Chapter 10
Mr. Darcy
By noon, every hand at Netherfield was labouring towards the ball. The house had taken on the particular chaos of an army preparing for a battle nobody had explained to it.
Footmen hauled chairs from room to room as though the furniture itself could not decide where it wanted to be.
Maids carried candles in armfuls. The cook, somewhere below stairs, objected to the fishmonger's timing and to the musicians' supper arrangements.
She objected with real feeling to a kitchen boy who had somehow misplaced two entire lemons between the larder and the kitchen table, a distance of perhaps twelve feet.
Bingley crossed the hall six times in an hour and improved nothing whatsoever by any of it.
Darcy stayed in his room until McKeever brought him something worth hearing. McKeever came in without preamble, which was itself a sign of how serious the matter was. The man usually managed at least one remark about the weather first. "Sarah overheard Miss Bingley speaking with Mrs. Hurst, sir."
Darcy set down his razor. "Where?"
"Miss Bingley's dressing room. Sarah was clearing the adjoining closet on Mrs. Nicholls's orders. The door was not fully shut."
"What did she hear?"
McKeever's distaste showed itself in nothing more than the exaggerated care with which he folded a towel.
A man expressing an entire opinion through linen.
"Miss Bingley means to take Miss Elizabeth's blue shawl from the ladies' retiring room, sir, after the opening pair.
She will wear it into the east saloon. Her maid is to bring you a message that a lady in blue requests a private word.
Mrs. Hurst is then to bring Mr. Bingley along to discover you together. "
Darcy stared at him. The scheme was crude. It was also, he understood at once, dangerous. Candlelight, a borrowed garment, a story told and retold could outlive whatever denials came after it.
"Why the shawl?"
"Miss Bingley believes it will suggest you expected Miss Elizabeth herself, sir. Her maid overheard her say she would deny giving any order at all."
"And Bingley is meant to force an offer out of me?"
"Mrs. Hurst was of the opinion you could hardly refuse without making her sister a laughingstock before the whole household."
Darcy looked towards the door, jaw tight.
Caroline's desperation had moved well past flirtation and into something darker.
He had let her pursuit run on for months, dismissing it as vanity because dismissing it cost him nothing.
Elizabeth had already paid once for his inattention. I will not let her pay for it twice.
"Does Sarah still have the shawl in her keeping?"
"It is at Longbourn, sir. Miss Elizabeth will bring it with her cloak tonight. Sarah has been assigned to the retiring room."
"Convenient."
McKeever met his eyes with something almost like a smile trying not to happen. "Mrs. Nicholls made the assignment this morning, sir. Sarah asked for it herself, once she had heard the plan."
"That is rather less convenient, then. It is a risk to her position."
"She knows it, sir."
Darcy rinsed the razor, watching the water run pink with lather down the basin. "Tell Sarah she is not to confront Miss Bingley under any circumstance. If the shawl disappears, she informs Mrs. Nicholls. You bring any message straight to me."
"Yes, sir."
Sarah was waiting in the passage outside.
Darcy called her in. She stood just past the threshold, her hands still at her sides.
It was the stillness, Darcy was beginning to recognise, of a woman working very hard to appear calmer than she felt.
"I saw her hold a length of blue silk against her gown, sir. She has matched the colour exact."
So Caroline had not merely planned a deception. She had rehearsed its appearance in front of a mirror.
"I will tell Bingley now."
McKeever hesitated. It was an unusual enough event that Darcy looked up. "Sarah asked that Miss Elizabeth not be told before the ball, sir. She feared Miss Elizabeth might stay home rather than make difficulty for Mr. Bingley on his own evening."
"Sarah does not decide what Elizabeth has a right to know," Darcy said, more sharply than he had intended.
"No, sir."
Darcy stood. He understood the maid's reasoning well enough. He even sympathised with it. But understanding it did not grant her the authority to act on it.
"If the shawl leaves the press, Sarah tells Miss Elizabeth at once. Before that happens, there is nothing but an overheard intention that may never become an act."
