TWO
Netherfield, Hertfordshire.
Darcy
The door to the breakfast room was not fully closed.
Darcy noticed it before Marsh did. A thin line of light bled into the passage.
Voices drifted through the gap. Breakfast had concluded the better part of an hour ago.
Darcy had returned to his room after, as was his custom, and had only now asked Marsh to take him to the library.
The library was this way, so this was the way they came. He had not planned to hear anything.
Just then, his name drifted through the gap.
Darcy raised his hand. Marsh stopped pushing.
“I still do not understand why you insisted upon Mr. Darcy accompanying us this evening, Charles.” A brief pause followed. “Indeed, I cannot imagine why we were required to travel all the way to Derbyshire to collect him when we might simply have come directly from London.”
Darcy placed the voice immediately. It was that of Mrs. Hurst. Louisa. The elder of Mr. Bingley's two sisters, and by some margin the more temperate of them, though that was a distinction that said rather more about Miss Bingley than it did about Mrs. Hurst.
A short silence followed. Then Bingley spoke, his voice lighter than his sisters’, though he was plainly choosing his words carefully. “Why not? I mean, he has been at Pemberley for two years, Louisa. Two years. Barely left the grounds. Barely saw anyone.”
“That was his choice.”
“It was not a choice so much as —” Bingley stopped. Then he began again. “He needed time. After everything. But two years is long enough and somebody had to say so.”
“And that somebody had to be you.”
This time, Darcy recognised the voice as that of Miss Caroline Bingley, the younger of the two sisters. Her tone was not unkind precisely, but it had an edge to it that her sister's did not.
“Georgiana wrote to me,” said Bingley. “She was worried about him. She asked if I could do something and I said I would try.” There was movement inside, brief and indistinct.
“I did not try so much as beg, if I am being honest. I complained at him across half a dozen letters until he decided to follow me here, perhaps simply to stop hearing me complain.”
“I understand your sentiments,” said Caroline, lowering her voice slightly, “but the journey, Charles. Surely you cannot pretend it was not something of a trial.”
“The journey from Derbyshire was perfectly manageable.”
“You call repeatedly extending every stop manageable?”
“Caroline...” Bingley’s tone carried warning beneath it.
“You cannot deny that travelling with Mr. Darcy required rather more time and arrangement than usual,” said Mrs. Hurst. “It is simply a fact.”
A silence followed, the particular sort produced by a remark everyone understood ought not to have been spoken aloud.
“I am not complaining about Mr. Darcy,” Caroline said at last, her voice smoothing itself deliberately.
“I merely mean that travelling with him requires a certain adjustment. As, I imagine, does attending an evening such as this. I like Mr. Darcy very much. I always have. I only wonder whether he will be comfortable.”
Darcy pressed his lips together to stop himself from scoffing as he listened. He felt something he could only describe as a familiar tiredness.
He knew that voice. Not the one Caroline used with her brother, sharp and unguarded, but this one — the softer register, the careful concern, the I like Mr. Darcy very much delivered with the precise weight of a woman who wanted it remembered.
He had been hearing that voice for more than two years.
It appeared whenever the conversation turned to him and she became aware, or suspected, that people were paying attention or that it might reach him.
She was not unintelligent. She was simply not as subtle as she believed herself to be.
“Whether he will be comfortable,” Bingley repeated. “Yes. That is what concerns you?”
“Charles.”
“It concerns me too,” said Bingley, and his voice was entirely even. “Which is why I spoke to him about it before I suggested it, and why he agreed to come, and why we are going.” A chair scraped. “He is not a child, Caroline. He does not need us to decide what he can manage.”
“I only meant —”
“Look,” said Bingley, cutting across her cleanly, “Darcy kept himself locked in Pemberley since the previous winter. According to his sister, he refused every invitation from their uncle at Matlock. If not for any other reason, bringing Darcy here is as much for him as it is for her. Georgiana is frightened for him. Not for his health. For him.”
The room was very quiet.
“Will it not be embarrassing?” said Mrs. Hurst. “Having him simply sit there whilst every other person in the room dances? We are in a county that is not accustomed to seeing refined gentlemen in — in that condition. People will stare. They will whisper. It will be uncomfortable for everyone, him included.”
“The assembly tonight is not about dancing,” Bingley continued.
