THREE #2
“Did I not say it from the first?” she whispered to Kitty and Lydia, with very little concern for who might overhear her.
The dancing soon commenced. Mr. Bingley stood up with Jane for the first set and remained with her for the second, a circumstance remarkable enough to attract the notice of the entire room.
Charlotte danced with her father and endured the honour with good grace.
Lydia and Kitty spent both sets in high spirits with officers whose names Elizabeth never entirely managed to distinguish.
Mary did not dance at all and positioned herself near the musicians with an air suggesting she considered herself capable of improving the evening considerably.
Elizabeth danced the first set with Mr. Goulding's eldest son, whose conversation seldom advanced beyond weather and horses, and the second with an attorney from Meryton who spoke so earnestly on turnpike improvements that she was forced to exert herself not to laugh.
Her spirits were high enough that even dull company could not greatly oppress her.
She also observed Miss Bingley observing Jane, and her satisfaction diminished considerably.
Miss Bingley's expression remained perfectly polite, yet there was a sharper quality to it now, the look of someone reassessing a circumstance she had not anticipated.
Elizabeth quietly stored the observation away.
By the third set, Mr. Bingley stood up with Charlotte. Even whilst dancing with her, Elizabeth noticed that his attention continued to drift toward Jane whenever propriety allowed.
It was during the pause after the third set, whilst Elizabeth stood near the edge of the room with her fan, that she became aware of how close she had drifted to the alcove where Mr. Darcy's chair had been positioned against the wall.
She had not noticed it until the music stopped and the room had not yet recovered its full volume.
Then, the words arrived with perfect and deeply inconvenient clarity from somewhere just behind her.
Bingley's voice came first. Warm, urging. “Come now, Darcy. You have sat in this corner the whole of the evening. Of all the people in this room, is there not one person you could find it in yourself to speak to?”
Silence.
Then the second voice. Quiet. Measured. “You socialise, Bingley. Your friendliness has always been sufficient for two. I did not come to Hertfordshire to be paraded before country misses with nothing to recommend them.”
Elizabeth went still. She did not turn around.
“Come,” said Bingley, undeterred. “My dancing partner, Miss Bennet, tells me her sister is a most accomplished conversationalist. There, Miss Elizabeth, just there.”
Elizabeth felt the precise moment the conversation turned toward her, before she heard what followed.
She turned. She had not intended to, but she did, and found Mr. Darcy looking directly at her, no longer with the assessing attention of their introduction, but with a level indifference that suggested he had already formed an opinion and found no reason to revise it.
“Your dance partner is very handsome, Bingley, and I congratulate you on securing her. Enjoy.” A brief pause followed. “However, I would not take a sister's recommendation of her sister as any reliable measure of good conversation. Intelligence is rather more than a relation's partiality.”
“Come now, Darcy,” said Bingley. “Surely you are not judging the lady's intelligence before you have exchanged a single word with her.”
“I am judging the setting,” said Darcy, and his eyes did not move from Elizabeth's face. “A ballroom is hardly the setting in which one expects to discover superior conversation.”
“You have not even spoken to her. Yet you judge her entirely because she is at a ball?”
“Then let us speak plainly,” said Darcy. “She is not handsome enough to tempt me. And I find I have no inclination to discover whether anything else recommends itself.”
Elizabeth's chin lifted. Her grip on the fan tightened once, briefly, and then released.
She looked at Darcy for one moment longer, her eyes steady and her expression giving him absolutely nothing.
Then her gaze moved, just briefly, to the man standing behind him.
She held it there for the space of a breath. Then she turned and walked away.
When she was across the room, her pace unhurried, her expression giving nothing away.
She found Charlotte near the windows and said nothing of what had just passed.
Charlotte looked at her once, steadily, as if suspecting something was off, but then looked away.
She did not ask. Elizabeth did not offer.
She had resolved to think of Mr. Darcy later. Unfortunately, her mind appeared unwilling to wait.
The arrogance of the man.
The composure she had carried across the room held for precisely as long as it took her to reach Charlotte's side, and then the anger moved through her, sharp and sudden.
Her blood was up. Her hands were not entirely steady.
She drew one slow breath, and then another, and fixed her eyes on the middle distance until the worst of it passed.
He had been looking directly at her when he said it. Not past her, not through her, but at her, with the full and deliberate knowledge that she could hear every word. He had made no attempt to lower his voice.
Elizabeth decided, with a clarity that surprised even her, that she would not give him the satisfaction. So, she resolved not to think of him further that evening.
The night continued as assemblies do, with dancing, conversation, and the warmth of a pleased neighbourhood. Elizabeth danced one more set, laughed where laughter was warranted, and made a deliberate effort not to think of Mr. Darcy or his comment. She mentioned it to nobody.
By the time the evening drew to a close and the assembly began to disperse into the cool autumn night, the neighbourhood had formed its opinions of the Netherfield party. Elizabeth heard fragments as the room thinned, snatches between ladies reaching for their cloaks, gentlemen waiting at the door.
“The proud one,” someone said. “Did you see how he looked at everyone? As though we were something he had stepped in.”
And from somewhere else, closer, another person said, “…the disagreeable cripple in the corner. Never opened his mouth the whole evening. Never even tried.”
In contrast, Mr. Bingley's name was on every other tongue. The most agreeable man in the county, they said, and his evident partiality for Miss Bennet was discussed with considerable enthusiasm to Mrs. Bennet's undisguised delight.
Before they left, Elizabeth helped Lydia find her left glove, steered Kitty away from a conversation she had no business being in, and walked out into the night air with her mother's voice already resuming its analysis of Mr. Bingley's many perfections somewhere behind her.
The proud one. The disagreeable cripple in the corner.
She had heard both and could not entirely dispute either. And yet neither description felt entirely sufficient.
She did not know what to make of Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley. She knew only that he had looked directly at her when he slighted her, not carelessly, not accidentally, but with no concern for whether she heard it.
She lifted her chin slightly, there in the dark, at nobody in particular.
She would form her own opinion.
She always did.