Chapter Seventeen #2
She was going to return to Miss Darcy’s sitting room, where she would drink whatever was left of the tea and be adequately composed.
Elizabeth let out a long, slow breath, gathering her resolve.
That was exactly what she would do, and she would do it because it was the only thing available to her.
Because Jane was in that room carrying her own weight and did not need Elizabeth’s added to it.
And because the alternative was standing at this window for the rest of the morning, achieving nothing besides being rude to Miss Darcy.
With concentrated effort, she turned from the window and walked back down the corridor, found the sitting room, and went in.
Miss Darcy remained concentrated on her playing.
She was so immersed in the music that she likely had not even realised Elizabeth had been gone from the room.
Jane looked up when she entered, a question in her expression that she would not ask and Elizabeth could not answer.
Elizabeth sat down beside her and accepted her cup and did her best to be entirely composed.
Jane took her hand briefly and said nothing. She only gave a gentle smile, which at once told Elizabeth that she had not been as composed as she had hoped. Both were very welcome at that moment: the smile, full of a sister’s love, and the silence, full of a sister’s understanding.
She sat with Jane and listened to Miss Darcy play.
The room was warm, while outside, the Hertfordshire winter pressed grey and unforgivingly against the glass.
Elizabeth held herself very still and thought about nothing at all, with a determination that was its own kind of answer, and that she recognised even as she practised it as something she could not keep up for long.
∞∞∞
Bingley’s reply arrived before Darcy had finished speaking.
“But surely Miss Bennet’s discomfort comes from believing you feel trapped, not from her own reluctance?”
Darcy turned from the window. The continuation of the conversation from the Robinsons’ card evening had not grown less disquieting in the interval.
Bingley, seeing that Darcy’s mood and countenance had not improved in the days since, had returned to the subject in an effort to cheer his friend. Or, perhaps, to reason with him.
Bingley was looking at him with the expression he wore when he believed he was being obvious and could not understand why the other person was not following. It was an expression Darcy had seen often, though it had never before made him feel as though the floor had shifted slightly beneath him.
“What makes you say that?” he said, with a care that Bingley likely heard as composure, though it was not.
“Because I have eyes,” Bingley said patiently.
“And because I have watched her across a great many rooms and tables over the past weeks, and what I see when she looks at you is not a woman counting the days until she can be free. It is a woman who has decided not to look too often, which is a different thing entirely.” He rubbed his chin.
“The forced smiles you describe. When does she smile like that? Not when she is talking to you. When she thinks you are not happy.”
Darcy said nothing. He was engaged in the uncomfortable work of comparing Bingley’s observations to everything he had concluded, and finding that they did not produce the same picture.
“She deflected the investigation,” he said finally.
“Yes,” Bingley said. “And you have decided that meant the worst.” He tilted his head. “Has it occurred to you that she might have found something she is protecting someone else from?”
Darcy was at the point of answering when he happened to glance at the library door.
It was closed. It had been open when they came in. He looked at it, and understanding came approximately a minute too late.
∞∞∞
Darcy did not go to the sitting room immediately. He stood in the library for a while after Bingley had excused himself, looking at the door and conducting the kind of internal inventory that requires stillness and produces very little comfort.
Bingley’s reading was possible. He held it honestly, with the same discipline he applied to things he wanted to be true and therefore had to be most careful about.
It was possible that what he had taken for Elizabeth’s reluctance was protective distance.
That the deflection of the investigation had a different source than the one he had assigned it.
It was also possible that he had formed an attachment he had not intended and was now constructing arguments that served the attachment, and that Bingley, who was constitutionally optimistic about human affection, was perhaps not the most rigorous source.
He was still considering both possibilities when he went upstairs.
Darcy resisted the temptation to seek her out for another five minutes.
But he was in need of further evidence, for additional data was required for him to make any decision about his feelings or Elizabeth’s regard.
With Bingley’s interpretation held carefully, as one would hold a fragile hope, he entered the sitting room.
Georgiana was at the instrument but not playing, turning pages with the absorbed focus she brought to music even in its static form. Jane sat near the fire. Elizabeth was beside her, cup in hand.
She looked up when he came in. Something moved through her expression, quick and carefully managed, and then her face was composed again.
She said, “Mr Darcy,” in a pleasant, neutral tone that gave away nothing.
Darcy concealed a flinch. It was so very cold, compared to the tone of teasing challenge that sounded so well from her lips.
“Miss Elizabeth. Miss Bennet,” he said. “I hope I am not interrupting.”
“Not at all.” Elizabeth gestured lightly at nothing in particular. “Your sister has been keeping us well entertained. She is a most accomplished pianist.”
Georgiana looked up from her pages, blushing a little, but obviously pleased by the compliment. Darcy sat down because to remain standing would have been strange, and because some part of him that he was no longer entirely trusting had decided that he needed to see her, and he was here now.
Telling himself he must maintain some measure of dignity and self-control, Darcy cleared his throat. “And — is your family in good health? Mrs Bennet, is she quite well?”