"Very good, sir."
"And McKeever."
"Sir?"
"Thank her."
His valet bowed, and something in the set of his shoulders as he straightened suggested the thanks had landed exactly where it was meant to.
Bingley was in the ballroom directing the placement of a row of orange trees he had somehow arranged in a straight line across half the windows, as though he meant to plant a hedge indoors.
"They ought to go in the corners," Darcy said.
"Nicholls said as much. I wanted a second opinion."
"You wanted permission."
"That too," Bingley admitted, entirely unashamed.
The footmen moved the trees.
Darcy drew Bingley into the card room and left the door standing open. It was a small propriety, and one that felt, under the circumstances, worth preserving. He gave the account without softening any of it.
Bingley's face went from disbelief straight through to hurt, with no stop in between. "Caroline would not."
"Sarah heard her."
"A maid may have misunderstood."
"McKeever questioned her closely, Bingley. She repeated the order back word for word — the blue shawl, the east saloon, Louisa's part in it."
Bingley crossed to the window and stood there a moment, his back to the room. "Caroline knows you do not wish to marry her."
"She believes public embarrassment might change my wishes."
"It will not."
"No."
"Then what on earth do we do?" Bingley's voice had none of its usual cheer left in it.
Darcy had turned over three possible courses on the way downstairs.
Confronting Caroline before the ball would only let her deny everything outright and take her anger out on Sarah afterwards.
Ignoring the plan left Elizabeth's shawl in danger, and Elizabeth's name with it.
Cancelling the ball outright would injure Bingley and feed the very gossip they were trying to prevent.
"We proceed as planned. Sarah watches the shawl. McKeever brings me any message. If Caroline enters the east saloon, you and I go together."
"Why let her begin at all?"
"Because she will deny the intention the moment she is asked. She cannot so easily disown an act you have witnessed with your own eyes."
Bingley's reluctance was plain in every line of him. "I do not like laying a trap for my own sister."
"We are laying none. We are only stopping hers. She may abandon it at any point between now and the opening pair."
"And if she does not?"
"Then you decide what follows, in your own house."
Bingley scrubbed a hand hard over his face. "I will send her to Louisa's, in Scarborough. They had meant to travel there next week regardless. They can travel tomorrow instead."
"That is reasonable."
"It does not feel reasonable. It feels like sending my sister away for wanting to marry well."
"No consequence feels reasonable to the person who has to impose it," Darcy said, and heard an echo of his aunt's voice. He had never once agreed with her before.
Bingley looked at him properly then. "You speak as though you know that from experience."
"I have a sister."
The answer needed nothing added to it, and Bingley, to his credit, did not ask for anything more.
Caroline swept into the card room a minute later, wearing a morning gown the colour of pale gold and an expression of manufactured sisterly concern.
"Charles, the musicians have arrived. One of them insists the platform is too narrow."
"Nicholls will see to it."
"Nicholls is occupied with the flowers."
"Then the butler will see to it."
Caroline's gaze moved from her brother to Darcy and back again, sharp as a needle. "Have I interrupted something?"
"Ball arrangements."
"Then I may be of use."
"Everything is settled," Bingley said, and the small crack of pain underneath his voice nearly gave the whole thing away. Caroline heard only the dismissal, and not what lay beneath it.
"As you wish."
She left, silk skirts snapping around the doorframe behind her.
Darcy waited until her footsteps had faded down the corridor. "Do not speak to her before tonight."
"I know."
"And do not punish Sarah for whatever you learn tonight."
Bingley turned on him, sharp. "I would never."
"Good," Darcy said, and believed him.
Mrs. Nicholls joined them once Caroline had gone. She had confirmed Sarah's account and added the retiring room to her own rounds.
"Sarah believes Miss Elizabeth must be told the instant Miss Bingley acts, sir."
"On that we agree," Darcy said. "If the shawl leaves the press, Miss Elizabeth is told before anything else. Not after."
