Chapter 27
“Lizzy, you great clodhopper! You almost knocked me down. Have you heard the news too?” Lydia exclaimed, all in a rush and with great excitement.
“Lydia? Kitty?” Elizabeth gasped in between short, quick breaths as her two youngest sisters caught at her excitedly, halting her mad run through the back lanes away from Belton Manor. “What…I…No. What news?”
She had run blindly, not consciously knowing what she was running from, or where she was running to.
It seemed her feet had taken her back toward Longbourn, even though Elizabeth wasn’t sure it was where she wanted to be.
Good God, what had she just seen at Belton Manor?
How could she ever tell Jane? Or their mother? !
“You’ll never guess what, Lizzy,” Kitty put to her, almost dancing with anticipation of telling. “You’ll really, really never guess. But why are you in such a tizzy anyway, if you don’t already know?”
“Mother heard that Lord Grantchester was at Belton Manor and sent me over to invite him to supper, but…” Elizabeth began to explain and then halted abruptly, knowing that she could go no further.
The image flashed into her head again of the two men standing in one another’s arms, their locked eyes full of love. Gradually, her initial shock at the sight was fading and being replaced by other emotions.
There was some anger at the deception practiced on innocent Jane, but also some gratitude for Lord Grantchester’s subsequent breaking of the engagement, and astonishment at the hiding of so important a secret.
Elizabeth knew with certainty now that he could never have loved her sister, not as he loved Lord Keeble.
Surely no one could look on two people with such a gaze, man or woman.
Elizabeth also felt a twinge of compassion as she realised how frightened both Lord Grantchester and Lord Keeble’s faces had grown when she burst into the room and saw them.
Men might love other men in the ancient Greek myths she had read in her father’s library, but out in the modern world of nineteenth-century England, such love could draw only mockery, censure, or worse.
“Oh, pooh to supper invitations,” Lydia thankfully talked across Elizabeth without asking for further details, and was then herself interrupted by Kitty again.
“Our gossip is far more exciting than supper invitations…Oh, Lord Grantchester, did you hear what has happened in Meryton?”
Lord Grantchester had pulled up beside the young women, breathless and in his shirt sleeves as he had been in the library.
He clutched a jacket in his hands, presumably snatched up as he ran after Elizabeth.
His anxious eyes turned to her, and she shook her head silently, trying to indicate that he should say nothing before her sisters.
“I…have not…been to…Meryton,” he panted, before bending over to catch his breath, evidently having chased Elizabeth all the way from Belton Manor and suffering from the exercise more than her.
“Stop interrupting, Kitty!” Lydia complained. “I want to tell them. Anyway, you will never guess who has been caught in a scandal at Wickham’s lodgings this morning…Miss Bingley! It’s all over Meryton, and Maria Lucas says that it will be in London by sundown.”
“I dare say her brother is searching for Wickham now and will call him out for a duel!” added Kitty, not to be outdone by her more forceful younger sister.
“No, she will have to marry him,” Lydia contradicted Kitty. “Lucky thing!”
“If this is true, Miss Bingley is not lucky at all, and greatly to be pitied,” Elizabeth declared, horrified both by the tale and her younger sisters’ flippant telling of it. “You had both better hold your tongues and not make a bad matter worse by telling anyone else.”
“You don’t even like Miss Bingley, Lizzy,” protested Lydia. “I heard you say that she was a small-minded social climber of limited understanding.”
“That does not matter,” Elizabeth snapped. “You should not repeat private comments like that either. Have neither of you any decency or good sense?”
“You act as though we are the ones who had been naughty,” Kitty complained, pouting like a child.
“Miss Elizabeth is right,” Lord Grantchester pronounced. “This kind of gossip can ruin lives, if only you were old enough to understand.”
While they glowered under this criticism, the younger girls showed more respect for his view than they had done for Elizabeth’s, or perhaps for the combination of views from two older persons, and at last fell silent.
“Where is Miss Bingley now?” asked Lord Grantchester soberly, but Lydia and Kitty only shrugged.
