Chapter 14
Mr. Darcy
Darcy could no longer pretend. Three weeks had passed since the ball at Netherfield, and every one of them had made things worse.
He could not pretend that his rides past Longbourn were for exercise.
He could not pretend that his eagerness to accompany Bingley on every call was friendship.
He could not pretend that the book of Cowper's poems, with Elizabeth's margin notes, sat on his bedside table for literary appreciation.
He had read her annotations fourteen times.
He could recite three of them from memory.
This was not literary appreciation. This was a fever of the mind.
He was in love with Elizabeth Bennet. He had been in love with her since the library at Netherfield, or perhaps since the Meryton high street, or perhaps since the moment he looked down and saw a pig on his boot and felt, for the first time in years, something other than duty.
He was also, he acknowledged, making a thorough mess of it.
The dinner at Mrs. Phillips's house haunted him.
He replayed the evening in a loop: his silence, his rigidity, Caroline's poisoned compliment, Elizabeth's face turning away.
He had stood in a room with the woman he loved and given her every reason to believe he was the villain Wickham painted him as.
And Wickham. Wickham was still here, still charming, still moving through Meryton's society with the practised ease of a man who had been deceiving people since he could talk.
Darcy heard reports from Bingley. Wickham had dined with the Phillipses.
Wickham had been seen walking with Elizabeth in Meryton.
Wickham had told his story of the denied living to at least four families, each telling adding detail, each detail a lie wrapped in just enough truth to be believed.
Darcy could do nothing. The truth about Georgiana sat behind his teeth like a coin he could not spend.
He rode past Longbourn again on a Thursday morning.
November had stripped the landscape to its bones: brown fields, black hedgerows, the occasional red flash of a robin.
He had developed, over the past two weeks, a route that took him past Longbourn and through the lanes connecting Longbourn to Meryton without ever requiring him to stop.
He had mapped it carefully. The route was exactly forty-five minutes at a walk, thirty at a trot, and seventeen at a canter, and he had timed all three because he was a man who measured things, and measuring was a way of maintaining the illusion of control over a situation that had escaped his control entirely.
He knew the section of wall where the mortar was crumbling, because on his third ride past he had seen Elizabeth sitting there with her knees drawn up and a book in her hand and the pig asleep at her feet. She had not seen him. He had been grateful. He had also been disappointed.
He slowed his horse near the garden wall. From inside: laughter, and the faint, distant squeal of a pig.
He missed that pig. He would not admit it.
He would not admit that he still carried a crust of bread in his coat pocket from habit, or that he had caught himself looking down at his boot in the Netherfield dining room, half expecting to see a small pink snout gazing up at him. He rode on. He did not look back.
His valet had noticed the state of his boots. "Sir," Jenkins had said that morning, holding up a boot caked with Hertfordshire mud, "you appear to be riding a great deal."
"I am."
"In the same direction."
"The exercise is beneficial."
Jenkins had said nothing else. Jenkins had been in Darcy's service for eight years and had perfected the art of communicating volumes through the application of boot polish and silence.
At Longbourn, while Darcy circled the lanes, Truffles had eaten Mr. Bennet's bookmark.
Not the ribbon he used in his Tacitus, which he would have mourned, but the slip of paper he had been using in Fordyce's Sermons — a volume he had been reading aloud to the household at Mrs. Bennet's insistence and which had been sitting untouched on his desk since Tuesday, when he declared that Fordyce's views on female education made him want to lie down in a ditch.
Truffles had nosed the book off the desk, chewed the bookmark into a damp ball, and was discovered asleep on the open pages with her snout resting on a passage about the dangers of feminine levity.
Mr. Bennet, informed of the destruction, looked at the pig over his spectacles. "She has better literary taste than most of my family," he said. "Leave her."
At Netherfield, Caroline was waiting. She had been watching him with increasing sharpness over the past week, tracking his rides, noting his routes, cataloguing the evidence of an attachment she was determined to prevent.
She had the instincts of a woman whose entire future depended on a single outcome, and she could see the outcome slipping.
