Chapter Fourteen
The days following her errand to Meryton left Elizabeth strangely exhausted, though she had little enough to do.
They were not unhappy, precisely, but neither were they comfortable.
Some answers bring only more questions, and to the question of what she owed and to whom, Elizabeth could not seem to find an answer.
She walked, read, and listened to her mother’s wedding opinions, which had achieved a new altitude of ambition since Mr Darcy’s income had been more precisely established in the neighbourhood’s collective arithmetic.
She wrote to Aunt Gardiner. Underneath it all, she felt the persistent weight of the thing she was not doing.
She was not telling Mr Darcy what she had discovered.
Elizabeth had revisited the decision every day since she made it, with the restless thoroughness of someone who hopes to find they were wrong.
The logic had not changed. Jane’s happiness depended on a Bingley household that remained intact.
A Bingley household that remained intact required Caroline Bingley to remain unchallenged, and that required Elizabeth’s silence.
And beneath that, quieter but no less present, was her own commitment to honour.
Not simply her own reputation, or anyone else’s.
That was what society thought of one. Honour was something different.
It was what one chose to do, and what one thought of oneself.
Elizabeth did not like Caroline Bingley.
She found it difficult to imagine that she ever would.
But she had found, somewhere in the days of carrying first the ruin of her own reputation, and then the secret of how it had come about, that she could not make herself want her ruin.
The chain was exactly as she had assembled it in her room on the afternoon she came home from Meryton, and no amount of revisiting had found a weak link.
What she had not anticipated was how much the secret would weigh on her. She had made her choice, but Mr Darcy had not had the opportunity to do the same. Was she wrong to make the choice for them both? Elizabeth did not think so, but neither could she feel entirely in the right.
When Mr Darcy called now, as he did with a regularity that Elizabeth thought due both to his understanding of what was expected and right and to an increasing interest in the conversations they shared, Elizabeth was carefully a little less than engaged in the subject of their investigations.
He raised the subject twice in the first week after Elizabeth’s discovery in Meryton, and she deflected it gently, not allowing the topic to advance.
The third time, she said that she had been thinking about it and felt they had perhaps exhausted the current lines of inquiry, and that new information would have to come from elsewhere.
Mr Darcy had looked at her with that careful, unsatisfied attention and said, after a moment, that he thought she might be right. He did not sound convinced, and Elizabeth found herself half admiring and half regretting his perception.
∞∞∞
What had once been intended as a simple supper at Longbourn did not remain so for long.
Through the natural operation of Mrs Bennet’s enthusiasm, the modest original intentions were soon left far behind.
An invitation to Mr Darcy and Mr Bingley must necessarily include the rest of the party at Netherfield Park, and as Mrs Bennet could not bear to have such a triumph with no one to witness it, others must be invited likewise.
One thing seemed to lead to another, until there resulted a degree of preparation in the kitchen that suggested Mrs Bennet considered this supper a rehearsal for the wedding breakfast itself.
Elizabeth helped where she could and got out of the way where she could not, and supervised the placement of the silverware with Jane while their mother could be heard from two rooms away delivering opinions about the fish course.
“She is happy,” Jane said, adjusting a glass with careful precision.
“Indeed, she is,” Elizabeth said. “I have not seen her this happy since we received news that Netherfield Park finally had a tenant — and that tenant, a handsome and eligible young man.”
Jane laughed. “That is not quite the same.”
“No,” Elizabeth agreed. “Now there is reason for her optimism concerning a certain young gentleman.”
They worked in companionable silence for a moment.
The afternoon light was low and golden through the dining-room windows.
Elizabeth found herself enjoying the simple beauty to be found in that light on the fine table settings, an image like something the Dutch masters of two centuries past might have painted.
“Lizzy,” Jane said, without looking up from the silver she was assessing. “Are you certain you are well?”
“You have asked me that three times this week,” Elizabeth remarked lightly.
“You have given me the same answer three times this week, which is not quite the same as truly being well.”