“We don’t know. We heard she ran away when they were discovered, but it was too late,” Kitty told them.
“Yes, Wickham’s landlady, neighbours and half of the regiment’s officers had seen her alone in Wickham’s lodgings, and Wickham without his jacket or shoes on,” put in Lydia, furnishing all the salacious details she could.
Belatedly, Lord Grantchester pulled on his own jacket, as if reminded by the mention of the potential indecency of a gentleman’s shirtsleeves.
He and Elizabeth exchanged a look of understanding at the seriousness of what had passed in Meryton, whether in reality or the public imagination.
Either would be equally disastrous for Caroline Bingley.
“Go straight home now and don’t stop to talk to any of your friends,” Elizabeth ordered her younger sisters. “Tell Mother I am speaking to Lord Grantchester and will be home after that.”
They obeyed with a surprising lack of resistance, likely eager to at least tell the dreadful tale to their parents, Jane, and Mary, even if they had been forbidden to tell others.
“We must talk,” Elizabeth said to Lord Grantchester once they were alone. “There are certain matters you ought to explain. I will tell no one else, except for Jane, where explanation is owed most.”
Nodding acceptance, he offered her his arm, and they began to walk slowly together toward Longbourn.
“I suppose I should first thank you for your understanding, shouldn’t I?” he began. “It is not a common thing, you know. I shall also tell you that Matthew and I love one another. We have loved one another for a long time.”
“That is clear to me now,” Elizabeth told him, thinking back over their whole acquaintance and the way she had seen his face light up whenever Lord Keeble entered a room.
“Do you despise me now that you know?”
Elizabeth shook her head. “I would have despised you if you had married Jane under false pretences, knowing that you could never love her,” she answered. “As you ended the engagement, I can only be angry at you for stringing Jane along and playing with her feelings.”
“I am truly sorry,” Lord Grantchester told her. “Perhaps, at the start, I hoped Jane would realise my nature and accept me as I am. There are many similar society marriages based on such understandings, some of them even happy.”
“Yes, although I suspect the happy ones were never deceived,” Elizabeth said tartly. She would not let him off the hook quite so easily as that.
“My own family was so relieved at the engagement,” he continued with a sad, weary smile.
“My mother and sisters must know, or at least suspect, what is between Matthew and I, and they fear for me on account of it. Their feelings also influenced me, but I never intended to hurt Jane. She is truly the sweetest-natured and most beautiful woman I have ever met.”
“Jane is someone who needs to love and to be loved,” Elizabeth told him. “She deserves to be loved, as you and Lord Keeble love. These society marriages that are not marriages might be enough for some people, but my sister could never be happy in such an arrangement.”
“I came to see that,” Lord Grantchester acknowledged. “I could not go through with it once this became clear to me. It was not right. If I am to marry, and would be safer for me to do so, it must be to a very different kind of woman.”
“It would have been very wrong indeed for you to marry Jane and presumably continue your life with Lord Keeble,” Elizabeth told him soberly.
“There are many other ladies who are not seeking love in marriage, only security, social position, or companionship. Some of them would surely understand and accept you.”
To his credit, Lord Grantchester owned his actions and accepted the fairness of her reproaches. “There were other roads I might have taken,” he agreed. “Other roads I should have taken, if I had not let my liking for your sister sway my better judgement.”
Now that the harms to Jane had been exposed to the light and acknowledged, Elizabeth’s mind looked further afield and turned quickly to Fitzwilliam Darcy, the only person to have warned against the match from the first.
Every one of Mr Darcy’s infuriating past statements and warnings came back to Elizabeth in a new light, and she groaned at how badly she had misunderstood and mistreated him.
“Oh, how unfairly I judged Mr Darcy on your account, Lord Grantchester!” Elizabeth groaned.
“It was Darcy’s intervention that finally made me see sense and end the engagement,” he admitted. “I might otherwise have fooled myself, and your sister, for several months longer. No one else would have challenged me.”
