Chapter 6 #2
"That honesty should offend me. It does not."
Darcy took a breath before he spoke, feeling the weight of what he was about to admit. "I once made their faults an excuse for my own pride. That was neither honest nor fair of me."
Elizabeth's fingers touched the empty place at her shoulder where her shawl would have rested. "You improve quickly, when you are corrected."
"I have received excellent correction."
The colour at her cheeks now had nothing whatsoever to do with embarrassment.
That evening, Jane came downstairs for half an hour. Mrs. Nicholls arranged a sofa near the fire and set a screen against the draught. Bingley carried a footstool from one side of the room to the other, and then back again, until Jane told him exactly where she wanted it.
"There."
He set it down. "Are you certain?"
"Entirely."
"It may be too near the fire."
"Charles," Caroline said, with the weary patience of a woman explaining the obvious to a child, "Miss Bennet has answered you."
Bingley sat, chastened for perhaps four seconds. Jane looked pleased by the fuss rather than oppressed by it. Darcy noted the difference. Solicitude stopped being kind, he thought, the moment it refused to accept an answer.
Elizabeth chose a chair beside her sister.
Sarah laid the blue shawl across Jane's knees, then left with the empty tray.
McKeever passed her in the hall carrying letters.
Neither of them so much as paused. Their restraint had become, Darcy thought, nearly as noticeable as their interference ever was.
Caroline had watched Sarah place the shawl. Her gaze rested a beat too long on the bright blue fringe. Unmistakable, even across a room, even to someone who had every reason not to notice it.
Mrs. Hurst proposed music. Caroline played with exact accomplishment and continued rather longer than the company strictly required. When she finished, Bingley applauded with generous relief.
"Miss Elizabeth," Darcy said, "do you play?"
"Poorly enough to give others confidence."
"That is a social gift."
"Miss Eliza undervalues herself," Caroline said. "She played at Lucas Lodge, if I recall."
"You remember every failure but your own," Elizabeth said.
Jane touched her arm. Elizabeth had gone a step too far, and knew it the moment the words left her mouth. Caroline's face tightened like a fist.
Darcy could defend Elizabeth and turn the whole exchange into a contest. Or he could move the room somewhere else.
"Bingley," he said, "you promised to show Miss Bennet the miniature of your mother."
"I did. It is in the cabinet." Bingley, grateful for something to do, went to fetch it.
Jane admired the likeness. Caroline supplied the date and the artist's name, unable to resist the chance to be useful and correct at once. The tension in the room loosened by degrees.
Elizabeth looked at Darcy. "Another diversion."
"Kindness, I hope."
"Both, more likely."
He accepted the answer without argument.
Later, while Jane and Bingley examined the miniature together, Elizabeth moved to the book table. Darcy joined her, staying within easy sight of the rest of the room.
"You did not agree with me when I was unkind."
"No."
"You did not correct me in front of everyone."
"You had already corrected yourself."
"Jane corrected me."
"You listened."
Elizabeth turned a small volume over in her hands, not really reading its title. "Do you always observe so closely?"
"Only when affection makes accuracy unavoidable."
The sentence escaped before Darcy could call it back. Elizabeth looked up. He could have withdrawn it. He chose not to.
"I told you yesterday that the storm did not create my admiration. I meant it."
Her thumb stilled on the book's spine. "I believe you."
"That is more than I had."
"Do not spend it carelessly."
"I shall not."
Across the room, Jane laughed at something Bingley said. Caroline glanced towards them, then towards Darcy and Elizabeth, and her face looked, briefly, lonely. If it was, Darcy thought, the loneliness was partly of her own making. That did not make it any less real to watch.
Elizabeth followed his gaze. "She will not forgive this easily."
"I have asked for fairness, not forgiveness."
"And if she refuses even that?"
"Then Bingley and I will deal with what she does. You will not be asked to carry it."
Elizabeth studied him, unhurried, measuring what she found. "You are learning."
"Painfully."
"That is often how learning becomes memorable."
Jane tired soon after. Bingley rang for the maid before she had even admitted it aloud. Sarah arrived with the medicine tray. Darcy watched Elizabeth rise to support her sister, and watched Bingley step back the instant Jane asked for room to stand.
Love, he thought, might be less a grand gesture than a series of correct distances kept.
He had spent years mistaking distance itself for virtue. It was a strange thing to unlearn.
Bingley came down the stairs a little later with the news that Jane might return to Longbourn tomorrow. Elizabeth smiled at that. Then she looked back at Darcy, and the smile changed into something harder to name.
Tomorrow. He had one night in which to work out how a single departure could come to matter so very much. He had not expected her leaving to feel like a loss. Expectation, he was beginning to suspect, had become entirely useless where Elizabeth Bennet was concerned.
McKeever entered behind Bingley, carrying the repaired shawl. He handed it to Sarah, who had followed with Jane's medicine tray. The transfer was ordinary, witnessed, and entirely exact. Nothing hidden in it at all.
Darcy understood the message perfectly well.
If he wished to see Elizabeth again, no servant would arrange it for him this time.
He would have to go to Longbourn himself.