Chapter 1 #2
“Yes, but only if you promise not to spill punch on my gloves or break my necklace,” Elizabeth agreed. “If you do, you must repair the damage.”
“You must all look well for the assembly rooms this week,” Mrs Bennet announced.
“We will go to Meryton tomorrow for ribbons, sashes, stockings and other small trinkets. Who knows who Mr Bingley might bring with him? I doubt there can be many with ￡5000 a year, but a husband with ￡3000 or even ￡2000 would do well enough for some of you.”
Her eye fell on Elizabeth as she spoke, only causing her to smile to herself.
“Is ￡2000 not enough to tempt you?” Jane whispered to her, guessing at the cause of her humour.
“If a man does not have character, mind and manners, I would not marry him for ￡2000, ￡5000 or double that amount,” Elizabeth declared. “Otherwise, I shall be an old maid and live with you, Mr Bingley, and your twelve children!”
Jane coloured but laughed.
“You cannot marry me off to someone until we have at least met him,” she protested. “I am no less fastidious than you on that point, Lizzy.”
“Ah, but you are kinder, and see all the good that is to be found in every new acquaintance,” Elizabeth pointed out. “You are far more likely to find a match in Mr Bingley or his party than I.”
“We shall see,” Jane remarked calmly, but with a certain dreaminess in her eyes. “Who knows who might be there, what we shall make of them, or what they will make of us?”
∞∞∞
When the eagerly awaited night finally came, the assembly seemed likely to justify even Mrs Bennet’s elevated hopes.
“This is the second dance they’ve danced together,” Elizabeth heard her mother telling Lady Lucas with great satisfaction as she watched the handsome, golden-haired Mr Charles Bingley lead her eldest daughter out onto the dance floor for the quadrille. “How well they look, don’t you think?”
“They look very well together indeed, Mrs Bennet,” Lady Lucas agreed. “Of course, it is commendable that he danced the first measure with Charlotte, given that we were his first acquaintances in the neighbourhood.”
“Certainly, certainly. Mr Bingley’s manners cannot be faulted. What a fine young man! So handsome and amiable. I am sure he will be a most valuable addition to the neighbourhood.”
Elizabeth and her friend Charlotte Lucas sighed in tandem on overhearing these words between their mothers and then laughed together.
“Let us not listen to this,” suggested Charlotte, taking her arm. “We can take our punch over to those chairs and watch the dancing from there. I think your mother is right this time, though. Mr Bingley has taken a definite liking to Jane, and they do make a handsome couple.”
Elizabeth had to agree. To her eyes, Jane appeared equally happy in her partner, her shy smiles rising frequently to her lips and her gaze joyful when it fell upon him.
His personality had also struck Elizabeth agreeably.
Mr Bingley seemed to have quickly made friends of half the county and had good words to say about everyone and everything he had encountered so far.
It was impossible to imagine disliking so friendly and engaging a young man.
If only the rest of his party could have been equally satisfactory, there would have been nothing more to wish for, but regrettably, it was not so.
Any hopes of a new friend in Miss Caroline Bingley were dashed in her first entrance to the assembly rooms. Elizabeth distinctly saw her lip curl before she whispered something in the ear of a tall and humourless-looking man beside her.
Behind them walked another couple, a woman as disdainful as Miss Bingley and similar in aspect, and a bleary-eyed man in a well-cut and slightly garish coat who appeared to have imbibed liberally in advance of reaching the assembly rooms’ punch bowl.
From neighbourhood intelligence, Elizabeth understood them to be Mr Bingley’s married sister and her husband, Mr and Mrs Hurst.
The elegantly dressed and coiffed Miss Bingley appeared far less satisfied with their new situation than her jolly brother. Elizabeth and Charlotte watched her again now, dancing rather joylessly with the same saturnine companion with whom she had entered.
“Mr Bingley takes pleasure in everything and his sister in nothing, I suspect,” Elizabeth murmured to Charlotte Lucas.
“We likely don’t have the wealth or rank in our circles that Miss Bingley is accustomed to,” Charlotte replied philosophically. “We all feel uncomfortable outside our own familiar groups.”
“She even looks on the orchestra with disdain!” Elizabeth laughed, as the woman did indeed look down her nose towards the players. “See! Not even the fiddler can please Miss Bingley.”
“She seems pleased enough with her partner,” Charlotte observed, her eyes on the tall, dark man.
She might have good reason for being so, for despite his rather stern expression, he was undeniably handsome, and with a tall, graceful form that would have drawn any woman’s eye.
Yet there was something lacking. “I do not think that he is so very well pleased with Miss Bingley, though,” Elizabeth had to say, watching their dancing quite critically.
Miss Bingley’s partner danced so properly and formally that it did not really seem to Elizabeth to be dancing at all in the truest sense, although he was entirely well-mannered and correct in his steps.
“With ￡10,000 a year and half of Derbyshire to his name, Mr Darcy is perhaps well pleased enough already,” Charlotte suggested. “As to a wife, he may take his pick when he chooses, I dare say, and she will be thought a lucky woman.”
“I shall not think her lucky unless Mr Darcy can be convinced to smile rather more,” Elizabeth declared with a bright laugh. She finished her punch just in time, as two of Charlotte’s younger brothers approached and begged for their hands for a reel in the next measure.
∞∞∞
“Why will you not dance, Darcy? I feel a bad friend indeed to bring you here and then leave you standing alone while I have all the fun. Yet you will not be helped, will you?”
Already familiar to their ears, Mr Bingley’s genial tones reached Elizabeth and Charlotte’s ears where they sat on the other side of the potted palms, catching their breath after the reel. Elizabeth began standing to leave, but Charlotte pulled her back and put a finger to her lips.