“Others knew,” Elizabeth reflected aloud with deepening dismay as she realised the breadth of the deception Jane had almost been trapped in. “Oh my, your other friends, your family, they all knew, and none would have spoken. Only Mr Darcy.”
Lord Grantchester nodded, his expression slightly ashamed, although in this moment Elizabeth found herself blaming him less than she blamed others around him.
While nothing could have justified deceiving Jane in so dreadful a manner, Elizabeth could understand the fears and pressures that had driven Lord Grantchester.
But what excuse had everyone else? Had no one but Mr Darcy seen the wrongness of the match?
“Darcy can only speak the truth as he finds it, even if he makes himself seem objectionable,” Lord Grantchester said then, giving words to Elizabeth’s thoughts.
This was true, and Elizabeth’s heart swelled with pride for Mr Darcy, although she knew she had no right to such emotions on his behalf. He was going away tomorrow, and they might never meet again.
“Mr Darcy has been a good friend indeed, both to you and to my family, if they only knew it,” she said ruefully.
“Fitzwilliam Darcy is one of the best men I know. If other men could be half so upright, the world would be a better place, but some are rogues and the rest of us are…only human and fallible.”
Elizabeth smiled and patted Lord Grantchester’s arm.
“Yes, most of us are human and fallible, including Mr Darcy, for all his excellent qualities. He is not always right, although he was in this case, and might believe himself so in all others. He needs good friends like you and I to remind him of his humanity, I think.”
“And what of you and I? Can we still be friends after all this?” Lord Grantchester asked her. “I shall understand if you do not wish it so, but I would be sorry for it, just as I am sorry to lose Jane’s company.”
Pausing in the road and removing her hand from his arm, Elizabeth held it out to him and shook his hand as though they were two gentlemen concluding a deal. “Yes, we are still friends, John,” she told him. “You must thank Mr Darcy for that.”
Lord Grantchester smiled and gave a long sigh of relief, tension visibly lifting from his shoulders and jaw as they continued walking together.
“Thank you. Can I ask that you tell Jane the full story one day, but not yet? I should like the dust to settle on our engagement and for Jane to forget me, if she can.”
“Jane is moving on,” Elizabeth assured him, thinking of her sister smiling happily into the face of Charles Bingley at the Meryton assembly rooms. “She too feels that it was right to break the engagement, although she cannot say why. Yes, I will tell her the truth when the time is right.”
“Thank you.”
The time would certainly not be right today with such scandal falling on the Bingley family and Miss Bingley’s whole future hanging in the balance. Across the fields, Netherfield Park came into view, and Lord Grantchester stopped to look at that estate.
“I shall not detain you further,” Elizabeth told him, her own eyes turning down the path towards Longbourn. “If we go any closer, there is a chance you might be seen and dragged inside for luncheon by my mother.”
“Of course. Before you go, may I beg your view on another question of propriety? Given what your sisters have told us, do you think Matthew and I ought to go over to Netherfield Park and offer our assistance? Or would our presence be useless and unwelcome at such a delicate hour?”
Elizabeth considered the question and nodded slowly. “It is worth making the offer,” she said. “I am sure that Mr Bingley needs as many friends as he can get in the neighbourhood today. Mr Darcy is still at Netherfield Park too, and he might know better than I what can be done.”
“Then we shall,” her companion determined. “I hate judgement by gossip and rule of the mob. A man like me knows the dangers of such things better than most. If there is any help I can give the Bingleys in escaping this scandal, I should like to do it.”
With these words from Lord Grantchester, a new and peculiar idea struck Elizabeth like lightning.
“Do take counsel with Lord Keeble and Mr Darcy before you act,” Elizabeth said hesitantly, “but there may be something you can do for the Bingleys, Lord Grantchester. You may be able to make yourself very useful indeed, and perhaps to your own advantage too.”
With that, Elizabeth leaned closer still to Lord Grantchester and explained the first inklings of a plan in a low, careful undertone.
A curious succession of emotions played over his face as he listened.
There was first surprise, then caution, and then something not entirely dissimilar from affront, but followed quickly by dawning agreement.
And then, Lord Grantchester laughed aloud.