Chapter 2
THE ASSEMBLY
"Twelve ladies," Lydia announced, with the authority of a girl quoting scripture. "Twelve ladies and seven gentlemen. Mrs. Long had it from her niece, who had it from the housekeeper at Netherfield herself."
"Six ladies," Kitty said. "You always add."
"I never add. You subtract."
Elizabeth surrendered her wrap at the door of the assembly rooms and exchanged a look with Charlotte Lucas.
Charlotte had been enjoying the same sums from her own family all week.
The musicians were tuning. Half of Meryton had arrived early, draped itself in its best, and arranged its daughters within easy view of the door.
"The latest count from Lucas Lodge is five," Charlotte said, falling in beside her. "Two ladies, three gentlemen. Though my father holds out hope for a duke among them."
"Only one duke? Sir William is losing his touch."
"He is pacing himself. He has knighthood enough for everybody." Charlotte surveyed the room. "Your mother has secured the bench with the best view of the entrance. She is generaling tonight."
She was. Mrs. Bennet had deployed Jane at the most flattering angle the candle smoke allowed and was attempting, by means of furious small gestures, to direct Elizabeth toward the same bench. Elizabeth waved cheerfully and remained exactly where she stood.
The party from Netherfield arrived at half past eight, and the room performed the great country trick of pretending not to notice while noticing everything.
Five of them, Charlotte's count carrying the night.
Two ladies in London silk wearing identical expressions of polite suffering.
A married gentleman already searching the room for the card tables.
A young man with sandy hair and an open face, who looked about the assembly as if it had been got up purposely to delight him.
And behind them, last through the door, the tall one.
Elizabeth gave him a moment's study. Handsome. Decidedly handsome, and decidedly aware of standing in a doorway in Hertfordshire rather than anywhere else on earth. He surveyed the room as a man surveys weather he has been promised he will not enjoy.
"Mr. Bingley," Charlotte reported, meaning the sandy one. "Four or five thousand a year. The tall one is his friend from Derbyshire. A Mr. Darcy, with ten thousand."
"Ten thousand a year! And he came anyway. How brave."
"Lizzy."
"Look at him, Charlotte. I have seen men walk to the gallows with more pleasure. Somebody should tell him the assembly is voluntary."
Within half an hour the room had drawn the same conclusions and stopped forgiving the ten thousand.
Mr. Bingley danced every dance, asked to be introduced to everybody, and declared the evening the pleasantest he had spent in his life, loudly, to three separate people.
His friend danced once with each of the London ladies, declined every other introduction, and took up a position by the mantelpiece with the air of a man guarding it from theft.
Mr. Bingley asked Jane for the first two dances.
Elizabeth watched her sister go down the line, saw Jane's composure soften into something warmer at the turn, and the evening arranged itself into excellence.
A man who looked at Jane like sunrise and had the good sense to keep looking.
There was nothing in him to decode and nothing to forgive.
Elizabeth approved of him completely, on principle and on sight.
The same could not be said of the mantelpiece.
Scarcity of gentlemen obliged Elizabeth to sit down for two dances. She took her exile philosophically, on a chair near enough the mantelpiece to overhear what happened next.
"Come, Darcy," said Mr. Bingley, arriving flushed from the set. "I must have you dance. I hate to see you standing about by yourself in this stupid manner."
"I certainly shall not. You know how I detest it, unless I am particularly acquainted with my partner. Your sisters are engaged, and there is not another woman in the room whom it would not be a punishment to me to stand up with."
"I would not be so fastidious as you are for a kingdom! Upon my honor, I never met with so many pleasant girls in my life as I have this evening, and several of them uncommonly pretty."
"You are dancing with the only handsome girl in the room."
"Oh, she is the most beautiful creature I ever beheld! But there is one of her sisters sitting down just behind you, who is very pretty, and I dare say very agreeable. Do let me ask my partner to introduce you."
"Which do you mean?"
And Mr. Darcy turned.
Elizabeth had her face arranged in advance. She had been to enough assemblies to know how this exchange ended, and she intended to meet his glance with the bland serenity of a woman admiring the musicians. What she had not prepared for was the man himself.
He turned, and he stopped. Entire.
His eyes went wide, and his lips parted, and the color left his face as though a tap had been opened somewhere below.
He stared at her with an expression Elizabeth could find no shelf for, because it did not belong in a ballroom.
Men had looked at her with admiration, with indifference, and once, memorably, with open dislike across a whist table.
No man had ever looked at her the way this one did, as if she were a debt come due.
As if she had walked out of his own house carrying the silver.
"She is—" he said, and stopped.
Elizabeth waited, fascinated despite herself, to learn what she was.
Whatever it had been, he strangled it. The look closed over, and he gathered his features by force. When he spoke again it came out stiff and quick, a lesson recited before it could be forgotten.
"She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me. I am in no humor at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men. You had better return to your partner and enjoy her smiles, for you are wasting your time with me."
Mr. Bingley abandoned the cause and returned to Jane. Mr. Darcy resumed his examination of the dancers with terrific industry.
Elizabeth sat where she was.
Tolerable. The word stung. It would have stung from any man. From this one, with the room's ten thousand reasons to flatter him, it stung doubly.
