Chapter 1
October
Three weeks to the day after the Northram ball, Miss Caroline Bingley once again entered a place with the intention of dancing.
On this occasion, it was the assembly hall in the Hertfordshire town of Meryton, near her brother’s leased estate, Netherfield Park.
He had met several of the local gentlemen, but this would mark the first time the rest of their party became acquainted with their new neighbours.
She felt rather like she had at her first London ball—full of equal parts hope and anxiety, wishing above all else to make a good impression.
She had thought too well of herself for too long to easily accept the notion that many of the people she would meet tonight in this shabby little market town were above her, however unrefined they might prove to be; yet she was not a stupid woman.
Stubborn she was, and short-sighted she certainly could be, but those flaws had only the power to temporarily subsume her native intelligence and perception.
She had had a great deal of time to think over the past weeks and had at last seen what ambition would have her ignore: the grudging nature of her acceptance in high society, founded on her family’s wealth and her brother’s close friendship with Mr Darcy of Pemberley, and little if at all upon her own virtues.
Her pride might revolt at acknowledging the social superiority of ill-educated country gentry, but she entered the assembly determined to keep herself under good regulation and to bear at the forefront of her thoughts how very wrong she had been to believe that the supremacy of birth was upheld more in theory than in practice.
She might not agree that lineage ought to be placed above education and wealth, but so it was and she had no power to alter it.
She had received a salutary reminder of her place only hours ago, when Mr Darcy had arrived at Netherfield.
She had greeted him sedately, commenting only that she hoped his journey had been easy before directing the housekeeper to show him to his rooms. The look of surprise upon his noble features, so rapidly concealed, had cut her to the quick.
Amending oneself was a painful business, she was daily reminded.
Here, however, in this out of the way place, among people she would have sneered at a month ago, she had an opportunity to practise the manners she ought to have displayed these last years.
A chance to pass herself off with some degree of credit, to make her brother proud and to demonstrate to his friend that she was a worthy acquaintance.
She knew now that she could never be more, and she was fiercely, secretly glad that he had never touched her heart.
She felt grief enough over her errors and did not think she could have borne that additional pain.
Handing her cloak to the attendant, she took her brother’s arm without so much as a glance at Mr Darcy to see if he might offer his. She rather hoped he noticed how thoroughly she was leaving him be—let him now despise her, if he dared.
Entering the assembly room, they were greeted instantly by a round, jovial fellow with a thin fringe of salt and pepper hair around his gleaming pate.
His coat was several years, possibly as much as a decade, out of fashion.
It was all Caroline could do to continue smiling.
“Mr Bingley, you have come! But you said you would. Capital, simply capital. May I be known to your friends?”
Charles happily performed the introductions, and the gentleman—for such he was—was revealed as Sir William Lucas.
They were introduced also to Lady Lucas and Miss Lucas, while Miss Maria, who was across the room with several other girls who seemed rather young to be at a dance, was pointed out to them.
Sir William liked the sound of his own voice rather too much, often using it to refer to the honour of having been knighted, while his wife simpered over Caroline and her sister’s ballgowns and thereafter seemed to have nothing to say for herself.
The knight and his lady were, Caroline told herself firmly, no more trying than many people she had met in town.
The daughter seemed perfectly unobjectionable on short acquaintance, however.
Miss Lucas accepted Charles’s request for a set with demure pleasure before fixing an amiable look upon Caroline.
“I hope you are enjoying the area, Miss Bingley. We are all so very pleased to see Netherfield inhabited once again.”
“I have seen little of it, I fear. I have spent the time since our arrival becoming familiar with the house and its routines, as I am my brother’s hostess. But now that we are entering the local society, I anticipate coming to know the place and its people,” she replied cordially.
“As we anticipate coming to know you,” Miss Lucas said. “My father, I think, is eager to introduce you around, but perhaps we shall speak again later.”
They curtseyed to each other, and Caroline took her brother’s arm once more, following the verbose gentleman through the room.
There was not a great deal of time before the first dance commenced, he informed them, but he hoped it would be sufficient to make them known to the leading families.
Stopping before a matron with far too much lace on her dress, fine though that lace was, Sir William asked if he might make the Netherfield party known to her.
She agreed with alacrity, and they were introduced to Mrs Bennet and her daughters Jane, Elizabeth, and Mary.
Two others, Lydia and Kitty, were indicated as being among the group of very young ladies including Miss Maria Lucas.
Five daughters! thought Caroline. And had she a son, he would surely have been mentioned.
I do not envy her the task of settling five daughters on a country squire’s income.
This charitable thought made it a little easier for her to bear the vulgar manner in which the lady hinted that Charles must wish to dance with her eldest and most beautiful daughter.
The fact that the three young ladies were visibly mortified and that Charles was excessively happy to agree to the suggestion also soothed her fractious sensibilities.
The remainder of their party slipped away while Mrs Bennet was focused upon Charles. Mr Hurst made for the refreshments with his wife—Caroline’s sister Louisa—on his arm, and Mr Darcy found an obligingly empty stretch of wall before which he might stand and glower at the assemblage as was his wont.
It occurred to her, for the first time, that perhaps his behaviour in society was not all it could be, either.
She expected little of Mr Hurst, but if the Darcy scion, courted and feted by so many, could rudely avoid being introduced to those among whom he proposed to spend some weeks, perhaps her own mistakes were not quite so egregious as she feared.
Or perhaps this was another instance in which those born to the elite could bend or break those rules which formed an immovable prison about their inferiors.
She wished quite desperately that she had the sort of close and trustworthy friend of whom she might ask such questions.
“Unless this is its first appearance, Miss Bingley, I am certain you have already heard many praises of your gown,” said the dark-haired second Bennet daughter, pulling Caroline from her thoughts.
Elizabeth, that was her name. “But please allow me to remark how particularly becoming that colour is to your complexion.”
Caroline had chosen it for this evening because it was the simplest of her ball gowns, a fine muslin in pale apricot layered over a cream under-dress, delicately embellished in silver thread.
It was still rather more au courant than anything she had seen upon the locals.
“Thank you, Miss Elizabeth. I shall be very sorry when it goes out of fashion, for I have not seen this particular shade before or since. I have thought of reusing some of the fabric. Perhaps I might have the skirt made into a light wrap.”
“Oh, you simply must do something with it,” the young lady said warmly. “It is far too pretty to give up on after a single season.”
Sir William Lucas suggested to Mrs Bennet that her new neighbours might like to meet some others before the dancing commenced.
She reluctantly conceded. The knight turned to them with a bright smile which faltered when he saw that their party of five had been reduced to a mere two.
“Oh. Well.” He floundered for a moment before collecting himself.
“I see the Chethams just over there. Their estate, Hillcrest, lies between Lucas Lodge and Haye-Park.”
Though Caroline had understood the rudeness in Mr Darcy and the Hursts’ desertion, seeing the jovial man struggle to regain his smile caused her to feel it, and she blushed for the incivility displayed by so much of her own party.
The knowledge that she should have blithely done just the same were it not for her recent humiliation and the revelations attendant upon it only deepened her unease.
She and Charles became acquainted with the Chethams and their three adult children just in time for the tuning of instruments to signal that the first set was forming.
Young Mr Chetham obligingly requested a set of Caroline and was happy to be granted her first. Taking to the floor among so many strangers, she smiled at her partner and thought that her family’s entrance into this new society must surely proceed more smoothly than it had begun.
Less than two hours later, Caroline was rapidly losing that optimism.