"You ride to Longbourn rather often," she observed at dinner. She was cutting her meat with precise, controlled motions that suggested she would rather be cutting something else.
"The lanes in that direction are pleasant."
"All lanes in Hertfordshire are pleasant. You seem to prefer the one that passes the Bennets' gate."
He said nothing. Caroline examined her wine glass.
"The neighbourhood dinner at the Phillipses' is next Thursday," Bingley said, oblivious to the tension. He had the cheerful unawareness of a man who had never been the subject of strategy. "The Bennets will attend. I have it from Jane herself."
"Jane," Caroline repeated, with a shade of emphasis.
"Miss Bennet. Yes. We are on friendly terms."
"You are on more than friendly terms, Charles. The entire county is aware of it."
"Good," Bingley said, with a firmness that surprised everyone, including himself. "Let them be aware."
Caroline turned to Darcy. Her expression said: Do you see what is happening? Do you see what we are losing? Darcy saw. He saw a man in love with a woman who loved him back, and the simplicity of it made his own situation feel like a punishment.
The dinner arrived. The Phillipses' dining room was small but well-appointed, the table laid with Mrs. Phillips's best china and the candelabra that came out for company.
The Bennets came as a party of six: Mrs. Bennet leading the charge, Jane beside her, Elizabeth behind.
Kitty and Lydia brought up the rear, already scanning the room for officers.
Elizabeth was in a dark blue gown, the same one she had worn at Netherfield.
Darcy recognised it by the way the fabric caught the candlelight, and by the small repair at the hem that she had done herself, and by the fact that he had memorised it, which was not something he was prepared to examine at this moment.
She did not look at him when she entered.
She moved past him to greet Mrs. Phillips with a warmth that specifically excluded the corner of the room where he was standing.
Her avoidance was steady and complete and more eloquent than any confrontation.
She had not spoken to him directly since the card party.
She had not met his eye. She had not acknowledged him beyond the minimum courtesy required between acquaintances, and the minimum was very minimum indeed.
Truffles was not present. Elizabeth had managed to contain her. The dinner table felt emptier for it, though no one else would have noticed.
Without the pig, Darcy was alone in his stiffness.
He sat through the first course with the rigid posture of a man sitting for a portrait he had not commissioned.
He spoke when spoken to. He praised Mrs. Phillips's soup, which was oversalted.
He answered Mr. Phillips's question about whether the shooting was good at Pemberley (it was) and Mrs. Long's question about whether the library was extensive (it was).
He said correct things. He was polite and measured and completely, devastatingly hollow.
Elizabeth was seated four places down from him, between Jane and a young officer. She was animated in conversation. She laughed twice. She did not direct either laugh toward his end of the table.
Then Caroline made her move.
The second course had been cleared. The table was at ease, the conversation fragmenting into smaller groups.
Someone mentioned the Netherfield ball. Someone else mentioned the pig's dramatic entrance.
Laughter rippled around the table, the comfortable laughter of neighbours who had been dining out on this story for weeks.
Elizabeth's mouth tightened. She was waiting for the joke to pass.
Caroline did not let it pass.
"We were all so diverted by the little pig at the ball," she said.
Her voice carried the sweetness of a woman who had been waiting for this moment and had rehearsed her approach.
"Though I confess I worry for the health of any assembly.
Livestock in public rooms cannot be sanitary.
" She paused. She smoothed her napkin. She turned to Darcy.
"Surely you agree, Mr. Darcy, that such displays are beneath the dignity of good society? "
The room went quiet. Forks stopped moving. Mrs. Phillips, who had been midway through a sentence about her sister's new curtains, went silent. Fifteen faces turned to Darcy with the expectant attention of a gallery watching a duel, waiting for the second shot.
Elizabeth's face turned to Darcy.
He knew what he should say. He should say that the pig was harmless and charming and that Elizabeth had nothing to be ashamed of.
He should say what he had said at Netherfield, when Caroline first complained: "She is quiet.
She is doing no harm." He could feel the right words forming.
They were there, in his chest, pressing upward.