Chapter 8
Mr. Darcy
Longbourn's drawing room contained too many chairs and not nearly enough silence.
Mrs. Bennet supplied whatever the room lacked in noise.
She praised Netherfield, Bingley, Jane's recovery, and the prospect of a ball, sometimes all four in a single breath.
Lydia asked whether the militia would be invited.
Kitty repeated the question, a beat behind as usual.
Mary began explaining, unprompted, why dancing encouraged vanity in young persons.
Elizabeth sat near Jane. The green of her gown made her eyes look darker than usual. Darcy knew this because he had looked too often, and looked away too late every time. Mr. Bennet, watching from behind his newspaper, seemed to know it too.
"Mr. Darcy," he said, "you have seen more of great houses than we have here. Does conversation improve with the size of the room?"
"No, sir. It merely travels farther."
Mr. Bennet's mouth shifted at one corner.
Elizabeth looked down at her lap to hide a smile she was not quite fast enough to catch.
Mrs. Bennet did not hear any of it. She was telling Bingley that Jane had never looked better in her life, except perhaps at fifteen, when a young gentleman had written verses upon her complexion.
Bingley listened as though she were describing the movement of armies. Utterly rapt.
Darcy had intended to speak with Elizabeth alone. Intention had come easily enough at Netherfield, where rooms multiplied and servants opened quiet routes between them without being asked. At Longbourn, every attempt seemed to come with an audience of at least four.
McKeever had offered no assistance before their departure that morning. Quite the opposite. He had handed Darcy his gloves with something close to a warning. "Longbourn has five daughters, sir. Privacy is unlikely."
The observation was accurate, and entirely useless.
After tea, Lydia demanded a walk. Mrs. Bennet objected to Jane going out but approved, with startling speed, of everyone else escorting her two youngest daughters instead.
Mary remained behind with a book she seemed to be reading mostly for the pleasure of being seen doing so.
Jane and Bingley settled near the fire under the thin pretence of discussing her health.
Darcy joined the walking party with something close to relief.
Elizabeth took the lane beside Kitty. Lydia ranged ahead, swinging her bonnet by its ribbons.
Mr. Bennet followed for a short distance, then announced that exercise had fulfilled its promise for the day and turned back towards the house.
Darcy waited until the younger girls had hurried on towards a stile, well out of earshot.
"Did you finish the Cowper?" he asked.
"I did. Your servants' list was severe, but useful."
"McKeever disclaims all authorship of the comments."
"Then Sarah has adopted his hand for half the page, which strikes me as unlikely."
"I shall investigate."
"Do not. Their conspiracy is far more entertaining while imperfectly understood."
The word conspiracy carried no anger in it now.
None at all, where once it would have. They walked on behind Kitty and Lydia.
The lane was public, the afternoon clear, Longbourn still visible through the hedge behind them.
Darcy could have named every protection the situation offered.
None of it stopped his pulse from picking up.
"I came because you permitted it."
Elizabeth glanced at him sideways. "I understood that already."
"I did not want you thinking Bingley had dragged me here against my will."
"Could he have?"
"No."
"Then the question rather answers itself, does it not."
Darcy accepted the correction with something like a smile. "May I ask whether my company is unwelcome?"
"You may ask."
He waited, heart doing something foolish.
"It is not unwelcome."
The lane seemed, absurdly, to widen around them.
Lydia called out from the stile. A mounted officer approached from the direction of Meryton. Darcy recognised Denny and braced himself for a conversation about the weather.
Another man rode just behind him.
Wickham.
Darcy stopped dead.
Ramsgate came back in a single cold rush. Georgiana's frightened face. Wickham's easy assurance that no harm had ever been intended by any of it. Darcy had not expected, not for one moment, to see that face again in Hertfordshire of all places.
Wickham saw him too. Surprise disturbed his smile for less than a second before it smoothed itself back into place, practised as breathing. Elizabeth noticed both. The recognition and the recovery.
"Mr. Darcy?"
"The gentleman with Lieutenant Denny is known to me." His voice came out flatter than he had intended.
"Not favourably, I think."
Darcy looked at her. She had read the whole truth off his face in a matter of seconds. Sarah's opinion of her mistress's powers of observation, he thought, has been, if anything, too modest.
The officers reached them. Denny greeted the ladies with easy good humour. Wickham bowed with perfect, practised grace.
