Chapter Nine
“You’re leaving?” Bingley caught up to me in the stables.
I was in the midst of negotiating having my trunk taken in a carriage, along with my valet, but I was going to ride on ahead myself. Now that I was decided, I wanted to be on my way immediately.
I turned to him, apologetic. “Yes, I am sorry for leaving without any notice, but I left you a letter—”
“I see that.” He waved it at me. His eyes were flashing.
I furrowed my brow. “You’re in a bit of a state.”
He chuckled sardonically under his breath and turned around and stalked right out of the stables.
I was startled. He rarely behaved that way, but then I thought it through. Bingley was not one for confrontations. He never had been. Why, it had been months of myself and his sister insulting him to his face, and he simply took it, always.
I took a deep breath and went after him.
He was ahead of me, walking back to the house, the November air whipping coldly against the both of us.
I caught up to him, hunching into my jacket. “I have treated you ill, I think,” I said.
He glanced at me sharply.
“I do not have much to say for myself. It has very little to do with you, truly. Something happened this summer before I met you. It involved that man who was loitering about in Meryton, the one who gave me that awful grin—”
“Oh, it was him,” interrupted Bingley, halting his movement to look at me. “I wondered about that. He is with the regiment, I understand. An officer taking over someone’s commission.”
I stopped walking too, but it was cold, and I did not wish to explain that entire situation to Bingley.
It was not that I did not trust him, not exactly.
However, I could not go around telling my personal business to everyone.
It was quite mad I’d confessed it all to Elizabeth Bennet, now that I thought about it.
She had promised not to tell anyone, but did I believe her?
“I cannot go into all the particulars, I am afraid, but know that I am sorry for, well, a number of things, the way I have latched onto you and followed you all over, and the way I have spoken to you on occasion, and the way I have, perhaps wrongly, assumed your intentions have been untoward, when it has been my own.”
He was confused. “What are you going on about?”
“Nothing,” I said with a sigh. “No, never mind all of this. I shall be going, though, and I shan’t be your concern any longer.”
He wavered for a moment. “If you don’t mind, Darcy—” Then, he broke off and shook his head. “No, no. What am I saying? Off with you, then, I suppose. What else am I to say?” He sighed.
I furrowed my brow. “Do you have something you wish to say?”
He jammed his hands into the pockets of his trousers and looked at the ground and shook his head.
“You clearly do,” I said. “Well, not out here. Let us go in to your study and talk.”
“I would not wish to inconvenience your hasty exit,” he said, a bit of heat to his tone.
“Is it involved, what you have to say?”
He sighed again. “Never mind it. You will go. We shall no longer be each other’s concern. None of this will be your concern. You can gallop off and leave everyone to pick up the pieces. It is what men like you do, I suppose.”
“Men like me?” I said. “No, let us talk. If we have things to say, let us have them out. If it festers, it will only turn everything sour.”
He considered and then gave me a curt nod.
We went back inside and went together to his study.
He sat down in front of the fire, and I sat down, too. Now, I felt a bit apprehensive. I had never seen Bingley upset before, I had to say.
But he didn’t say anything. He poured himself some brandy, and he offered me some, and I didn’t think I should be riding horseback after drinking brandy, but perhaps I was going to have to put off my departure until the morning, and so I acquiesced.
Then, we sipped and stared into the fire, and he was still silent.
“What have I done?” I finally said. “Is this about your sister, about Miss Bingley?”
He turned to me. “No. Why, is there something I need to know about that?”
“I don’t think so. She spoke to me earlier, and…” I cleared my throat. “You are agitated about something.”
“I’m agitated,” he scoffed. “What about you, running off in a hurry, to leave everything behind?”
“Bingley, if you have nothing to say, then why are we seated here together?”
“I don’t suppose it will matter,” he said.
“But what you have done to that family, I do not think you have any sense of it. And perhaps it does not matter at all, and perhaps Miss Elizabeth was going to get herself into some scrape or other anyway, running about with her skirts six inches caked in mud, but Miss Bennet, Miss Jane, she does not deserve it, and neither do the rest of them, I have to say. No matter what they are, they are all quite agreeable, and you have done them a bad turn.”
“What are you talking about?” I said. “What bad turn?”
“Well, they are all ruined, are they not?” he said. “That Collins had come to marry one of the sisters, but now he has heard the rumors, and he will inherit Longbourn after Mr. Bennet’s passing—”
“Wait, that man is Mr. Bennet’s heir?” I said.
