Chapter Two
I did not apologize to her.
I could not. I had no notion how to go about it. I thought of going over to her and asking if she’d overheard, but that was insupportable.
I thought of going to her and just blurting the apology out, of telling her that I actually thought she was very beautiful, but then that sounded idiotic and I didn’t think she’d believe me.
Trying to explain that I had been doggedly sticking to my argument with Bingley made me sound like some sort of village idiot, and I resolved I needed to think that explanation through before I gave it voice again.
At some point, I noticed that Mr. Bingley and Mr. Bennet were talking about me, at least they were talking and looking over at me and both gesturing at me from time to time, and Bingley was shaking his head and laughing. Mr. Bennet looked stunned and rubbed his forehead.
This distracted me, and I would have gone to speak to Bingley about it, demanded he explain himself, truly, for it was rude to talk about a person in that manner, especially when I could see them doing it.
But Miss Bingley was there, interrupting my thoughts. “You have not danced, Mr. Darcy.”
Well, that was Miss Bingley for you. She had painted me into a corner with but one sentence. I had no option now but to ask for a space on her dance card.
Perhaps, I supposed, I could have said that I was in no mood for dancing at all, but she might still have taken that as a slight, and I could not do that in all politeness. However, it was really not entirely fair, because she was not being polite.
Not that she was typically polite, I supposed.
She was a bit artless, was Miss Bingley.
No, no, that is not it at all. She was actually rather artful, but she was awful at concealing it, so that everything she did seemed to be a scheme, all of her behavior manipulative in some way, always trying to move people about here and there to do her bidding.
However, because she was so obvious about it, she was not at all good at manipulating people.
This seemed to only make her behavior more desperate and obvious.
“It is true, I have not,” I said. “But here you are, such a fortuitous coincidence. I wonder if you might do me the honor, Miss Bingley.”
“Oh, of course, Mr. Darcy.” She gave me a dazzling smile.
We took to the dance floor, and she began to engage me in conversation, though I found speaking to her rather tedious.
Miss Bingley had two modes of interaction: one was to slavishly ask questions about her conversation partner’s interests and make all sort of interested noises and various exclamations of delighted surprise and the other was to go on about her own (very boring) exploits.
I had been treated to a long diatribe once about how Miss Bingley decided what fabric to have her gloves made of.
She had given it a lot of thought. She said that many women wanted gloves that matched their dresses, made of the exact same fabric, but that she did not like this look, that it drew too much attention to the gloves and that gloves should accentuate the dress by fading out and providing a frame for the eye.
It was dull, however, I seem to have remembered it rather faithfully, and truthfully, I had found myself noticing women’s gloves, and she was right. A simple glove did make a woman’s dress more prominent to the eye.
What Miss Bingley seemed to fail to grasp about a conversation was that it should be about finding common ground between people, not simply taking turns talking at each other about things the other person did not care about.
But for a half hour, I answered her questions and she prattled on, and then finally, I was set free to go and hide in the corner for the rest of the ball.
Mr. Bingley found me there, and he regarded me with an expression more serious than I was used to seeing on his face. “You had quite a conversation with James.”
“James?” I said. Who was it that we were addressing by first names in this place?
“Mr. Bennet,” he said. “The heir to Longbourn. The brother of the girl you said was tolerable.”
I winced. “Oh, yes, that was not my finest of moments.” I cleared my throat.
“Here it is, Bingley, I am sorry I have been so sour about the ball. Truly, what I should have done is simply been plain with you. I disliked the fact that you misrepresented so much of this excursion. You made it out to be this large group and it is only you and me and your sisters.”
Bingley looked me over. “All right, then.” He adjusted his cravat. “So, to be clear, you would not be enticed by the prospect of being shut up in a house with only me?”
Why was this his response? What did it mean?
If his tone had been different, I would have assumed he was affronted, but he seemed only genuinely curious, as if he were trying to ascertain something about me.
