Chapter Nine #3
After the carriages had gone, Darcy stood at the window of the empty drawing room for a while.
Bingley had gone upstairs in good spirits, which was his natural condition and had been especially pronounced by Jane Bennet’s presence.
Georgiana had gone up tired but settled, which was the best he had hoped for, and considerably better than he had feared.
Mrs Annesley had followed her charge, looking very well pleased by her success.
Mrs Hurst and Hurst had retired likewise, and Caroline Bingley had said good night with her customary composure and a searching look in his direction that he had chosen not to see.
The room was quiet. The fire had burned low. Outside, the drive was empty where the Bennet carriage had been, the gravel still marked by its wheels in the torchlight.
Darcy could not seem to stop thinking about how Elizabeth had handled the tense moment at supper.
The housemaid had left the room without crying, which had been the point of Elizabeth’s intervention into the incident.
Her task accomplished, she had then returned to her conversation with Charlotte Lucas as though she had done nothing more remarkable than pass the salt.
Darcy had watched her for the rest of the evening, unable to do otherwise. He had the distinctly uncomfortable feeling that he must revise his opinion of Elizabeth Bennet once again, and that as soon as he did so, he would find that all his evidence was stacking the wrong way.
He had one opinion of Elizabeth Bennet formed at the Meryton assembly, where he had said something he should not have said and had spent subsequent weeks failing to unsay it.
He had thought her tolerable and beneath his notice, which had turned out to be the least accurate assessment he had made in recent memory.
Darcy had then thought her clever and impertinent, which was closer.
Then he had spent a week at Netherfield revising again, and had arrived at a version that was more complicated and less comfortable than either.
And now he was standing in an empty drawing room at eleven o’clock, revising again. He turned from the window.
The guilt had been present since the moment the study door had swung open and he had read in the faces of the assembled servants exactly what they had seen and what it would cost Elizabeth Bennet if he did not act.
He had proposed out of honour, nothing more nor less.
She had accepted out of necessity, and between them they had constructed something with all the outward form of an engagement.
Darcy told himself it was the best outcome available to them.
He had believed it, largely, and had managed the arrangement with the intent of making it as tolerable as possible.
Tolerable — a word that had not served him well of late.
What he had not expected was to find himself, six weeks in, thinking that tolerable was by no means the most they might expect of their union. He sat down in the chair nearest the dying fire and looked unseeing at the coals.
She was not trapped, he told himself, or if she was, he had not trapped her.
They had agreed in the parlour at Longbourn that if the engagement could be honourably dissolved, it would be.
The investigation was ongoing. The scratch on the lock plate was a beginning, not a conclusion, and nothing was irreversible.
And yet Darcy sat with the knowledge, quiet and persistent as an ember, that his own feelings on the question of dissolution had been shifting, by increments, for some time.
He had not examined them directly before, and set his mind to doing so with the reluctant thoroughness of a man who prefers to know the worst of himself rather than be surprised by it. The conclusion was not flattering.
Darcy was not sure he wanted the engagement dissolved.
Elizabeth was composed in his company, in the manner he now recognised as something deployed rather than simply felt.
She had always been honest with him, but what she actually felt, what she thought of him beneath the composure, whether the distance she maintained was the distance of a woman who found her situation merely difficult or the distance of a woman who found her companion the chief difficulty of it, he could not read.
Darcy thought about the study, and how her steadiness had surprised him.
He thought about the parlour at Longbourn, and the precision with which she had laid out her terms. He thought about Georgiana’s laugh that afternoon, and the look on Elizabeth’s face as she listened.
He thought about the words, entirely my fault, said without hesitation for a girl she did not know.
The fire went out.
He sat in the dark for a moment, not moving, and thought that it was very possible he was coming to admire a woman who was enduring him.
The gap between those two positions was wide enough to make the whole business considerably worse than it needed to be.
Honourable discharge of obligation was one thing.
But a marriage in which one party felt love, and the other only obligation, might quickly become intolerable.
Darcy vowed to be careful. He would continue to be attentive without presuming, courteous without implicating, giving her every option and no pressure.
It might yet be that they had no choice.
That what had seemed the only option for both of them was so still.
And if not, if they succeeded in repairing their reputations another way — well. Then the choice would be Elizabeth’s.
If the engagement dissolved, it would be because she wished it. If it did not, it would be because she had chosen otherwise, freely, with full knowledge of what she was choosing.
But what he wanted could not become a weight she had to carry. Darcy would not allow that — could not bear it.
He went upstairs, moving between pools of candlelight. The house settled around him. Outside, the Hertfordshire night was very quiet.