“Very well, thank you,” Elizabeth said. “She has been occupied with the question of which hymn is most suitable for the ceremony. The debate has now entered its fifth day.”
“I was not aware that there could be so many opinions on the subject.”
“There are at least four. Possibly five. I have lost count of the iterations.” She set down her cup with precise care. “I believe the church organist has been consulted twice and has ceased responding to correspondence.”
“That seems understandable.”
“It does. I should adopt that policy myself if we did not live in the same house. I hope the question will be resolved before the New Year. For everyone’s sake.”
“That seems prudent,” Darcy said.
A silence established itself and stretched out, heavy and uneasy.
Darcy looked at her and felt the sharpness of that silence bury itself in his chest. “Have you been walking this week?” he asked. “The frost has held. The lanes must be passable.”
“A little. The paddock, mostly.” She glanced at him briefly. “Not the kind of walking that produces anything useful.”
“Walking does not always need to produce something useful.”
“No,” she said. “I suppose it does not.”
Elizabeth looked at the fire again.
Darcy saw her gather something. There was a subtle shift in her expression, the slight quickening of attention that he had come to know as the precursor to her wit, to the angle of observation she brought to things when she was most herself.
He watched it assemble, and he waited for it with a smile of anticipation on his lips.
It did not come.
Whatever she had been about to say, she decided against it. The expression settled back into mere pleasantness, and she reached for her cup. The ghost of the woman he had first met walked through the room, taking his Elizabeth’s lightness with her.
It was only a minor witticism, certainly, one she judged not worth saying, and yet Darcy felt its absence keenly.
“The library,” she said after a moment. “Have you been in it recently? I thought I might look in this morning, but I found I did not want to after all.”
“I was there this morning,” he said. He kept his voice level. “With Bingley.”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said, and drank her tea.
She knew. Or she had been in the corridor, or had heard something, and whatever she had heard had produced the pleasant tone and the stalled wit and the careful levelness.
He did not know how much she had heard or what shape it had taken from where she had stood, and he could not ask, not here, not with Georgiana at the instrument and Miss Bennet three feet away.
He stayed for twenty minutes, which was the minimum that would not appear a retreat, and then left.
Darcy went to the window at the eastern end of the corridor. It was the closest available point of stillness and a good distance away from both the library and the sitting room, and he needed a moment in which neither of them was immediately present.
Bingley’s sentence still rang in his head.
Her discomfort comes from believing you feel trapped, not from her own reluctance.
He wanted to believe it, only too much. That statement had not loosened its hold.
The conversation in the sitting room had not helped him resolve it in either direction.
What he had observed was a woman working to be pleasant and not quite managing to be herself, and he could read that two ways and had been reading it two ways for the better part of an hour with no conclusion.
What he could not read away was the stalled wit.
He knew that quality, the gathering and the deciding against saying anything at all, because he had watched her choose to be funny in situations where it would have been easier not to be, and the absence of it was its own kind of information.
She had been going to say something real and had pulled it back.
The pulling back had not looked like someone who did not care.
It had looked like someone who cared too much to risk it.
Darcy was at a loss to reconcile his conflicting thoughts. He remained stationed at the end of the eastern corridor until he heard Elizabeth and Miss Bennet exit the sitting room, thanking Georgiana for the afternoon.
He followed them to the entrance hall, weighing whether to speak, and how to achieve a moment’s privacy if he did. He paused on the stairs, not deliberately, but because the tableau below held him for a moment.
Georgiana had already gone. Elizabeth and Miss Bennet were momentarily alone, the servant perhaps having been dispatched to bring the carriage around.
He was above and behind them, on the curve of the staircase, and the entrance hall carried sound rather further than people standing in it might expect.
“I cannot bear it,” Elizabeth said. Her voice was low and not low enough. “That he should suffer this engagement when his every action shows he wishes to be released from it.”
He stopped, blood chilling in his veins.
Miss Bennet must have said something. He did not hear it.
The words did not arrive. By the time his hearing had adjusted from the shock of Elizabeth’s sentence to the acoustics of the hall, Miss Bennets’s response had already passed through the air and dissolved, and the door was opening, and Elizabeth was moving toward the carriage.
He did not move. He could not move.
He wishes to be released.
She thought he wanted to be free of her.
In that moment he understood, with the painful clarity that arrived too late, that they had been reading each other wrong in perfect symmetry for weeks with complete sincerity and considerable damage.
Darcy closed his eyes for a long moment. He opened them to find that Georgiana had come to stand next to him and was watching the carriage through the narrow window beside the door with an uncertain expression.
“Brother?” she asked tentatively.
“I am well,” he said, which was not what she had asked and did not answer the question he knew she wanted to ask. To his considerable relief, Georgiana accepted it with the grace she brought to things she understood better than she said.
He went back to the library. Standing at the window again, Darcy looked out at the frost-silvered garden, which had not changed since morning, and thought about the weight of misunderstandings.