Mrs. Nicholls inclined her head. "I will see it done, sir." And then she left to go command the rest of Netherfield into readiness, the way generals presumably commanded armies, except with rather more competence.
Bingley wandered to the card table and straightened a pack of cards nobody had touched all day. "I keep thinking of Caroline at twelve. She climbed the cedar after I told her she could not, and would not come down again till I apologised for saying so."
"Did you?"
"I did. I thought peace was worth more than being right." Bingley turned the top card over and did not look at it. "I fear now I only taught her that persisting is all it ever takes to get her own way."
Darcy came to stand beside him. "You were a child too, Charles."
"I am not a child tonight."
"No," Darcy agreed. "You are not."
Bingley squared the cards with more force than the gesture required. "If she stops on her own, I will say nothing further about it. If she acts, she goes to Scarborough."
"Yes."
"Jane may think me cruel for it."
"Jane thinks more clearly than either of us deserves credit for. Tell her whatever truth you are able to tell."
"You make that sound easy."
"It is not," Darcy said. "Nothing about tonight is going to be easy."
They returned to the ballroom, where the orange trees had somehow been moved yet again, this time by a footman convinced the first arrangement had been a mistake. Bingley directed them back to the corners without so much as glancing at Darcy for approval.
It was a small decision, in the scheme of the evening ahead. Darcy respected it more than he expected to.
By late afternoon, coaches began arriving down the drive in a steady, crunching procession. Darcy dressed early. McKeever tied the plain cravat.
"The embroidered one might be more festive," Darcy said.
McKeever's hands stilled. "Sir?"
"The embroidered one, McKeever."
His valet replaced the cravat without a word of comment. The silence itself was not insolence, Darcy understood, but something closer to a small private celebration, the kind a man allows himself only when he thinks nobody is watching.
"Miss Elizabeth has accepted the first two dances," Darcy said, mostly to fill the quiet.
"So Sarah heard, from a Longbourn maid."
"Your chain of intelligence is genuinely alarming."
"Households require information, sir."
"Households require discretion."
"The two need not be enemies."
Darcy recognised the phrase. It was Elizabeth's, nearly word for word. "Did Sarah say that?"
"No, sir. You did. Some years ago, if I recall it right." McKeever's tone gave nothing away, which was, Darcy reflected, exactly the point.
He finished the knot. The embroidered edge showed only the barest hint of itself above the collar. Festive, by Darcy's standards, meant something most men would call restrained.
Downstairs the ballroom glowed gold with beeswax and candlelight, the air already thick with the mingled scent of hothouse flowers and warming wax.
The orange trees stood in their corners at last. Bingley stationed himself at the entrance, greeting neighbours with a pleasure so sincere it seemed almost to embarrass the more reserved among them.
Caroline stood at his side in silver, flawless and false.
Darcy could not help but see it now, from the arranged tilt of her head to the practised warmth of her smile.
Darcy greeted guests as they arrived. He answered Sir William Lucas's raptures about St James's with more patience than he felt.
He endured Mrs. Philips, who had a great deal to say about very little.
He declined, with some effort, to discuss Wickham at all with Denny, who had come without him this time, after Bingley had quietly seen to it that no invitation reached him.
Then the Bennets arrived.
Elizabeth wore ivory muslin trimmed with dark green ribbons. Over her shoulders, against the chill of the entrance hall, lay the blue shawl. Sarah received it from her in the retiring-room doorway and caught McKeever's eye across the passage for the briefest instant.
The object was in play now — and there was no stopping it.
Elizabeth looked into the ballroom before her mother had even finished greeting Bingley, and found Darcy at once, as though she had known exactly where to look. Her smile was small, and private, and entirely her own choosing. No scheme had put it there.
Darcy crossed the room to claim his first two dances. For the first time all day, the whole machinery of Netherfield ceased to matter to him at all. The trees, the candles, the careful arrangements upon arrangements. None of it.