Chapter Fifteen #2
“Certainly not,” Darcy said civilly. In fact, she did, but his own disturbed state of mind was hardly a reason to be rude to his friend’s sister.
Miss Bingley hesitated a moment. “May we speak?”
Darcy indicated the chair across from the desk, and she sat with graceful precision.
Having achieved a suitable pose, Miss Bingley looked at him with a carefully crafted expression of sympathy.
Though it was evidentially intended to convey reassurance, Darcy would rather have called the emotion it evoked in him wariness.
“I have been concerned about you,” Miss Bingley said, elegantly tentative. “The situation is not a happy one.”
“I am quite well.”
“You are not, I think.” Darcy felt his breath catch, though she had spoken gently. “I have watched you, Mr Darcy, for a long time. I know you are carrying something you should not have to carry alone.”
He said nothing. He was good at saying nothing, and he deployed the tactic now as the most honest response.
“The engagement,” Miss Bingley said. She paused, then continued with rehearsed care. “I know you will not speak ill of it. I know you better than to expect that. But I also know you well enough to see what it is costing you, and I cannot stay silent when there may be something that would help.”
“Miss Bingley —”
“Please.” She held his gaze steadily. “I have heard something from Mr Hurst’s solicitor that I feel you ought to know. I would not have sought the information, only it came up in a conversation about quite another matter. Given the circumstances, I thought you should be aware it exists.”
He waited.
“An engagement,” she said, “dissolved by mutual consent where both parties can credibly attest that the original circumstance was accidental rather than designed, need not be the public rupture one might fear. Managed with discretion, with the appropriate documentation — witness testimony, if it were available — it can be handled quietly. The damage to both parties’ reputations, handled correctly, would be significantly less than one might expect.
” She squeezed her hands together. “Particularly if another engagement were to follow, in either direction. Something that gave the neighbourhood somewhere else to direct its attention.”
She concluded her speech. The fire settled in the grate.
Darcy looked at her for a long moment. He understood precisely what she had said, and he also understood what she had not said.
It required no elaboration. Another engagement, in either direction.
She did not speak abstractly. Caroline Bingley sat across from him, offering a mechanism and positioning herself as its instrument.
It was a clever suggestion, in one sense.
Society would indeed be quick to forget about the scandal Darcy had found himself embroiled in under such circumstances.
“That is a considerable amount of information to come from a conversation about another matter,” he said, his voice carefully even.
Miss Bingley’s expression did not waver. “I thought you should know it was possible. That is all.”
“And the witness testimony,” he said. “You believe that could be produced.”
“I believe,” she said carefully, “that if the circumstance was as accidental as has been stated, there may be people who could attest to that.”
Darcy looked at the fire. He thought about Elizabeth at the whist table. He thought about Bingley’s observation, which he could not make himself discard, and about the word tolerable.
He had not previously allowed himself to consider what he wanted, but it was no longer avoidable.
Darcy could not help knowing what he wanted.
He did not want the engagement dissolved.
He had not wanted it dissolved for some time.
That desire was not his alone to act on, but it was real, and it sat in him with the stubborn specificity of something that had decided where it lived and was not moving.
“There is a difficulty,” he said, “with the proposal you have described.”
“Oh?” Miss Bingley’s voice was measured.
“A quiet dissolution, however managed and documented, would restore my reputation with little difficulty.” He kept his voice level.
“Miss Elizabeth Bennet’s reputation is another matter.
The initial compromise that threatened her reputation would remain.
The neighbourhood has already constructed one version of events that does not favour her.
A dissolution, however discreet, would resurrect the initial harm, and add still more upon it.
” He paused. “I do not see how the mathematics improve for her in such a case.”
Miss Bingley was quiet for a moment. Something moved behind her expression that he could not quite name. “With the right handling —”
“No amount of handling,” he said, “changes the fundamental arithmetic.” He said it without heat, because heat was not required. “I appreciate that you have brought this to my attention. But I do not think it is the path forward.”
Miss Bingley held his gaze for a moment, then looked down at her hands and inclined her head with the gracious composure of a woman accepting a decision while disagreeing entirely.
“Of course,” she said. “I only wanted you to know it existed. Whatever you decide is, as it always has been, entirely your own affair.”
She left shortly afterward, walking with a light and graceful step. Darcy listened to her footsteps in the corridor and sat for a time, looking into the fire.
He had told her the truth, as far as it went. Such a dissolution would not serve to protect Elizabeth or to restore her reputation. That much was true.
But it was also true that he was not capable, at this point, of promoting an arrangement that removed her from his life entirely. Not without being asked. Not while Bingley’s reading of their circumstances sat unresolved in his chest, impossible to put down.
Though he could not honourably act on what he wanted, Darcy refused to construct the mechanism of its opposite.
Darcy picked up his correspondence and attended to it with careful discipline. He did not think about Miss Bingley’s offer again.
There was no need. Whatever might happen, however so painful a circumstance might be resolved, it would not be by making Elizabeth Bennet the object of blame. Not by his hands, and not if it could be prevented by any effort of his, however great.
Of that much, Darcy was already entirely certain.