“It is not about what the neighbourhood will think or whether the journey takes fifteen minutes longer than it might otherwise. It is about getting him into a room full of people who do not know him, do not know what happened, and will simply see a man at an assembly on a good evening. That is all.” He paused.
“And as for the extra time we spent on the road, Louisa — you have spent longer than that deciding which earring to wear.”
Mrs. Hurst made a sound that was not quite agreement and not quite disagreement.
“We cannot leave him here alone in any case,” Bingley said.
“His valet will be with him,” said Caroline.
The silence that followed was its own reply.
“He is my friend,” said Bingley quietly. “He was my friend before any of this and he is my friend now. I will not leave him here on the evening of an assembly simply because the neighbourhood might not know where to look.” A chair scraped back fully. “He is coming. That is the end of it.”
Footsteps moved toward the door.
Darcy raised his hand. Marsh turned the chair with the quiet efficiency he had perfected over two years of navigating spaces that had not been built with him in mind, and they were halfway down the passage before the breakfast room door opened fully behind them.
Darcy did not look back.
* * *
The library was east-facing and the morning light came in well at this hour. Marsh positioned him by the window and withdrew to his place near the door. The grounds outside were quiet, the grass still silver with dew, the sky the pale blue of an autumn morning that intended to be fine.
Darcy looked at it for a while without speaking.
He was thinking about Caroline Bingley's voice. Not the sharp one she used with her brother, but the other one. The careful one.
I like Mr. Darcy very much. I have always liked him.
He wondered, not for the first time, precisely how stupid she thought he was.
He had ten thousand a year and a bath chair and apparently that was, in her calculation, a workable arrangement.
The chair made him dependent. The money made him worth the dependency.
It was not a new calculation. She had been doing that arithmetic long before his marriage, long before the accident, long before any of it.
The bath chair had simply, in her estimation, improved her odds.
He had watched her arrive at this conclusion with the slow, patient certainty of someone who has reviewed their figures and found them more favourable than before.
She had never said it plainly. She was too careful for that.
But the careful voice, the particular warmth that appeared whenever she thought he or people close to him might be within earshot — these were not difficult to read.
He was a man in a bath chair, not a man without a mind.
“Marsh,” Darcy said, without turning from the window.
“Sir.”
“What do you think. An invalid at a country assembly.”
Marsh’s eyes lifted briefly. “It will be your first assembly in some time, sir. I imagine it may do you some good.”
“Mrs. Hurst appears to believe my attendance will prove burdensome to the company.”
“With respect, sir,” Marsh said after a brief pause, “Mrs. Hurst is not always the fairest judge of other people’s company.”
Darcy said nothing for a moment, giving no indication of whether he agreed or disagreed.
“Bingley accepted this invitation on my behalf,” he said at last. “He is the one who wishes to bring a man in a bath chair to the assembly.” He turned from the window.
“Mrs. Hurst believes the neighbourhood will not be accustomed to someone in my condition.
And to make matters worse, Miss Bingley believes my presence made the journey here considerably more of a trial than it needed to be.
“A three-day journey ending safely and without mishap seems to me a perfectly ordinary trial, sir.”
“You are far too kind in your assessment, Marsh. Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley will disagree,” Darcy said. He looked at his hands for a moment. “The neighbourhood will stare tonight, will they not?”
“They may, sir.”
“They will not know where to look.”
“Some of them may not, sir.”
Darcy managed a smile at the reply. It was the kind of candid answer Marsh gave that made Darcy value his opinion above most. Outside, a wood pigeon settled on the stone balustrade and attended to its feathers with great seriousness. Darcy watched it.
“Good,” he said at last. “If the world intends to be unkind, let us at least give it something to occupy itself with.” He turned back to the window. “My grey coat tonight, Marsh. Not the black.”
“Very good, sir.”
“And tell Bingley I will be ready at seven.”
Marsh moved toward the door, then stopped. He did not speak immediately, which meant he was deciding whether to speak at all. Darcy had learned that particular hesitation over seven years and knew to wait.
“It is good that you are going, sir,” Marsh said at last. Quietly. Without ceremony.
Darcy said nothing. He looked at the grounds, at the dew lifting slowly off the grass, at the pale autumn sky above Netherfield that was, he supposed, much the same sky as the one above Pemberley and yet felt, this morning, somehow less heavy.
He did not reply.
Marsh left the room without waiting for one.