Chapter Five #2
The whispers were not whispers, exactly.
They were conversations that paused when she passed and resumed when she had moved far enough away.
They were glances exchanged across the room with a speed that their owners clearly believed was discreet and was not.
Lady Lucas greeted her with the elaborate warmth of a woman overcompensating for something.
Mr Robinson, who had always been perfectly ordinary with her, now had a quality of heightened interest in his manner that she found intensely irritating.
Even Maria Lucas, who was seventeen and no more complex than she needed to be, kept finding reasons to position herself near Elizabeth and then looking at her sideways.
Elizabeth bore it as best she could. She took a glass of wine she did not want and carried it through the room, speaking to the other guests as though nothing at all was the matter.
It was essential to keep a small smile on her face, as though it were an evening like any other.
As though she had not noticed that everything had changed.
She looked tolerably composed, Elizabeth thought — provided no one looked at her too directly.
Then she saw Mr Darcy. He stood near the fireplace with Sir William, who was telling him something with his customary goodwill and enthusiasm.
Mr Darcy listened with composure, but his eyes moved to her the moment she entered the room, and stayed there for some moments longer than courtesy required.
In those fleeting moments, Elizabeth saw in him something she had not expected: not embarrassment, but a kind of grave, direct acknowledgment. He knew exactly where they stood. He had, she thought, known it rather earlier than she had.
She looked away first.
The evening arranged itself around her, exhausting as any social occasion must be when one is at its centre without having chosen to be.
She was not avoided, but by the end of the evening, Elizabeth thought grimly that she might have preferred it if she had been.
To be — attended to, watched at every moment as though she might make the news of the week, was immeasurably worse.
The room had assigned her a meaning she had not consented to, and was now reading her for confirmation of that meaning in everything she did; she was simultaneously too visible and entirely without recourse.
She had just concluded a conversation with the elder Miss Robinson, conducted on Miss Robinson’s side with the breathless attentiveness of someone extracting information under the pretence of sympathy, when she heard her mother’s voice from across the room, carrying over everything.
“—not in the least surprised, for I always said Mr Darcy admired Lizzy, though she would not hear it, and now I think we need not wonder at it any longer—”
The room did not go quiet. It might have been less dreadful if it had. Instead, conversations dropped half a register so that her mother’s voice sat above them with perfect, mortifying clarity.
“— a very fine match, and ten thousand a year at least, though some say more, and of course Pemberley, too. I have heard the park is five miles round! And now that it is all settled, we can look forward to it quite happily, though I must say it might have been done more becomingly —”
Elizabeth did not move. She stood where she was and held her wineglass and looked at a point just above the mantelpiece and breathed, her composure straining to its limits as her mama added mortification to an already delicate situation.
Several faces that had merely been interested were now openly gratified.
To her credit, Lady Lucas’s expression strongly suggested that she wished to be somewhere else, or better still, that so unbecoming a scene were not occurring under her roof.
Charlotte, across the room, was looking at Elizabeth with a steady compassion that was nearly unbearable.
Still Mrs Bennet sailed on, warming to her theme and entirely oblivious to the discomfort she was causing.
“— Jane nearly settled too, which I said would happen, though Mr Bennet would not believe me, and now I think we may all be very comfortable indeed, for it is not every family that can say two daughters —”
“Mama,” said Jane quietly at her mother’s elbow.
Jane was the only person alive capable of stopping their mother mid-sentence through the simple application of a calm word and a hand on her arm.
Mrs Bennet looked at her eldest daughter, began a sentence, reconsidered it, and accepted the glass of wine that Jane pressed upon her. Mercifully, she was quiet.
The room breathed comfortably again.
Elizabeth set her own glass on the nearest surface lest her hands tremble so much she dropped it and looked up to find Mr Darcy watching her from the fireplace.
There was no privacy to be had in a room of thirty people, and she did not seek it. Elizabeth stood where she was, letting the room settle back into its ordinary noise around her and trying to think clearly.
That was difficult, for three things were happening inside her at once, and each alone would have been enough to occupy all her thoughts.
The first was humiliation, the kind that comes not from anything one has done but from being made a spectacle by the actions of others.
The second was fury, aimed at her mother, who had taken a difficult situation and made it a public declaration in front of thirty people; and underneath that, quieter and colder, at the locked door itself, and the unanswered question of how it had come to be locked at all.
The third was a creeping sense of cold fear. Mr Darcy was across the room looking at her with that grave, direct, acknowledging expression. He was a man of honour, and Elizabeth understood, with a horrible and sudden completeness, precisely what the situation now required.
Her mama had called the matter “settled”, but Elizabeth was determined it should not be so.
It would not, perhaps, be her choice. She looked around the room, at the faces, at the quality of their attention, at the thing her mother had just done with perfect thoughtlessness in front of everyone she had known her entire life, and she could see, with the cold clarity of real fear, how narrow the path ahead of her had become.
