Chapter 6
Miss Beaumont arrived on Thursday, in a carriage a great deal finer than the occasion strictly required, and proved, within the space of a single afternoon, to be precisely the sort of woman Elizabeth had always found it easiest to dislike on principle and hardest to dislike in practice, because she gave one so little material to work with.
Elizabeth had hoped, in the idle way one hopes for things that cost nothing to wish for, that she might prove otherwise.
She was perhaps four-and-twenty, handsome in the assured, finished way of a woman who had been told from the cradle that she was handsome and had never had occasion to doubt the report, accomplished in the manner that accomplishment is meant to be displayed — she played, Elizabeth learned within the hour, very well indeed, and sang a little, and spoke creditable French, and had toured the Lakes the previous autumn and could discourse upon the picturesque with the fluent confidence of a woman who had read precisely the right books on the subject.
She greeted Georgiana with real and evident affection.
She greeted Elizabeth with perfect, unimpeachable civility.
She greeted Mr. Darcy with a warmth that Elizabeth noticed before she had any business noticing it, and spent the better part of three hours afterward informing herself that she had no right whatever to notice it further.
"Fitzwilliam," she said — for it transpired Miss Beaumont and Mr. Darcy's cousin were old acquaintances, and she addressed him with the easy familiarity of long standing — "you have grown stout since Bath."
"I have grown precisely as stout as a man of my regiment is permitted to grow, and not an ounce stouter, and I shall thank you to retract the accusation before dinner, or I cannot answer for my appetite at table."
Miss Beaumont laughed, a pleasant, practiced sound, and turned her attention to Darcy, who had come forward to greet her with the correct degree of cousinly civility — for it emerged, in the course of the introductions, that some distant connection existed between the families, the precise nature of which Elizabeth did not follow and did not, she told herself firmly, have the smallest interest in following.
"Darcy. You look exactly as you did the last time I saw you, which I mean as the compliment it is intended to be, since most men of your acquaintance have the decency to age a little, if only to give the rest of us something to remark upon."
"I shall endeavor to do better, Miss Beaumont, though I cannot promise the effort will be visible before dinner."
It was, Elizabeth thought, watching this exchange from a few feet away with an attention she was finding it increasingly difficult to disguise even from herself, a very easy sort of conversation: the conversation of two people who had known each other long enough to have exhausted the need for caution, who could say a slightly impertinent thing and be certain of how it would land, because the ground between them had been thoroughly mapped some years before and held no surprises for either party.
She had no such ground with Mr. Darcy. Everything between them was still being mapped, slowly, with considerable care, and the contrast between his ease with Miss Beaumont and his careful deliberateness with herself struck her, standing in the hall with her bonnet still in her hand, with a force she had not anticipated and did not enjoy.
She spent the better part of the afternoon telling herself this was nothing.
Mr. Darcy had known Miss Beaumont for years; he had known Elizabeth, in any meaningful sense, for considerably less than one.
Ease was a function of time, not of preference, and she had no grounds whatever for reading anything into the difference beyond the plain arithmetic of acquaintance.
She told herself this with great firmness, walking out alone before dinner to compose herself, and found that the firmness held for perhaps a quarter of an hour before some fresh evidence undid the whole careful structure of her self-persuasion in an instant: Miss Beaumont's hand resting briefly on Darcy's arm as they crossed the gravel walk, nothing in it beyond ordinary courtesy, certainly nothing that any reasonable observer would have remarked upon.
She slept, eventually, though not soon, and woke the next morning with the particular heaviness of a person who has spent half the night arguing with herself and lost. She went down later than was her habit, and found the breakfast room already comfortably full — Fitzwilliam holding forth on some absurdity involving a fellow officer and a borrowed horse, Georgiana laughing properly at it, Miss Beaumont seated near Darcy with the easy proximity of long acquaintance, discussing, as far as Elizabeth could make out, some mutual friend's recent marriage with the comfortable authority of a woman who had opinions about everyone and saw no reason to withhold them.
"Miss Bennet." Miss Beaumont greeted her with apparent pleasure, gesturing to the chair beside her own.
"We were just speaking of Caroline Aldous — do you know her?
