Chapter Ten
The letter from London arrived on a Friday.
Caroline read it twice before setting it aside.
It was from a woman she had known since their days at school together, whose opinions she respected and whose social intelligence she considered approximately equal to her own.
The letter was warm, as their correspondence always was, and full of the usual London gossip: who had been seen where, what had been said about it, which engagements had been announced and which were being discussed most.
The relevant passage was three sentences long. Caroline had read those three sentences four times by evening.
We have heard about your brother’s neighbour and Mr D. One understands these things happen, but it is surprising all the same. I should not have thought Mr D the type to indulge himself, though I suppose the woman may have led him on.
Caroline folded the letter and put it in her writing desk. She sat for some time with her hands in her lap, thinking.
She had not intended the narrative to travel to London.
That was an honest assessment, and she was capable of honesty in private even when she preferred other modes in company.
She had intended a local difficulty that was contained, manageable, and resolved by the obvious means.
She had not intended the kind of story that crossed county lines and arrived in the correspondence of women who had never met Elizabeth Bennet and were now forming opinions about her over their breakfast tables.
Caroline rose and went to the window. The park below was grey with December, the trees stripped bare, and the whole landscape gone bleak and indifferent. She would have much preferred to look out on London streets.
What had happened to Elizabeth Bennet’s reputation was not her fault.
This was a position she had occupied since the morning after the study, and she had examined it from several angles.
She had arranged a situation which, upon playing out, had involved the wrong person.
The public had then done what the public always does, which was to take the available information and construct from it the most interesting possible interpretation, and the interpretation it had constructed was not one she had designed or intended.
The gap between her intention and the outcome was real.
She truly had not wanted Elizabeth Bennet harmed.
What she had wanted was the Darcy name and fortune. She had simply taken the most direct available path toward resolution. Only the path had turned out to lead somewhere she had not mapped. These things happened. One adjusted and moved on.
What was rather more difficult to adjust to was the fact that the outcome had given Mr Darcy to Elizabeth Bennet instead.
It might have been only a matter of honour and obligation, but Caroline did not think that it was. Something was developing between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy that Caroline did not like, and could not entirely account for.
Eliza Bennet was not beautiful, not in any way that should have commanded a second glance from a man of Mr Darcy’s refinement. She was not accomplished, had no fortune worth naming, and a family that was, from any objective standpoint, a liability rather than an asset.
Yet Caroline had catalogued the way Mr Darcy’s attention followed Elizabeth Bennet across the Netherfield breakfast room on the morning of her arrival, the quality of stillness he brought to the room when she was in it, the care with which he did not look at her in company, which was itself a kind of looking.
She had recognised it because she had been watching him for some time and knew the full range of his attention: this was not the attention of indifference.
Worse still, his manner toward her had changed.
She would not pretend otherwise, not to herself, alone at the window on a grey December morning.
Mr Darcy was always civil, but the civility had a new quality to it.
In all the years of their acquaintance, Caroline had seen Mr Darcy be careful in the way of a man who does not wish to excite undue hopes.
Now he was careful in the way of a man who considers himself to belong to someone, and the difference made Caroline furious.
He would see the folly of it — he must. The engagement would founder.
This was her settled conviction, and she had reasons for it that went beyond mere hope.
Elizabeth Bennet was unsuitable. Not in Caroline’s private estimate alone, but objectively, by every standard the world they moved in applied to such things.
Mr Darcy knew this. He was a man of clear-eyed judgment when his judgment was operating correctly, and whatever had distracted it in recent weeks, the clarity would return.
It must. Lady Catherine had not yet arrived on the scene, but she would.
A letter to Rosings Park could only be delayed so long.
The Bennet family would continue to be themselves, which required no assistance from Caroline and could be relied upon to do considerable damage independently.
Mrs Bennet alone was worth several months of quiet deterioration.
What was needed was patience, proximity, and the steady maintenance of her own superiority in the ways that could be maintained through manner, conversation, and in the ongoing demonstration of what Mr Darcy would have had if the study door had opened on the right woman.
She moved from the window and sat at her writing desk, drawing forward a fresh sheet. In the meantime, there was the matter of the narrative.
As it was presently constructed, the narrative of the event cast Elizabeth Bennet as its passive element: a young woman who had found herself in an unfortunate situation through no agency of her own.
Caroline had heard this version from Charlotte Lucas, from Mrs Long, and from three separate people at the Netherfield ball.
It irritated her with a persistence she considered disproportionate to its significance.
Passive victims attracted sympathy. Sympathy was useful.
It had been useful to Elizabeth Bennet in a way that Caroline had not foreseen and did not wish to continue.
Another version was possible. It required no outright invention, as she was too aware of the consequences of being caught in something that could not be credibly retracted.
But the facts, rearranged slightly, emphasised differently, offered through the right channels to the right people, produced a different shape.
A young woman who had been rather often in Mr Darcy’s vicinity, whose mother had a penchant for publicly thinking up matches between her daughters and any wealthy young men within range.
A young woman who had, on the morning in question, gone to return a book to a room she ought to have known Mr Darcy used alone, and early, without announcing her intention to anyone.
It was not a fabrication, surely. It was an interpretation. And interpretations, in Caroline’s experience, travelled as readily as facts and were considerably harder to disprove.
Caroline collected her writing instruments.
She was not vindictive. She wanted to be clear with herself on this point.
What she was doing was corrective. With the stroke of her pen, she was returning the narrative to a shape that more accurately reflected the complexity of human motivation, which the sympathetic version had flattened into something misleadingly simple.
Elizabeth Bennet was not guileless. Nobody who had observed her for five minutes believed that.
It was not unreasonable to wonder whether the situation had been entirely beyond her management.
She began to write. Outside the window, the park was very still, and the sky was the leaden grey that meant snow would soon fall.
Caroline wrote carefully, stopping well short of anything that could be attributed to malice, for that was not her aim. She was merely practical. There was, she had always felt, a meaningful distinction between the two.
There would be consequences for Elizabeth Bennet, of course. So be it. If she did not wish to suffer the consequences, she should not have taken something that belonged by rights to Caroline.