“Aye,” said Bingley. “He sent a letter ahead of himself, saying that he intended to make the Bennet sisters ‘every possible amends’ or something of that nature. He clearly intended to marry one of them, but he has not done so, not since hearing all about Miss Bennet’s situation.”
“I suppose the story he heard is that she and I left for Gretna Green, and then I brought her back and jilted her after she sprained her ankle,” I muttered.
“Quite,” said Bingley. “And you know the way of these things. Even if someone protests and tells him the correct story, he thinks they are lying to cover up the ignominy of the first.”
“Indeed,” I said with a sigh.
“So, you hadn’t thought of what that does to the Bennet family,” said Bingley. “You had not thought of it at all.”
“What does it do to them exactly?”
“Oh, Darcy, do not be daft, you know. I have been asked, more than once, if I intend to invite them to my ball, with the indication being that people with such loose morals should not be included. They all say it would be one thing if the Bennets would turn Elizabeth out from under their roof—”
“She cannot walk. Her ankle is badly sprained!” I broke in, horrified at the suggestion.
“Well, her reputation is now a stain on the entire family’s.”
“But she’s done nothing wrong,” I said. “That story is all nonsense.” I shook my head.
“It’s awful what’s become of it, but the gossip is not my fault, not at all.
You all leaped to conclusions and spread spurious tales about me, and I can’t see why you would have thought that about me in the first place. ”
“Oh, so it’s my fault.”
“It’s no one’s fault,” I said. “But you are going on as if it is mine. You said I had done them a bad turn. I did nothing except try to keep a young woman from walking alone in the woods, that is all!”
Bingley was quiet.
I downed my brandy. “This has gotten us nowhere. I think there is still time if I set out on horseback—”
“Perhaps it’s not your fault, but you could do something about it.”
I was not certain that Bingley had ever interrupted me. If he had, he had not done it with such quiet conviction. I gazed at him, hardly recognizing him. “What could I do?”
“You could marry her,” said Bingley.
I set down the brandy glass and simply gaped at him in disbelief.
“Oh, come now, Darcy, you have compromised her. Not in truth, I suppose, but in effect. And you do like her. Everyone knows that. You made that no secret.”
“Now, see here, you must understand, the thing that I said to Caroline—”
“Oh, hang what you said to Caroline about the Elizabeth Room. I am talking about how you refused to dance with her and how you have been pointedly gruff with her, and—”
“None of those things mean I like her.”
Bingley glared at me. “You are going to deny it, then?”
I sighed. “No, all right. I have… she is pretty. She is spirited. She is…” I trailed off. “I cannot marry her. I’m betrothed.”
“You’re always saying that betrothal isn’t binding.”
“Yes, but it’s expected of me. I do what it is expected of me. I always have.”
“So, then, what becomes of the Bennets?” said Bingley.
“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “Perhaps I could give them some money.”
He laughed, a bitter sort of laugh. “That is exactly what you would say, I suppose.”
“Why is this your battle to fight?” I said to him. “What is the Bennet family to you?”
“I want to marry the eldest, obviously,” he said.
I tilted my head at him. “You are not serious.”
“Obviously, I am quite serious. She is beautiful and sweet, and I think of her constantly, and I wish she had been stuck under my roof for weeks on end. I should like her, in fact, to be always under my roof, and I—”
“You cannot marry that sort of a girl, Bingley!” I cried.
“Why can’t I marry her?” said Bingley. “I’m aware she has little fortune, but she is the daughter of a gentleman, which confers some respect upon me, and I am not in need of money.”
Yes, perhaps he was right about that. Perhaps he need not follow the same sort of strictures as I must follow.
“I don’t think she fancies you,” I said.
“I think she’s been thrust at you by her mother, who was very obvious about the fact she wants to marry her daughters to men of consequence, and you are nothing but a coin purse to the mother, who is manipulating the daughter to put her in your way. ”
Bingley’s lips parted. He bowed his head.
“Apologies,” I said. “I would not have put it so baldly, truly, but I am a bit out of sorts.”
“That is not true,” said Bingley.
“I have observed the eldest Miss Bennet, and she does not seem to pay especial attention to you, Bingley. She danced with you, yes, but what woman would not dance with you? You know it is considered impolite to refuse.”
“You really think she is being forced into it by her mother.”