The door at the far end of the room opened to admit a draught of cold air and the butler with a tray, and nobody noticed except Elizabeth, who looked at the open door for just a moment with an expression she would not have wanted anyone to see.
Then she smoothed her gloves, lifted her chin, and went to find Charlotte.
∞∞∞
The part Caroline Bingley returned to, again and again, in the privacy of her room, was that Elizabeth Bennet had ruined everything.
It had almost been perfect. Everything else had proceeded as designed.
How close it had all come to working exactly as she had intended!
The timing was right; the crowd was right; the news was right.
Only Elizabeth Bennet was wrong. Quite unaccountably, she had been in the study, where she had no business at all, and the silly maid, having heard the voice of a female accompanying Mr Darcy, had simply followed instructions.
When Mr Darcy had implored her for the key, she had gone for it at once, as she had said she would, down the servants’ stair and along the eastern passage, moving quickly.
Not knowing what had gone wrong, and believing Mr Darcy to be alone, Caroline had hoped it might be possible to salvage the plan.
Witnesses were still coming; she might have arranged to have been found in Mr Darcy’s arms, if not locked in.
If not, there was still the benefit to rescuing Mr Darcy from an unfortunate situation, and the gratitude he might feel as a result.
But she could not locate a spare, nor anyone who might know where it might be.
By the time she thought to seek out the butler, which required her to walk back through the study corridor, Caroline realised she had been a quarter of an hour away.
Hurrying back, she heard the steady, authoritative voice of Mrs Nicholls, the whispering of the housemaids, and the collective murmur of a small domestic crisis in progress.
The ring of keys was already in Mrs Nicholls’ hand, and the group had assembled.
There was nothing left for Caroline to do except arrive at the back of it, slightly breathless, as the door swung open on the wrong woman.
No one paid her any mind, and the door had opened on Mr Darcy and Miss Elizabeth.
Caroline had been quick to mask her irritation, replacing it with concern.
But how could she not be irate when Elizabeth Bennet emerged with her hair in such disarray, and Darcy’s jacket was torn?
That, and they stood close enough to one another that the gap between them communicated something to every servant present, regardless of what had or had not occurred.
She had watched Mrs Nicholls’ face and studied the housemaids. She had watched the footman studiously avoid looking at anything, which was itself a form of looking. In that moment, she knew her plan had completely and utterly failed.
The rumour had left Netherfield Park before the carriage, just as she had known it would.
She had designed it that way. Only it was supposed to carry her name and her dishevelment and proximity to Mr Darcy.
The story was supposed to resolve itself in the obvious direction, because it was the right direction, because she was the right person, and none of this was supposed to involve Elizabeth Bennet.
Caroline sat at her dressing table and forced herself to unclench her jaw; unnecessary tension caused wrinkles. She looked at her own reflection with the dispassionate assessment she brought to difficult things, and tried to determine where the calculation had failed.
The maid, of course, was to blame. That wretched, obedient maid, who had done precisely what she was told and had seen a figure entering the study and had not looked closely enough to establish which figure it was.
The result was Elizabeth Bennet’s hair loose in a corridor, and all of Meryton viciously speculating on just what had occurred behind those closed doors.
She pressed her fingers briefly to her eyes. Caroline had not intended anything like this. It was meant to be a mild compromise. A containable scandal, resolved swiftly by an engagement that everyone would agree was sensible.
But she had not anticipated that the village would tear at a woman’s reputation with the cheerful efficiency of people who have been given something to talk about in a dull, gloomy November.
Through the channel of her maid, she had heard what was being said.
Not merely that they had been found together, but the elaborations that had already begun to pile up, the details sharpened in the retelling, the interpretations applied that transformed an accidental confinement into something that required a word she did not care to name.
No innocent woman deserved that, not even Elizabeth Bennet.
Caroline was honest enough to admit it, alone at night with no audience to perform for.
Whatever she thought of the woman’s family, her manners, her impertinence, her wholly unaccountable effect on gentlemen who ought to know better, Miss Eliza did not deserve this.
She had not intended to destroy a reputation.
Certainly not her own, nor yet Elizabeth Bennet’s.
She had not intended this. She had intended something quite different, and what she had produced instead was an impending engagement between Mr Darcy and a woman entirely unsuitable for him, and thirty people at Lucas Lodge apparently discussing nothing else.
The guilt lasted perhaps a quarter hour.
Then she thought about Mr Darcy’s flat, controlled expression, the tone that said rather more than the words.
At that thought, Caroline’s guilt was replaced by something more familiar and considerably more motivating.
The engagement was not yet formal. Nothing was set in stone — not yet. She would need to think carefully.
Caroline paced in front of her fireplace as gusts of chill November wind buffeted the windowpanes. The engagement was not yet formal. There was still time to manage this correctly, and she had not exhausted her means. She had only made one miscalculation, which was not the same as losing.
Her lips curved into a small smile. She would need to think carefully, but she was not yet defeated. There was still time for her to claim her rightful place by Mr Darcy’s side.