Elizabeth looked at her sister. Jane was still attending to the silverware with the absorbed focus of someone asking a difficult question through the medium of place settings.
“I am managing,” Elizabeth said. That was more honest than the ‘very well’ she had been prepared to offer, and had the added benefit of being true enough.
Jane received this with a slight nod and was generous enough not to press further.
Though the guests arrived promptly, winter dusk had already fallen.
Mr Bingley came in first, enthusiastic and charming as always, and calling forth answering smiles in Jane.
Mr Darcy followed close behind, his sister on his arm.
Miss Darcy came in shyly, but greeted Elizabeth with genuine, if quiet, warmth.
Elizabeth answered her with as much warmth as she could gather when weighed down by low spirits, and was rewarded by seeing Miss Darcy grow more comfortable, and even offer a little mild wit.
The next guests to enter were less satisfactory.
Mrs Hurst was civil enough, if her expression was rather sneering, and Mr Hurst found the most comfortable chair in the room by some unerring instinct and occupied it.
Miss Bingley came last. She looked around the Longbourn drawing room with mild curiosity and a degree of judgement she did not trouble herself to hide.
Even as Elizabeth felt that judgement, she found her eyes meeting Mr Darcy’s across the room.
He smiled at her, a wealth of conversation and shared feeling in that smile. Elizabeth felt the familiar and inconvenient warmth of it and looked away first.
Supper was a success, at least by the standards of Mrs Bennet and of society.
The fish was excellent. The room was warm despite the chill of the winter night.
At the far end of the table, Mr Bingley and Jane politely pretended to be attending to the general conversation while attending only to each other, a state of affairs that Elizabeth found almost as satisfying as her mother seemed to.
With only a very little prompting by Elizabeth, Miss Darcy and Mary began to talk to each other of the pianoforte, and both found so much interest in the conversation that Miss Darcy became less shy than usual, and Mary rather better company.
Mrs Hurst seemed at least to enjoy showing off the superiority of her manners, and Mr Hurst ate with appreciation.
Elizabeth might have enjoyed the supper herself if her mother had not talked animatedly and almost without stopping about the wedding.
Mrs Bennet spoke of the flowers, the wedding breakfast, and the question of whether they ought to take a second carriage when returning from the church to Longbourn, which had been settled and unsettled four times in the past week.
Then there was the matter of Pemberley, which she had apparently been researching with the focus of a general studying terrain, and which she now described in detail that suggested she had memorised a passage from a guide and was reciting it while adding her own amendments.
Elizabeth ate her fish and did not offer her own commentary or opinions.
Across the table, Mr Darcy ate his meal with admirable patience and restraint.
At a pause in her mother’s account of Pemberley’s best aspect, he glanced at Elizabeth.
His expression was composed, but his eyes conveyed something that was not quite suppressed amusement and not quite sympathy, and was, in the very brief instant of the exchange, perfectly legible.
Elizabeth pressed her lips together, and Mr Darcy returned to his plate.
It was the kind of shared moment that requires no words and leaves a warmth behind it that persists longer than it has any reason to. Elizabeth was keenly aware of it, and aware too that it had raised her spirits and made her heart flutter as nothing else had for some time.
As the supper progressed, Mr Robinson turned to the table with the jovial air of a man sharing an observation he considers universally amusing.
“Well,” he said, “I suppose some engagements want a great deal of time and others want very little. Yours, Mr Darcy, must be the fastest I have heard of in the county. Say what you like, there is something to be said for a decisive man.”
He laughed loudly and unrestrainedly. Mr Hurst laughed with him, not troubling to enquire what the jest had been, while the more perceptive of the guests offered polite smiles with more or less tension in them.
Elizabeth could not bring herself to do either.
For a single, horrible moment, she felt almost as though she might cry, a humiliation too terrible to imagine.
She must say something, surely, but she did not believe she could.
Not without betraying an irritation that everyone would understand as vulnerability.