But underneath the smart, something else nagged at her, small and persistent.
The look had come first. The stop, the stare, the color draining.
She is— and a strangled silence where the rest of a sentence ought to have been.
Men did not turn white before delivering an insult.
Insults of his sort were administered comfortably, from a height.
He had looked at her the way one looked at an overturned carriage, and then called her tolerable in the voice of a man bolting a door.
It made no sense, and Elizabeth disliked few things so much as a person who made no sense.
Then she caught herself. There she sat, anatomizing the strange look of a stranger who had insulted her within earshot, as though his complexion were her concern. She knew a better use for him entirely.
She rose, crossed to Charlotte, and got the first telling wrong.
"You will not believe what the man at the mantelpiece has decided," she began, and made a muddle of it.
The stare and the stammer tangled up with the insult so the whole thing came out as confusion instead of comedy.
Charlotte's brow drew down in something dangerously near sympathy, and sympathy was not at all the effect Elizabeth had ordered.
"He looked at you how?"
"Never mind how he looked. The verdict is the point. I am tolerable, Charlotte. You have the honor of standing beside the most middling woman in Hertfordshire."
"Lizzy."
"No, no, do not attempt to console me. I mean to have it engraved on a locket."
By the supper table at Longbourn past one in the morning, it had become a finished performance.
"And so I am to be pitied, you understand, but from a distance. He was very clear upon the point. Slighted by other men, and not handsome enough to tempt him." Elizabeth laid her hand upon her heart. "I have considered the matter from every side, and I have decided to live."
Mr. Bennet, who had stayed home with his books and counted the evening a triumph on those grounds, looked over his spectacles.
"Tolerable. From a man who you say spent the evening defending a mantelpiece.
Lizzy, my dear, you have been weighed by the parish scales and found adequate.
No Bennet has achieved so much in a generation. "
"Oh! Do not speak of him," Mrs. Bennet cried, arriving at outrage by the longer road.
"Such a disagreeable, high, horrid man. Standing about as if he had bought the room and regretted the purchase.
Mrs. Long says he sat beside her a full half hour and never opened his lips once.
I told her, depend upon it, he overheard you have no fortune.
But Jane, my love, Mr. Bingley! Two dances!
And he asked who you were the moment you entered, the very moment, Lady Lucas heard it herself—"
Jane caught Elizabeth's eye with the gentle private smile reserved for survivors of their mother's enthusiasms. Elizabeth smiled over the rim of her cup and counted the evening, on balance, a victory.
Jane was admired by precisely the right man.
She herself had been insulted by precisely the right one, a man so disagreeable the insult improved in value the longer she kept it.
There was no better souvenir of an assembly than a grievance one could perform.
It was Jane, of course, brushing out her hair by their shared candle, who found the seam.
"He really said it loud enough to be heard?"
"Loud enough for me. I do not think he considered whether I could hear. I do not think he considered me at all." Elizabeth worked at a stubborn pin. "It was the more flattering kind of insult. Quite impersonal."
"And yet."
"And yet what?"
"You keep frowning in the middle of the story," Jane said. "You told it at supper like a play, and then you frowned. There, where you are frowning now."
Elizabeth put down the pin. There were disadvantages to a sister who knows one so well, and chief among them was this gentle ambush by candlelight.
"Before he said it," she admitted, "he looked at me.
Bingley pointed me out, and Mr. Darcy turned, and for a moment he looked as though I had leveled a pistol at him.
He went white, Jane. He began a sentence and could not finish it.
And then out came tolerable, all in a rush, like a man paying a toll to be allowed past me.
" She shook her head. "It is the strangest thing.
I have been insulted by experts. But this is the first time the gentleman seemed to suffer more in the delivery than I did in the receipt. "
"Perhaps he was unwell."
"Perhaps he is mad."
"Lizzy."
"Or perhaps," Elizabeth said, climbing into bed and pulling the quilt to her chin, "he is exactly what he appeared from the first, a proud, cold man who finds the entire county beneath him.
As like as not, the look was indigestion, and I have wasted a quarter of an hour of excellent sleep trying to fathom his motivations. "
Jane snuffed the candle and offered, into the dark, her own complete verdict. "Mr. Bingley says his friend is the most loyal man he knows. He told me so while we danced."
"Mr. Bingley, by his own account, has never met a person he disliked. His testimony is worthless, and you may tell him I said so, gently, while he is asking you to marry him."
"Lizzy."
Elizabeth laughed and burrowed into her pillow, and the house creaked itself quiet around them.
The opinion she had formed of Mr. Darcy settled neatly in the dark behind her eyes.
It was finished in all but one corner: proud, cold, contemptuous of the company, fixed against a mantelpiece in a fine coat, pronouncing the women of Hertfordshire adequate.
A single evening's work, and she would stand behind every word of it.
Except the mouth. The mouth would not sit right. She had set it cold, and her memory kept correcting it to what she had actually seen: parted on a sentence he could not finish, in a face gone the color of paper.
She is—
She was what, sir?
Elizabeth fell asleep before she could put the question away. The unfinished sentence followed her down, an annoyance, a smudge, the one wet stroke on a canvas she had been so sure was dry.