Chapter Sixteen #2
She went to find her sister, locating her after searching through the over-full room for a handful of minutes.
Jane was near the fireplace, talking to Mrs Long with the warmth she brought to all conversations, regardless of their interest to her.
Elizabeth found a position from which she could see both Jane and, across the room, Charles Bingley.
She watched him for ten minutes. Elizabeth did not need ten minutes, as she had the answer in the first two, but she gave herself the full ten. She needed to be certain, for the answer was going to cost her something, and she did not intend to pay in vain.
Mr Bingley was not avoiding Jane outright or treating her coldly.
That was the first thing, and it was important.
He was still the warm and easy man he had always been.
But there was a quality to his movements through the room that had not been present at the previous gatherings.
Mr Bingley circulated and talked to Sir William, to Mrs Long, and to two of the younger Lucas girls.
Mr Bingley laughed at something Mr Robinson said.
Without flaw or reservation, he was an excellent guest.
He did not cross the room to Jane.
But he did look at her. Elizabeth caught him twice.
The quick, suppressed look that suggested he was overriding an instinct, and both times he redirected his attention quickly, hurriedly.
Jane, for her part, talked to Mrs Long with composed, too-effortful brightness.
She did not look toward Mr Bingley more than twice, and both times looked away before he could catch her at it.
Elizabeth watched this and felt something cold settle in her chest.
She knew the mechanism. She had assembled it alongside everything else she had assembled over the past weeks.
Caroline Bingley had been working on him as on the neighbourhood, the same patient pressure applied to her brother rather than to a drawing room, and in much the same way.
The same rearrangement of facts. A Bennet connection, complicated.
A sister whose situation reflected on the family.
An attachment formed quickly and under circumstances that certain people considered worth examining.
Mr Bingley was not a man who would be moved by malice, but he was a man who loved his sister and trusted her judgment.
A misuse of that trust in her judgement, applied consistently and indirectly over several weeks, could move even the most firmly inclined.
That was what Miss Bingley had intended, and it was working.
Jane caught her eye across the room and gave her a smile that was nearly convincing and entirely devastating, and Elizabeth smiled back and felt the cold thing in her chest become something sharper.
Elizabeth had the housemaid. This was the thought that arrived, unbidden and with painful clarity.
She had the testimony. She had the means to end Caroline Bingley’s position in one conversation, to dissolve the mechanism that was operating on Mr Bingley and Jane, on the neighbourhood, and on Mr Darcy himself, to produce the documented proof that would allow the whole apparatus of Miss Bingley’s schemes to be dismantled and examined in the light.
Elizabeth could do it today. She could walk across the room and request five minutes with Mr Darcy and tell him about Meryton and the housemaid and the key.
If she did so, the engagement could be dissolved, and Jane’s situation could have hope again, and Caroline Bingley would be finished forever.
She held this thought and turned it over and examined it from all the angles she had examined before, as though there might be something new to be discovered.
And then, when Elizabeth had completed her examination and found it unchanged from every previous examination, she set it down.
She set it down for Jane, and for Mr Bingley, who had done nothing wrong and deserved none of the consequences. She set it down because Caroline Bingley, despite everything she had done, did not deserve to be destroyed beyond hope of recovery, finished entirely at Elizabeth’s hand.
And she set it down, though she did not examine this as closely as the other reasons, because using it would dissolve the engagement, and she did not want the engagement dissolved.
That wanting was not a reliable reason for anything, but it was real, and she was being honest now, in the cold winter light that came in through the window, and honesty required that she include it in the inventory.
Elizabeth went and stood beside Jane, and they talked about nothing.
She was pleasant and warm and entirely composed, and underneath all of it she felt the shape of her own situation with a clarity that was almost peaceful in its finality.
She could not act — had chosen not to act. The choosing was hers.
The consequences must be as well.
∞∞∞
Darcy had been watching Elizabeth for most of the afternoon, though he did not choose to advertise it.
He had attained a certain measure of experience in camouflaging his attention, and he deployed the skill with the focused application of a man who has convinced himself he is conducting a neutral observation and has not yet admitted that neutral observations rarely produce such a quality of attention.
He had seen her speak to Miss Bingley. Though he had not been close enough to hear it, he had watched the conversation warily.
If Darcy was not much mistaken, what he had seen was no incidental conversation, but a careful performance. It had all the markers: the sympathy, the careful positioning, and the incline of the head that Caroline Bingley used when intending deliberate manipulation.
Darcy did not know what she had said to Elizabeth, and he very much wished he did. Miss Bingley was up to something. Of that much, he had little doubt.
He watched Elizabeth return from the window.
There was no outward sign of what had occurred.
Quite the contrary; she merely stood beside Miss Bennet, seemingly entirely composed.
But he knew that composure, having learned its quality over the course of their tangled engagement, and what he saw in it was not ease.
She was distressed. Whatever Miss Bingley had said had added to something that was already there.
In over two months of close and involuntary study, her expressions had become visible to him.
The composure was real; Darcy was certain of it.
She was managing it genuinely, not performing it, but underneath the management was a woman carrying more than the afternoon should have required of her.
His mind churned through what he had said to Bingley at the card evening and Bingley’s reply, which he had not been able to dismiss.
He thought about the library and Miss Bingley’s offer.
About the careful reason he had given for declining it, about the private reason he had not given, and whether the private reason was the action of a man of honour or the action of a man who had confused his own wishes with someone else’s wellbeing.
Darcy watched Elizabeth smile at her sister and felt the uncomfortable weight of not knowing.
What he did know was this: she had not asked him for anything.
This could mean many things, and he had been assigning it various meanings for weeks with no reliable result.
What he would not do was place his own preference in her path.
If she asked him to dissolve the engagement, he would find a way.
He had resolved this in November, and he resolved it again now, in the way of decisions that have to be made more than once before they hold.
He would not act. But he would find a way to release her, if she asked. Whatever it cost him.
It was then that Elizabeth looked up and found his gaze across the room. For a long moment, neither of them looked away.
Then Miss Bennet said something, and Elizabeth turned to answer her. Darcy forced his gaze away from her, looking meaninglessly into his glass, and the afternoon continued, carrying them along with it.