Chapter Thirteen #2
But Elizabeth’s sympathy for her could only go so far.
Both her plan and her indifference to its results were nothing short of wicked.
The consequences had fallen on Elizabeth when the plan had been for herself.
And as for Mr Darcy, who had been caught in a trap gone only a little awry, Miss Bingley did not really seem to care at all.
Elizabeth walked the rest of the way home, carrying her basket and the far greater burden of a terrible discovery. She spoke now and then to Mary, but said nothing of any substance.
∞∞∞
The weight of the knowledge settled over the afternoon, implacable and unmoveable.
Elizabeth sat in the parlour with her embroidery and made very little progress. Making a slight excuse to her mother and sisters, she went upstairs. Finally alone, Elizabeth sat in her room, staring into space and thinking.
After six weeks of suspicion and circling, and the scratch on the lock plate that proved deliberation without proving agency, she now had something concrete.
Not the sort of proof that would satisfy a court, but the sort that satisfied her: a housemaid, a key, a payment, and a mistress who had been very put out at the outcome.
Assembled alongside everything else she had accumulated, it was sufficient.
It was, by any reasonable standard, a case.
Elizabeth held it and felt its weight, and thought about what cases were for.
Cases were for justice. They were for clearing names, for establishing truth, for ensuring that the person responsible for a thing was known to be responsible.
Elizabeth’s name needed clearing, as did Mr Darcy’s.
Terrible whispers had attached themselves to both of them.
Damage had been done, and it was all the doing of Caroline Bingley.
That much was clear enough, and exactly what she and Mr Darcy had been working toward since the parlour at Longbourn. It was the discovery they had hoped for, the thing that might dissolve an engagement that neither of them had sought.
She should tell Mr Darcy immediately, but Elizabeth could not seem to stop thinking about the consequences of disclosure.
They might clear their names, at least to a degree, but at what cost?
To end the engagement, to show their innocence, they would need to publicise everything Miss Bingley had done. And what then?
Society would judge it all. A woman who had deliberately arranged a compromise would not merely be censured.
She would be finished. Whatever Elizabeth thought of Caroline Bingley’s scheming, her condescension, her calculated unkindness to people she considered beneath her, she did not think she deserved to be destroyed.
And it would be utter destruction; there could be no doubt of it.
She would be ruined entirely, and at Elizabeth’s hand.
She could not quite make herself want that, and she was slightly surprised to find that she could not.
Her own honour had been called into question by this whole affair.
The judgement of society had been harsh and cruel.
Yet Elizabeth found she did not want that same cruelty turned toward Miss Bingley, who would suffer far more, and without the slightest chance of recovery.
What was more, there was Jane, taking careful, fragile steps towards an understanding with Mr Bingley.
If Caroline Bingley were exposed, the Bingley household would not survive it intact.
Likely Mr Bingley would send his sister away, but the scandal would attach to his own name even so.
He would have to leave Hertfordshire; even in London, doors would be closed to him.
And Jane would either lose the man who was quickly coming to hold her heart and all her hopes of happiness, or she would be caught in that shame and exile with him.
Elizabeth crossed to the fireplace and stared into the flames. She held the weapon that could free herself. And yet she felt with utmost conviction that she could not use it.
There was also something else she hesitated to examine directly.
But it was there, in the inventory, when she was honest: that she had sat in a cold study with Mr Darcy and turned a hairpin in a lock, and had walked with him in the park.
She had watched him care for his sister, and had noticed the way he said things, and had felt the weight of his hand on her arm for a moment longer than was required.
Their engagement had ceased to feel entirely like a prison.
Using the information she had would dissolve it once and for all, which was what they had agreed they wanted.
Holding the prospect in her hands on a winter afternoon, she found it rather harder to want than she had expected.
Elizabeth could not bear to examine what that meant, so she put it away.
For the moment, she could do nothing — not until she could think better what she ought to do.
She could not expose Miss Bingley, and she could not tell Mr Darcy what she had found.
Telling him would force a decision she was not prepared to force, and she did not trust her own reasons well enough to name them.
She could not even tell Jane. The truth, and what she ought to do about it, must be no one’s burden but her own.
She went down to supper and was, by all observable measures, perfectly well, only a little quiet.
Perhaps she ought to have known that Jane would notice. Her sister said nothing at the table, but she found Elizabeth afterward in the hallway and held her eyes for a moment with a question in them.
“I am all right,” Elizabeth said before Jane could ask her.
Jane looked at her with obvious disbelief. “You are sure?”
“Quite sure.”
Elizabeth was not sure, not in any meaningful sense of the word. But she smiled, and Jane was too gentle to push her. By mutual accord, they went up to bed, though Elizabeth suspected it would be some time before she could sleep.
∞∞∞
Mr Darcy called the following morning. Elizabeth received him in the parlour, for once grateful that Mrs Bennet remained with them to preserve appearances. It would be considerably easier not to say anything about what she had learned in her mother’s presence.
Elizabeth was composed. She had been composing herself since the previous afternoon with concentrated effort, holding onto it by sheer force of will. She talked about the neighbourhood, about Mr Bingley’s plans for Netherfield in the new year, about a book she had borrowed from the library.
To her mingled alarm and strange exhilaration, Mr Darcy noticed the new constraint in her manner.
That was evident in the furrow that gradually consumed his brow as she went on, talking brightly of nothing.
He did not ask her directly. He would not ask her directly in her mother’s presence, and Elizabeth knew she was using her mother’s presence in a way she was not proud of.
When he left, he paused in the doorway and looked at her for a moment with an expression she could not entirely read. “Are you well?” he asked.
“Very well,” she said. “Thank you.”
He held her gaze for a beat longer than the question required, and she met it steadily.
Then he bowed and left, and she listened to his horse on the gravel, trotting rapidly away.
Though she had done her best to appear at ease, Mr Darcy had clearly sensed a shift in her.
She could feel him knowing it in the careful quality of his attention, in the question at the door, in the look that had not been satisfied by her answer.
He did not know what had shifted or why.
She intended to keep it that way, for now, while she worked out what she was going to do.
Elizabeth was not sure yet. She knew only that she could not bring herself to destroy Caroline Bingley’s life despite considerable provocation, and that she was going to go for a walk in the paddock.
She got her coat.