Chapter 8 #2
Dinner at Longbourn tested his intentions rather more thoroughly than a proposal ever had.
Mrs. Bennet placed Darcy beside Elizabeth and Bingley beside Jane with such visible, gleeful design that a less determined man might well have changed seats out of pure self-preservation.
Mary sat opposite Darcy and asked whether the management of a large estate distracted a man from proper contemplation.
Lydia described every officer at Meryton in exhaustive detail except Wickham, whose absence from the guest list had already, somehow, become a grievance of the first order.
Mr. Bennet observed the table from one end, saying little.
Mrs. Bennet commanded it from the other, saying rather a great deal.
"Mr. Darcy," Mary said, with the air of a woman preparing for battle, "do you believe wealth increases moral responsibility?"
"Yes."
Mary had prepared for argument. Agreement forced her to regroup. "Then a rich man who wastes his time is worse than a poor one who does the same?"
"If the time belongs only to himself, perhaps not. If others depend upon his attention, then yes — considerably worse."
Elizabeth looked at him with open curiosity. "You speak like a man who has recently received letters from a steward."
"Three this week alone. One concerned a broken mill wheel."
"Did contemplation repair it?" Mary asked, entirely serious.
"No. A millwright did, eventually, and charged rather more than contemplation would have."
Kitty laughed at that. Mary did not. She accepted the answer with a small, thoughtful nod, as though filing it away for later.
The conversation moved on to books. Mr. Bennet asked Darcy whether Pemberley's library justified its considerable reputation.
Darcy admitted that it held several thousand volumes, and that a fair number had been purchased by generations more interested in fine bindings than in the thoughts bound inside them.
"Then you possess poor books as well as good ones."
"I have never once claimed perfection, sir."
"You claimed excellent judgement, at the assembly."
The table went quiet for one dangerous moment.
Darcy set down his glass, carefully. "My conduct at the assembly was poor evidence of any judgement at all, I am afraid."
Mr. Bennet's eyes sharpened with real interest. Mrs. Bennet had not heard a word of it.
Lydia had, but the subject contained no officers whatsoever and lost her within a sentence.
Elizabeth's teasing expression faded. Darcy had answered without any defence at all, and the honesty of it seemed to catch even him off guard.
"Then we shall strike that evening from the catalogue entirely."
"No. Keep it in. A corrected judgement still requires the original error to correct." And I would not, given the choice, erase a single part of what brought me to this table tonight, however badly it began.
Elizabeth's fingers found the repaired fringe at her shoulder. Her expression softened as she touched the visible new silk.
After dinner, Mary played at the pianoforte with great seriousness. Kitty and Lydia bullied Bingley into a card game he seemed happy enough to lose. Jane watched him lose with open tenderness. Mr. Bennet withdrew to the library and left the door standing open behind him. An invitation, of sorts.
Elizabeth stood at the side table, sorting through a stack of engravings. Darcy joined her there.
"You warned my father. He has already refused Lydia permission to walk into Meryton alone."
"I am relieved to hear it."
Elizabeth set one engraving aside and picked up another without really looking at it. "She will blame you the moment she works out why. Your courage in the face of sixteen-year-old girls is truly admirable, Mr. Darcy."
"I have survived Georgiana at sixteen. I consider myself hardened."
"You speak of her rarely."
Darcy looked down at the engraving in his hand. A landscape, unremarkable, that he was not seeing. "She is shy. I have learned to guard her privacy perhaps too closely."
"Too closely?"
"Sometimes protection becomes silence. And silence leaves other people free to invent whatever it is hiding." As I have learned, more than once, at considerable cost.
Elizabeth understood, he could see, that he spoke of Wickham, and of the pavilion, and perhaps of himself as well.
"Will I meet her one day?" she asked.
The question surprised them both in equal measure.
"I hope so."
No promise followed it. It was far too early yet for promises. The hope alone was enough, for now.
When Darcy and Bingley finally took their leave, Mrs. Bennet praised Bingley for a full ten minutes and Darcy for five, as though keeping careful score. Elizabeth escaped the room before the proportions could shift any further in his favour.
In the carriage home, Bingley said nothing at all until Longbourn had vanished behind the hedge.
"You like them."
"Some of them."
"You stayed to dinner."
"So did you."
"I am in love." Bingley said it simply, as though remarking on the weather.
Darcy looked out at the dark road unwinding ahead of them. "Yes."
"That was not a denial."
"No."
Bingley's satisfaction filled the whole carriage like warmth from a stove. Darcy let it sit there, unchallenged, and found he did not mind it in the least.
Back at Netherfield that night, McKeever took Darcy's coat with his usual quiet efficiency.
"Longbourn was agreeable, sir?"
"Yes."
"Sarah will be pleased to hear it."
Darcy turned to face him directly. "And precisely how will Sarah come to hear of my visit?"
McKeever folded the coat over his arm without so much as a flicker. "Mr. Bingley will have told half the household before breakfast tomorrow, sir. He generally does."
"And the other half?"
"Miss Bingley already knows, sir."
From the corridor came Caroline's voice, low and furious, speaking to Louisa about an invitation list and a certain woman who badly needed to be taught her place.
McKeever heard it too. His hands went still over the coat for just a moment. Darcy looked towards the door.
Elizabeth had given him reason enough to return to Longbourn. Caroline, it seemed, had given herself every reason to interfere.
One of those prospects pleased him a great deal. The other, for the first time in a long while, no longer frightened him at all.
Before sleeping, Darcy wrote to Georgiana that Wickham was in Hertfordshire and asked what, if anything, she permitted him to disclose if a general warning proved insufficient.