“I do not see why my disinclination to dance should affect your evening, Bingley. I have already danced a measure with your sister after your earlier complaints and thought I had done my duty to the company.”
Elizabeth pulled a droll face at this rather miserable speech, which seemed to confirm the spirit — or lack thereof — she had seen in his dancing.
“I dare say you have, but most of us dance for pleasure, not duty. Surely there must be some young woman here who might tempt you for the next dance, although I have already claimed the sweetest.”
Hearing this, the two young women smiled at one another, sharing the same early but promising hopes for Jane’s future happiness.
“Go and enjoy Miss Bennet’s smiles, Bingley,” Mr Darcy replied wearily. “This entertainment is not for me.”
“Miss Bennet’s sister Elizabeth is a pretty, lively girl, is she not?” suggested Mr Bingley, not yet giving up the fight. “She seemed not to have a partner for the next dance when I saw her a minute ago.”
Elizabeth’s eyes opened wide at this suggestion, and she shook her head in alarm at the idea of having to dance with Mr Darcy, much to Charlotte’s amusement.
“No, Bingley. Miss Elizabeth Bennet is not for me, no more than any of the other unexceptional young women of Hertfordshire who cannot find a partner for the dance.”
Charlotte’s amusement faded on hearing this insult to her friend, but Elizabeth smiled reassuringly at her. While Mr Darcy’s remarks stung her pride, the relief of not having to dance with so haughty and self-satisfied a man outweighed such a minor offence.
“You act as though the entire company were beneath you, Darcy,” scolded his friend.
“How else should I act in this place?” replied Mr Darcy rather blankly, as though he found Mr Bingley’s remark confusing. “I cannot pretend that I am someone else, or that my station in life is other than it is.”
“You are impossible, Darcy. I leave you to your own devices and go to seek more genial company,” Mr Bingley finally declared. “You will find me on the dance floor.”
As the two men parted company and walked away in different directions, Elizabeth and Charlotte both let out explosive noises of astonishment.
“Can you believe the arrogance of that man?” Elizabeth gasped. “He really does consider the whole of Hertfordshire beneath him, doesn’t he?”
“With ￡10,000 a year, half of Derbyshire and the Darcy name, I dare say that many would agree,” Charlotte replied with a sigh. “However, I cannot so easily excuse his personal insults to you, Lizzy. That was most ungentlemanly of him.”
“I do not care if Mr Darcy declines to dance with me, whatever his grounds,” Elizabeth reassured her. “Even if he had not insulted me, I should not have cared to dance with a man who seems to have a much greater sense of pride than sense of fun, and more consciousness of rank than manners.”
“Mr Darcy? It is no great thing to be dismissed by Mr Darcy,” Lydia abruptly cut in, as unthinking and unmodulated as ever, and as regardless of company or propriety of conversation. “I heard earlier this evening that he may not even have been his father’s natural son!”
“Lydia!” Elizabeth rebuked her, while Charlotte looked away with an embarrassed expression on behalf of her friend. “You ought not to be repeating such appalling and unseemly gossip. It reflects more badly on you than anyone it is supposed to concern.”
“I was only trying to make you feel better when I heard you say he wouldn’t dance with you,” her youngest sister justified herself sulkily, sipping from a large cup of punch. “It is not my fault that what Mary King told me she heard in London is unseemly.”
Pouting, Lydia turned from Elizabeth with her nose in the air and walked back towards the refreshment tables to refresh her punch.
“You are lucky in the character of Maria,” Elizabeth told Charlotte when Lydia was gone. “Lydia has no sense of propriety and ought not to be let out in public by my parents without their fullest supervision.”
“You have Jane,” her friend comforted her.
“The others may grow wiser in time. But what a thing for Lydia to say, and without any care for all the ears around us! She was correct in one thing, though. The original fault stems from Mary King for bringing that tale of Mr Darcy from London to Meryton, although that does not exonerate anyone who passes it on.”
Elizabeth nodded her agreement. Yet the question could not be so easily dismissed. She weighed whether to say anything more, before at last deciding for candour. “Do you think it could be true?” Elizabeth asked at last, her voice carefully too low to be overheard.
Charlotte’s plain but pleasant features grew philosophical once more.
“I think it does not matter. If Mr Darcy was born in wedlock and acknowledged as his father’s son, people might say what they want of him.
He would still be master of Pemberley under English law.
Likely, many great men have not had the father they supposed.
Mr Darcy would not be the first. In any case, it is no business of ours. ”
“No, you are quite right,” Elizabeth said, her brow smoothing again as she thought over these sensible words. “It is no business of ours at all.”
“Listen, there is going to be a hornpipe! Let’s dance again and forget all this tiresome nonsense over Mr Darcy.”
“Your brothers are already engaged, Charlotte. We will have to partner each other.”
“That is no great hardship.”
The two friends spoke with laughter rather than any real sorrow over the scarcity of dance partners. Linking arms, they turned towards the music and were soon in the thick of the jigging couples already on the dance floor.
“Wouldn’t life be simpler if we always danced with one another and our sisters and did not waste so much time waiting for men at these events?” suggested Charlotte with great good humour as they danced.
“Yes. Nor is it entirely bad that men are so thin on the ground here tonight,” Elizabeth answered her in kind. “At least it means that my mother’s matchmaking can only be limited to Jane tonight, and I doubt she objects when my mother’s target is so personable and agreeable to her.”
“You should not like to dance a hornpipe with Mr Darcy, then?” suggested Charlotte, and both women fell about in laughter at the very thought of that tall, proud form engaging in anything so undignified as a hornpipe.
“I should be grateful that Mr Darcy will never ask me to dance,” Elizabeth answered. “Nor any lady of insufficient title and fortune. Now, let us not spoil our fun with any further talk of unsatisfactory men!”