"Darcy," he said.
"Wickham." The single word came out clipped, and Darcy did not much care that it showed.
Kitty and Lydia stared between the two men, delighted by a tension they could not begin to understand.
Wickham turned his charm on Elizabeth. "I have not yet had the honour."
"Mr. Wickham, Miss Elizabeth Bennet," Denny said, and introductions followed all round.
Darcy held his ground. He would not abandon Elizabeth to a man whose charm worked fastest, and best, in the absence of contradiction.
Wickham spoke of his recent commission, granted through Colonel Forster's recommendation, and declared that the country promised very agreeable society indeed. His manner invited confidence the way an open door invites a draught. Elizabeth offered only a civil reply, and nothing more.
When the officers rode on at last, Lydia declared Wickham the handsomest man she had ever laid eyes on in her life. Kitty agreed at once, with one unnamed exception she refused, giggling, to reveal.
Elizabeth resumed walking. "You stayed."
"I did."
"You wanted to leave."
"Very much so."
"Why did you not?"
Darcy looked towards the road where Wickham had already disappeared, dust still hanging in the air. He could not tell her Georgiana's history. Not here. Not like this. He would not, however, let silence curdle into something like a lie.
"Because his manners conceal a character I have good reason to distrust. I cannot give you another person's private history. But I can tell you plainly that I would not place my own sister's welfare in his hands — not for a single afternoon."
Elizabeth's expression sharpened, all trace of teasing gone. "That is serious."
"Yes."
"Will you tell Mr. Bingley?"
"He already knows enough to be cautious. I shall tell Mr. Bennet that Wickham is not a man to whom young women should be entrusted — though I cannot demand belief without proof I am free to share, and that troubles me more than I would like."
"My father will listen to you."
"Will you?"
She took several steps before she answered, her eyes on the lane ahead. "I will remember what you have said. And what you have refused to say."
It was not blind faith. Darcy found he valued it a great deal more than blind faith would ever have been worth.
At the stile, Lydia complained that they had missed the officers' invitation to walk into Meryton. Elizabeth sent her home with Kitty, and for once they obeyed without a fight. Elizabeth suspected it was only because Darcy stood beside her, silent and immovable as a stone wall.
"You have frightened them."
"I said nothing at all."
"Your silence has rank, apparently."
"I should apologise for it, then."
"Do not. It saved us all a good ten minutes of argument."
They returned to Longbourn together. Mr. Bennet received Darcy in the library while Mrs. Bennet protested, from somewhere down the hall, that gentlemen did not generally call in order to discuss other gentlemen.
Darcy gave a carefully restricted warning.
He stated that Wickham had once attempted to obtain money through deceit, and that he, Darcy, would not trust the man anywhere near Georgiana.
He did not reveal the elopement that had nearly followed.
Mr. Bennet listened without a trace of his usual amusement.
"You understand, sir, that I cannot repeat further details," Darcy said.
"I understand that a man may protect his sister without supplying entertainment to the whole of Hertfordshire in the bargain. I shall keep my daughters from any private excursions with him. Public acquaintance is rather harder to prevent, as you might imagine, in a neighbourhood this size."
"That is all I ask."
"No, Mr. Darcy. It is all you may reasonably ask. There is a difference, and I would advise you to remember it."
Elizabeth's phrasing exactly, Darcy thought, and wondered, not for the first time, whether she had learned it from her father, or he from her, or whether the two of them had simply always thought alike without needing to compare notes.
As Darcy left the library, he heard Lydia arguing about some assembly in Meryton down the passage. Mr. Bennet's voice ended the dispute outright. A single flat sentence. The warning had already changed something in the house, quietly and at once.
Elizabeth waited for him in the hall.
"Thank you."
"For distrusting a man on your account?"
"For giving my father what you could, without using your own sister's privacy to make yourself more convincing. That would have been the easier path, and you did not take it."
Darcy had not expected her to understand the cost of that so precisely. She had named it, without being told.
Bingley emerged from the drawing room wearing the expression of a man who had been promised happiness but not yet told the date of its arrival.
"We should go," Bingley proposed, without any real conviction behind it.
Mrs. Bennet insisted, at considerable volume, that they stay to dinner. Darcy looked at Elizabeth.
"Will you remain?" she asked quietly.
He did.