“Now, see here,” I said, “I do not mean that I dislike your company in general, only that I was out of sorts because of the afternoon we had, rushing here, and then all of us sharing one valet, and everyone here loudly announcing my income whilst I am in earshot, and who told them that? Was it you who have been doing so?”
“Oh, come now, Darcy, everyone knows everyone else’s income and discusses it behind their backs. You know as well as I that men are never taken on their merit, not entirely.”
He was right about that, I supposed. There was a pecking order, and everyone knew where it was they fit into it, and all of that was common knowledge.
“Anyway,” I continued, “I am making a hash of this, because I am actually trying to apologize.”
“No, no, you need not.” He waved that away, giving me a little smile. “You are often disgruntled, and I do not mind. It is part of your charm.”
“I am not often disgruntled!” I protested and realized that I sounded disgruntled and cleared my throat again and ducked down my head, feeling embarrassed.
“It takes you a bit of time to adjust to a new setting,” said Bingley. “I ought not have brought you down here the day of the ball, I see. I do not often have the sort of forethought that others might, I’m afraid.”
This was true. He did not. “Perhaps that’s part of your charm,” I said with a little shrug.
He met my gaze, that serious expression back. “Are you, in fact, charmed by me?”
I drew back. “What?”
He laughed, shaking his head. “No, no, never mind. It is as I thought. James was mistaken. He seemed so certain, but I see that he simply does not know you.”
“Mistaken about what?” I said.
“Oh, it does not matter, since it was a mistake,” he said. “Please, put all of this from your mind, I beg it of you, Darcy.” He laughed a little.
“But when you two were talking about me, which I did notice, by the by, what were you saying?”
“He thought things about you that are not true, is all.”
“What things?”
“Oh, heavens, Darcy, I have dug myself into a hole, have I not?” He shook his head, looking quite chagrined. “It’s nothing for you to worry over.” He took a step backward. “Pray, excuse me, I am off to seek out something to drink, I think.”
I did not wish him to run away and not explain himself to me, but he had turned his back upon me and was obviously of a mind to do exactly that. I could have caught him and pressed him, but I did not.
The following day, I began to think more seriously about my scheme to get a very urgent letter from someone or other, something so urgent it would require my immediate departure from the country and the company of Mr. Bingley and his sisters.
I had a thought that I might write the letter myself, go on a walk alone, and then claim I had been given it by someone who had ridden from London to put it directly in my hands.
It would have to be some family emergency, I thought.
Not my sister, though, since that hit too close to home with what had happened in the summer.
So, perhaps a cousin or an aunt or something.
Some illness, death’s door, must rush to their bedside, something of that nature.
But as I sat down to write the letter, I began to think that it would not do if it were in my own handwriting, and I had written letters to Bingley and he would distinguish it, I thought.
At the very least, I could always determine who a letter was from without looking at the return address because I would recognize the hand that had written my name upon it.
I experimented for a bit with writing with my left hand, which was illegible, and then I decided to write everything slanted so that it disguised my handwriting fairly well, at least I thought so. The letter itself was quite short.
I was prepared.
But then, for three days, I was stymied in my attempts to take walks alone.
Sometimes it was Mr. Bingley himself, but often it was Miss Bingley, who seemed to always simply happen to be walking whenever I was. She would spot me on the grounds of Netherfield, wave, and come over to walk with me, exclaiming, “Mr. Darcy, what a lovely surprise to see you out here again!”
Miss Bingley was, of course, trying to marry me, but only insomuch as she was trying to marry positively all of her brother’s friends.
She treated all of the men that Bingley brought into her company in much the same way as she treated me.
If there had been anyone else for her to throw herself at, she would have been throwing herself at all of us equally, but I happened to be the only person here, so I bore the brunt of it.
Near as I could tell, Miss Bingley did not much care who it was she married as long as he was well settled and respectable.
She did not seem to want a match with someone she had anything in common with or a match that would be borne of true affection or love.
She seemed to be approaching the matter strategically, trying to flatter her way into an alliance of some sort.
