Chapter 13 #2
"Elizabeth was innocent." The words came out rough, and something in them gave his pain away. Caroline's guilt had not made his affection for her disappear. It had only forced him to place a consequence on someone he still loved. That was its own particular kind of misery, Elizabeth thought.
Jane understood it too. She lifted one hand toward his sleeve and stopped just short of touching it. "I am sorry."
"Do you think I was cruel?"
"No."
"I should have seen what she meant to do. Darcy has disliked her pursuit of him for months, and I called it harmless because confronting it properly would have made Netherfield unpleasant for everyone."
"You cannot be responsible for every choice your sister makes."
"I am responsible for what I allow under my own roof."
Elizabeth heard Darcy in that distinction, and Bingley in the regret wrapped around it. Not for the first time, she thought how strange it was that the two men had made each other better by standing near one another long enough.
Jane considered this. "Then you corrected what you allowed. You did not expose her to the whole neighbourhood. You did not punish Sarah for telling the truth. You did not ask Mr. Darcy to offer himself up for your family's comfort."
"No."
"What more should you have done last night?"
Bingley looked at her for a long moment. "Nothing, perhaps."
"Nothing more is not the same as nothing painful."
Mrs. Bennet's argument about the mud rolled on undisturbed in the background. The room stayed perfectly ordinary around a conversation that was rearranging Bingley's whole face.
"You do not think less of me," he said.
"I think more of you. For telling me."
"Jane."
He said her name with such feeling that Elizabeth had to look away. Jane did not.
"You may tell me the rest when you are ready," she said. "Your sister's conduct should not become entertainment — not even within my own family."
"Thank you."
Mrs. Bennet chose that exact moment to return. "What are you thanking Jane for?"
Bingley recovered enough to smile. "For listening to me."
"Jane has always been an excellent listener. At five years old she sat through the whole of Mrs. Goulding's account of a harvest supper without a single complaint."
"Mamma," Jane said.
"It was nearly two hours."
Bingley looked, in that instant, like a man who would sit through two hours of anything at all, provided Jane were the one telling it.
Elizabeth saw the future proposal arrive fully formed and gave up pretending she had not.
Behind the library door, the conversation carried on.
Mr. Bennet's voice rose once in laughter.
Darcy's did not. Elizabeth found herself wondering what her father had asked, and which answer had cost Darcy the most.
Bingley drifted toward the tea table. "May I pour for you?"
Jane accepted, and he remembered, without being told, precisely how she took it. It was such a small competence, and it pleased her far more than any grand display could have.
Elizabeth watched them and thought of the orangery, the storm, the offer that had come too fast and landed too hard.
Darcy had not asked for her declaration that night.
Bingley was not asking Jane to absolve him now.
Both men had brought their difficult truths into the light and left the women free to answer as they chose.
The servants had made the opportunities. They had not made any of this.
Mrs. Bennet gasped, loudly enough to interrupt her own war over the mud. "What can your father possibly mean by shutting himself up like that? Lizzy, have you done something?"
"Several things, Mamma. He rarely bothers investigating them."
"Mr. Darcy has not come about Lydia."
"Why would he?"
"She danced with Captain Carter twice."
"Then Captain Carter may answer for himself."
Bingley glanced at Jane, hoping for translation. Jane only shook her head, and he accepted the instruction without question.
The gentlemen remained in the library for twenty minutes.
Elizabeth counted every stroke of the clock and despised herself a little more with each one.
When the door opened at last, Mr. Bennet looked both amused and faintly sad, an expression she had rarely seen him wear at once.
Darcy looked like a man who had just sat an examination and had no idea, yet, whether he had passed it.
"Lizzy," her father said, "Mr. Darcy has asked permission to court you. I told him the permission belongs to you — but that I will allow the visits, if you will."
Mrs. Bennet made a noise generally associated with kettles reaching the boil. "Mr. Darcy!"
"Court Lizzy? Mr. Darcy — ten thousand a year?"
"Mamma, I have agreed to a courtship, not a marriage."
"Courtship leads to marriage, when it is properly managed."
