Chapter Eighteen
In winter, the paddock behind Longbourn had very little to recommend it.
The grass was iron-hard underfoot, and the hedgerows had been stripped to their architecture.
The sky sat low and steely grey, threatening snow without quite committing to it.
Elizabeth walked the paddock anyway, because the garden circles meant she was working something out, and she was not ready to be seen working this out.
But after forty minutes in the paddock, the problem still stubbornly refused to resolve itself.
Upon coming home from Netherfield the previous afternoon, Elizabeth had been careful not to appear ill at ease or give her family any reason to worry over her.
She had gone to bed at a reasonable hour and had not slept until well past two.
That was becoming a habit, although it was not one she wished to endorse.
She had lain in the dark and done what she had spent the past several weeks refusing to do: namely, to lay the situation out in its entirety and look at all of it at once.
There could no longer be any doubt who was responsible for the compromise, even if it had not enfolded quite as that person had intended.
She also knew the identity of the housemaid more immediately responsible, which meant there was access to testimony.
She had, as Caroline Bingley had made plain at Lady Lucas’s tea, everything required for a quiet and credible dissolution.
Elizabeth was not going to use it; she had decided this and undecided it and decided it over again.
Standing in the frost-hardened paddock she decided it for what she intended to be the final time, because she knew this time that no matter how much she thought about it, no matter how Mr Darcy looked at her with quizzical brows and eyes full of concern, that she could not produce a different answer.
Even to free herself, even to free Mr Darcy, she could not see Miss Bingley utterly ruined, her life as good as over.
In her angrier moments, the moments in which Elizabeth recalled how readily Miss Bingley had washed her hands of it all, Elizabeth wished she could.
Surely there was something of justice in seeing the consequences of Miss Bingley’s selfishness rebounded on her own head.
And there was, only if Elizabeth made the truth public, the consequences would not fit the crime. She could have happily sentenced Miss Bingley to a season or two of public embarrassment, a little judgement from her acquaintances, if such would have been the result of exposure.
Elizabeth knew very well that it would not.
A story such as this was not forgivable, and if it were publicly known, Miss Bingley would be dead to society in every way that mattered.
Every door in England would be closed to her; every acquaintance would cut her, and if her substantial dowry could yet buy her any kind of husband, it could only be a most unequal marriage.
Perhaps all that was justice. When she thought of all Miss Bingley’s schemes, Elizabeth felt angrily that it was.
Only she knew, in quieter moments, that it could not come at her hands. Elizabeth could not wish to choose such suffering for anyone, even a woman who had brought it on herself.
Then, too, there was Jane. Jane’s happiness was contingent on a Bingley household that remained intact, while Miss Bingley’s exposure and disgrace would comprehend all her family.
Elizabeth felt rather glad of the need to protect her sister’s happiness.
That, at least, was a reason that left her hopeful, rather than hopelessly angry.
But there was yet one more reason. Elizabeth could not deceive herself on that point, though she might have wished to.
She did not want to dissolve the engagement.
Elizabeth turned at the far hedge and looked back at the house. The house she had longed to return to when she was at Netherfield, and that she now found she could not sit still in.
She wanted the engagement, not as a convenient salve for her reputation or for the opportunity to marry a rich and respected man, but because she wanted it to be real.
What had caused the change? Elizabeth could hardly say.
It was the gentle, slow accumulation of experiences and shifted opinions of Mr Darcy.
It had been the walk they had taken together and the card evening and the way he had silenced Mrs Pearce, and every conversation that had been better than the one before it, and the almost-laugh at her own supper table, and the weight of his hand on her arm on the December path.
These feelings had been assembling for weeks with the patience of something that does not announce itself until it is already finished.
It did not matter, because he had stood in the library at Netherfield and made his hesitation perfectly clear.
Her breath made a small cloud in the cold air and dispersed.
What she had, then, was what she had started with, and this latest development did not shift her opinions.
Half out of love for Jane and half out of knowledge that the punishment would be too great, she could not expose Caroline Bingley.
She wanted the engagement and could not have it as anything other than an endurance for both parties.
She was going to be married, probably, to a man who wished she were someone else’s problem, and she was going to conduct that marriage with integrity and warmth and the best of herself, because it was what she had promised and because it was all that was left to offer.
Or she was going to be dissolved from it, quietly and legally, and return to Longbourn and watch Jane’s happiness through someone else’s window.
Elizabeth could not have what she wanted.
This was not a new condition. She had arrived at it gradually and was now standing in it fully.
Almost to her surprise, she found was that it was survivable, and that surviving it was going to require her to stop going over it in the paddock and find something useful to do.
She went inside and helped Mrs Hill calm her mother’s latest hysterics, and said nothing about any of it to anyone.
∞∞∞
Darcy wrote a handful of letters that evening; he put all but one in the fire.