She was not exceedingly plain, though she was not the sort of pretty that would turn heads. There was nothing exactly wrong with her, I supposed, but she also was the most grating of company, and I wished to be rid of her more than I had wished for anything on God’s green earth.
I was beginning to think that I was going to have to alter my plan, or simply to steal away in the night, politeness be damned.
I was also beginning to worry that my letter would be investigated, that the Bingleys might make inquiries about the health of my (entirely fictional) dying relative, and this was going to come out to them one way or the other, and then they would know I had made up a story to get out of their company, which would be quite worse than simply stealing away in the night, all told, though both would be rather bad.
On the fourth day, Bingley told me we had all been invited to a dinner at the Lucas household.
“That’s the penniless knight,” I said.
“Ah, you remember!” he said. “And here I thought you were not paying a bit of mind to anything I said to you at that ball.”
“I do listen to you,” I said. “I suppose we are all to go in one carriage?”
“Indeed,” he said. “It will be a nice diversion, I think.”
“Yes,” I said, and it would be, actually. I would be pleased to talk to anyone besides Caroline Bingley, after all.
“I want to say, also, Darcy, that I know I made it out that this would be a large party of us, and I see that you are, well, bored—”
“Oh, no, of course not,” I protested.
“You may go back to London without any repercussions from me is all I am saying,” he said. “I would not think it impolite.”
“I am not eager to leave you,” I said.
“Of course not,” he said.
I eyed him. “Wait, are you eager for me to be away?”
“Oh, no, absolutely not!” he said, shaking his head. “No, you are welcome here as long as you like.”
“Perhaps I shall stay a fortnight,” I said, grimacing.
“Oh, quite, indeed,” he said. “A fortnight, yes.”
I was confused. Did he, in fact, wish me to go? “Bingley,” I said, “you begged me to come here with you.”
“I am not asking you to leave,” he said.
“It seems to me that perhaps you are.”
“Oh, this is preposterous, because all you do is go on walks at the uncivilized hour of eight o’clock—”
“Since when is eight uncivilized?”
“You leave before anyone has scarce had breakfast and then you are stony silent during all the card games, and yesterday, you went on six walks. I counted them.”
I scratched the back of my head. “Yes, well, I was just trying to get some solitude, but your sister, Miss Bingley, she seems to be following me around.”
He groaned. “She is also bored. Perhaps I should simply take everyone back to London and come back here on my own.”
“A fortnight,” I said.
“Yes, you’re right, of course,” he said with a nod. “A fortnight is quite respectable. After a fortnight, I shall escort everyone back to London.”
I went away from that conversation quite confused.
I had never been alone with Bingley, not that I was exactly alone now.
We had all been together at a large gathering in the country that summer, though I’d had to leave to deal with the business with my sister, Georgiana.
There had been a great many people staying there, and it had been quite a diverting time, lots of games of lawn bowling and lemonade on the lawns and late nights gathered round the piano forte, all singing at the top of our lungs.
I had been in Bingley’s company during the summer, but rarely with Bingley himself alone. What tended to happen, now that I thought about it, was that Bingley would pull me in to go along and some other man to do some activity or other.
Often it was Danvers, I seemed to recall.
Mr. Jeremiah Danvers was the second son of a viscount, and he had seemingly no profession except to gallivant about to various people’s country houses.
He was a professional guest, perhaps. Bingley and Danvers were often together, walking here and there, sitting close in the evenings in the sitting room, engaged in eager conversation.
But from time to time, Bingley would collect other people, and I was one of them.
The collections could be awkward. Bingley and Danvers seemed to laugh at things that other people didn’t find funny, and they would apologize, saying it was a private joke between the two of them.
They would almost pointedly ignore each other during these outings.
I remember once, the three of us out riding horses, we had dismounted to look at a waterfall, and the two of them spoke exclusively to me and never to each other.
It was odd that Danvers hadn’t come, truly, was it not?
Perhaps I should ask Bingley if he and Danvers were still friendly.
No, perhaps I should not ask that.
Perhaps I should cease to think of this entirely, in fact.
Thus resolved, I did.