"That sentence," Elizabeth said, "explains my caution entirely."
Darcy stood very still, as though bracing for something. Elizabeth crossed to him.
"Will you walk in the shrubbery? Jane and Mr. Bingley may come."
Bingley was on his feet before she had finished the sentence. Jane rose more slowly, preserving what dignity she could for both of them.
Outside, the winter air was sharp and bright, the kind of cold that made the light look cleaner than it had any right to. Jane and Bingley walked ahead and were soon absorbed in a conversation that appeared to require them both to study the exact same bare hedge, at very close range.
"What did my father ask you?" Elizabeth said.
"Whether I considered you an obligation. Whether I meant to remove you from your family. Whether I could bear to be laughed at, every day, for the rest of my life."
"And your answers?"
"No. No." A pause. "I hope so."
"You hope to bear it?"
"I hope to deserve the distinction."
She smiled despite herself. "Papa approved?"
"He approved the attempt. He reserves judgement of the man."
"That is generous, coming from him."
They walked in silence for a while. Darcy did not take her arm. Not until the path narrowed and she offered it herself, and even then he seemed to accept it the way a man accepts something he has been forbidden to want too openly.
"Caroline left this morning," he said. "Bingley has said nothing publicly. Mrs. Nicholls knows enough to keep Sarah safe from retaliation."
"Protect her from what?"
"Caroline accused Sarah of theft before she left. Bingley rejected the accusation outright. Mrs. Nicholls had a footman's account of seeing blue fringe beneath Caroline's wrap, and Sarah had reported the shawl missing before the accusation was ever made."
Elizabeth stopped walking. "Sarah could have lost her place over this."
"Yes."
"She risked her place. For me."
"McKeever says she did."
The servants' scheme had seemed almost comic while it involved only books and glances exchanged across a drawing room. This part was not comic at all. Sarah's livelihood had stood between Caroline and a clean denial.
"I treated her warning as impertinence," Elizabeth said, "before I understood what it had cost her to give it."
"You also defended her to Mrs. Nicholls."
"That does not erase the first part."
"No." His voice was quiet. "It is what you did next."
Darcy's own errors stood behind that sentence, unspoken but not hidden. Elizabeth heard them. She heard, too, the complete absence of any attempt to excuse himself for them.
"Will Sarah stay on at Netherfield?"
"Mrs. Nicholls means to train her as a lady's maid. She has the skill for it, according to Bingley's housekeeper."
"She will be pleased."
"McKeever is insufferably pleased."
"He showed emotion?"
"He approved the embroidered cravat without argument. It was excessive."
Elizabeth laughed — properly laughed, the kind that came up from somewhere she had not planned on.
Ahead of them, Bingley had taken Jane's hand. He let go of it the moment he realised they were being watched, then took it again a second later with a determination that made the retreat pointless.
Darcy watched his friend with something close to fondness. "He has practised a question on me twice."
"Did he tell you what it was?"
"He told me by repeating it."
"How did you answer?"
"I refused him both times."
"Cruel man."
"He required a more representative audience than my own opinion."
The easy conversation carried them the rest of the way around the shrubbery. At the garden door, Darcy stopped.
"Elizabeth."
She looked at him. He had used her name again — this time without the small apologetic pause that had followed it in the orangery.
"Do you object?" he asked.
"No."
"May I call you Elizabeth, when we are among family?"
The question made the name feel more intimate than its first use had. It was as though he were asking permission twice, once for the word and once for what the word meant.
"Yes."
"Then I will try not to abuse the privilege."
"I expect you to fail."
"You expect me to use your name too often?"
"I expect you to enjoy having asked properly far too much to stop yourself."
He did not deny it.
They went into Longbourn together. Mrs. Bennet had already begun discussing wedding clothes to no one in particular.
Elizabeth corrected her, twice, without much hope of success.
Darcy only listened, and said nothing, and looked, she thought, glancing sideways at him, entirely too pleased for a man being measured for a son-in-law's waistcoat he had not agreed to yet.
Courtship, she was discovering, was not the removal of uncertainty at all.
It was permission to examine it closely.