The first letter, and the only one to be franked and given to a servant for the post, was intended to follow Georgiana to London. She would laugh to know he had written so quickly after her departure, and she would know that, as always, her brother thought of her and loved her.
The next letters were of business, but he was so distracted that he made several critical errors, muddling his points, becoming startlingly more personal than he intended and less legible than he required. With a muttered oath, Darcy consigned them to the fire.
Another letter was to Elizabeth. That letter, he had not intended to write at all.
He had sat down at his desk for practical purposes and had found, when other letters proved unwritable, that his hand had produced her name at the top of a fresh sheet, and he had written half a page before he understood what he was writing, which was everything he had not said and could not say. He burned that, too.
Let the evidence of his weakness collapse into ash. The fire had opinions about nothing.
He had not slept. He had gone to bed at a reasonable hour because there was no useful reason to stay up, only to lie in the dark with the entrance hall replaying with painful persistence.
I cannot bear that he should suffer this engagement when his every action shows he wishes to be released from it.
Elizabeth’s voice, low and steady and carrying further than she knew. The shape of Miss Bennet’s response, audible and inaudible in equal parts.
He had tried, over the hours of the night, to hold Bingley’s reading of it alongside what he had heard, and to determine which was more reliable.
Bingley believed she cared, but Bingley was constitutionally disposed to believe people cared for each other: that was one of the things that made him Bingley.
Against Bingley’s reading was her own voice, in her own words, in a private moment she had not known he was witnessing.
Was it a matter for hope or for deepest despair that she believed he wanted to be free of her?
It was at least transparent where the belief had come from.
He had stood at a library window and told Bingley the engagement was solely made out of honour.
Elizabeth must have heard it, and she had been terribly composed.
Darcy had watched the composure settle over her like something she had put on deliberately, and had known, in that moment, that the passage had not given her enough to understand him.
Only quite enough to misunderstand him entirely.
Ruefully, Darcy knew he had built the misunderstanding with his own hands.
His reticence, his carefulness, his refusal to place his feelings in her way — each of these had been both well-intentioned and ultimately disastrous.
He had tried to do right by her and had done something that looked, from her side of things, indistinguishable from wanting to escape.
It could not now be corrected without saying things that were not his to say. He could not tell her that what she had overheard was not what it had appeared to be without telling her what it actually was. Not without placing his feelings directly in her path, which he had resolved not to do.
Not without telling her directly: I do not want to be released.
I have not wanted to be released since we walked together at Netherfield, and possibly before, and the engagement is the best thing that has happened to me in years.
He could not say any of it, because she had stood in the entrance hall and told Jane she could not bear that he should suffer, which was the language of compassion and obligation, not attachment.
One did not describe a man’s feelings as suffering one could not bear if one returned them.
He was the cause of her distress. Darcy had been, in one form or another, since the corridor and the servants’ faces and the first understanding of what the situation would cost her.
He had tried to mitigate this, and had instead extended it, and every attempt he had made to do right by her had made matters worse.
Miss Bingley’s visit to the library had been the latest instance.
He had declined the mechanism she offered.
A dissolution conducted in such a manner, and without a way to salvage her reputation, would not have served Elizabeth.
But his refusal had produced nothing except the continued arrangement, which was serving neither of them.
As the fire burned low, Darcy’s thoughts turned to marriage, and what it would mean for them both.
He had made his peace with the public arrangement in the first days of the engagement; it was the private nature of their marriage-to-be that continued to haunt him.
The daily proximity of a woman he had come to know and to value with a specificity that made the word, ‘value’, feel insufficient, who would be in his house and at his table and across from him in carriages for the rest of their lives.
Who would be there under the terms of an engagement neither of them had chosen, and who would conduct it with the grace and the wit and the integrity he had come to expect from her, and who would find it a loveless arrangement and would not say so because she was not a woman who said such things.
This was survivable. He would have to believe so, because he was not in a position to believe otherwise.
What was available to him, honourable, and consistent with what he had promised her was to ensure that the marriage, if it became a marriage, was as easy for her as it could be made.
He had said this to her in the parlour at Longbourn in the first days, in the formal language of a proposal that had not been made in happiness.
Darcy had meant it then as duty, and he meant it now as something more.
He must not press her. He must not place his feelings in her way. He would conduct himself, for whatever remained of the engagement and beyond it, with honour. Whatever that might mean in a marriage where the man loved his wife, and the wife wished she were anywhere else.
Darcy would do this because it was right, and because the alternative was a dissolution that would take her out of his life entirely. At eleven o’clock in front of a dying fire, he was honest enough with himself to know that he was not prepared to forward that outcome without being asked directly.
He had not been asked. Until he was, he would stay.
He banked the fire and went to bed, and lay in the dark for a long time, and eventually arrived at something that was not peace but was at least exhaustion sufficient to permit sleep.