than she would have guessed, and it had the considered quality of a man whose statements were not revisions but conclusions. "You know how I detest it, unless I am particularly acquainted with my partner."
"I would not be so fastidious as you are," Bingley said cheerfully, "for a kingdom. Upon my honour, I never met with so many pleasant girls in my life as I have this evening, and several of them are uncommonly pretty."
A brief pause.
"You are dancing with the only handsome girl in the room," Darcy said.
"Oh, she is the most beautiful creature I ever beheld.
" Bingley's warmth was audible and uncomplicated and Elizabeth had a moment of thinking that Jane was lucky in the quality of the man who had noticed her.
"But there is one of her sisters sitting down just behind you who is very pretty and, I dare say, very agreeable.
Do let me ask my partner to introduce you. "
Elizabeth went very still.
She did not know, precisely, that they were discussing her.
She would know in a moment, but in the single second before, she had the particular and specific experience of standing in a dark passage with her hands behind her back and her sash half-attended-to and the feeling of something approaching.
"Which do you mean?" She heard Darcy shift his position.
She heard, because she was listening now in the way that the body listens when it has already understood something the mind is still arriving at, the brief pause of a man glancing.
"She is tolerable, I suppose. But not handsome enough to tempt me. "
The room went on being noisy. The musicians were discussing their next piece. Someone near the entrance laughed at something.
"I am in no humour at present," Darcy continued, and his voice had not changed in any way that she could identify, it was not unkind, it was simply the voice of a man completing a thought that had never required any particular care because it had never had any particular cost, "to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men.
You had better return to your partner and enjoy her smiles, for you are wasting your time with me. "
She heard Bingley laugh. Easy and good-natured, unbothered, already turning back toward the room. "Well then, I am off. Have it your way."
Then there was only the noise of the assembly, and the passage, and the cooling air from the direction of the side door.
Elizabeth stood in the dark for a moment.
She was not certain how many seconds it was.
She counted them afterward, lying in bed, and she thought it had been four, but it might have been three or it might have been five.
She stood in the dark passage with her sash half-straightened and the specific weight of what she had heard settling through her with the patient inevitability of something that intended to stay.
She is tolerable, I suppose. But not handsome enough to tempt me.
She finished the sash. She did it very carefully, because the doing of it gave her hands something to think about.
Then she smoothed her gloves. She smoothed the front of her gown.
She took three breaths of the cool corridor air, which was in fact exactly what she had come for, and then she put the expression back on her face that the evening had been going so well with and walked back into the room.
"There you are," said Charlotte, without looking up from the glass she was studying. "I thought you had escaped."
"I considered it," Elizabeth said pleasantly. "But then I remembered I had left Jane unguarded."
"Jane is dancing with Bingley."
"There, you see. Crisis averted by my own sacrifice."
She said it with the particular light delivery that she had been practising since approximately age twelve, the kind that filled a conversational gap so smoothly that no one thought to look at what was underneath it, and Charlotte laughed, and Mrs. Bennet bore down on them with a full report on the progress of Jane's dance and the exact expression on Bingley's face during each of the last three figures, and Elizabeth listened and responded and smiled at the right intervals and watched Mr. Darcy stand at the far end of the room with his hands clasped behind his back and the look of a man who did not know that anyone was watching him.
She danced again. She was asked by two separate partners and she accepted both in the cheerful spirit of a woman who was enjoying herself and would continue to enjoy herself because to do otherwise would be to give the evening a significance it did not deserve.
She did not look at Mr. Darcy directly again.
She looked near him, which was different, and which she permitted herself because it was the kind of thing you did when you were developing a naturalist's interest in a specimen.
She noted that he did not dance with anyone.
She noted that he declined two approaches that she observed and probably others she did not.
She noted that when Bingley came to speak to him near the end of the evening, his face shifted in a way that was the closest thing to warmth she had seen on it, which was illuminating in the way that a very small amount of light was illuminating when you were trying to see in a very large dark room.
The Bennet carriage home was loud in the way the Bennet carriage always was after an assembly: Mrs. Bennet in full flight, Lydia performing a retrospective of the evening's best moments with the dramatic commitment of a girl who had lived each of them twice, Kitty adding detail where detail seemed to be required.
Jane sat with a quiet brightness about her that Elizabeth recognised as the Jane version of happiness, which was always more inward than most people's.
Elizabeth sat in the corner and looked out the window at the hedgerows moving past in the dark, and she heard the report her mother was giving on Mr. Darcy, which was fierce and complete and contained the phrase pride, arrogance, a conceited, pompous, disagreeable man in close succession, and she thought that her mother was not wrong, and she thought several other things that she put in a particular order in her mind and then set aside.
She is tolerable, I suppose. But not handsome enough to tempt me.
And then, with the clean deliberate motion of a woman closing a book she does not intend to finish, she rearranged her thoughts, looked away from the hedgerows, and inserted herself into the conversation at exactly the right moment to make Lydia laugh and Kitty argue and Mrs. Bennet temporarily forget whatever she had been about to say next.
In bed, later, the candle out and the house settled into its nighttime sounds, Elizabeth lay on her back and looked at the ceiling and told herself that she found the whole thing tremendously amusing.
She was very nearly sure that she did.
The laugh, she thought. Not the words. The words were careless and she had heard careless words before and they had never troubled her particularly. It was the laugh. The brief, unhurried sound of a man for whom the entire question had been, from the first moment to the last, faintly absurd.
She turned onto her side.
She found it amusing. She had decided. She was very good at deciding things, and this was decided, and in the morning she would tell Charlotte the story because it was genuinely a good story, the kind that made people laugh, the kind she was particularly skilled at telling, and she would leave the passage out because the passage was not a part of the story she intended to tell.
It was a part of the story she was keeping, which was different.
And she would keep it the way you kept something that had no use and too much weight to simply set down: very carefully, in the dark, where no one would see it.
She slept.