No, of course you would not, she is quite out of your part of the country.
She has just married a baronet twice her age for his money, which I think entirely sensible of her, though Darcy disapproves, as he disapproves of most sensible things. "
"I do not disapprove of sensible things. I disapprove of marriages contracted for nothing beyond convenience, which I do not think the same accusation, however much you would prefer to conflate them."
"You are very severe for a man who has never once in his life been obliged to marry for anything but inclination."
"That is precisely why I think myself entitled to an opinion on the subject, and not less so."
Elizabeth, taking the offered chair, was drawn unexpectedly into the exchange before she had quite decided whether she wished to be drawn into it at all. "I think a marriage may be both sensible and inclined, Miss Beaumont, if the parties are fortunate. It need not be one or the other exclusively."
"How very diplomatic of you, Miss Bennet.
You will make an excellent peacemaker someday, in whatever household claims you.
" Miss Beaumont said it lightly, with nothing in her tone that Elizabeth could fairly call unkind, and yet Elizabeth felt the remark land somewhere it had perhaps not been entirely intended to land, and busied herself with her chocolate rather than answer it, aware of Darcy's eyes resting on her for a moment before returning, with apparent effort, to his plate.
She had always been rather proud of her own equanimity, of the particular freedom that came from caring a great deal about very few things and being entirely honest with herself about which things those were.
She had not, until this week, counted Mr. Darcy among them.
The discovery that she apparently did, that she was standing in a stranger's garden, conducting a private and entirely undignified accounting of another woman's hand upon another man's sleeve, was not a discovery she had asked for, and she found she resented it rather thoroughly even while admitting its truth.
At dinner she was seated, by what arrangement she did not trouble to investigate, at some remove from Darcy, near enough to observe but not near enough to be drawn into conversation with him, and she spent a portion of the meal in the particular misery of watching Miss Beaumont's easy command of the table — her opinions on the picturesque, delivered with confidence; her recollection of some shared acquaintance from Bath, delivered with the warm specificity of genuine fondness; her question to Darcy about the state of some improvement he had once mentioned to the east drive, delivered with the casual proprietary interest of a woman who considered his affairs, in some small measure, her own concern as well.
"You have not yet seen the full extent of the park, Miss Bennet?
" Miss Beaumont asked at one point, turning her attention with apparent friendliness toward Elizabeth.
"You must let Darcy show you the prospect from the high walk before you leave.
It is quite the finest view in the county, and he is rightly proud of it, though he would never say so himself. "
"I have seen a little of it already, and found it everything you describe."
"Then you have excellent taste, Miss Bennet, and I am very glad to hear it, for I have always thought a person's opinion of Pemberley a tolerably good guide to their opinion generally.
" Miss Beaumont smiled, entirely without malice as far as Elizabeth could determine, and turned the conversation elsewhere, and Elizabeth was left to examine the remark for some hidden edge she could not, on reflection, honestly locate.
It had been a perfectly civil thing to say.
It had also, somehow, managed to remind the whole table that Miss Beaumont's acquaintance with Pemberley and its master long predated Elizabeth's own, without once saying so directly, and Elizabeth thought, turning her wine glass slowly between her fingers, that this was rather an impressive piece of social architecture for a sentence delivered so lightly.
She wondered whether Miss Beaumont knew she had done it. She rather thought she did.
She did not think Miss Beaumont a villain.
She made herself consider the question honestly, walking up to bed that night with her candle throwing long shadows up the staircase, and concluded that no, whatever discomfort the woman's presence produced in her, it was not the product of any deliberate unkindness on Miss Beaumont's part.
She was, in fact, rather admirable — clever, accomplished, entirely secure in herself in a way Elizabeth half envied and was ashamed of envying.
That, Elizabeth thought, was very much the difficulty.
It would have been a great deal easier to dislike her if there had been anything in her conduct to justify the dislike.
There was not. There was only Elizabeth's own unwelcome awareness of every moment in which Miss Beaumont occupied a place at Darcy's side that felt, to Elizabeth, entirely natural, entirely unremarkable, and entirely intolerable to witness.
She sat at her window for some time before undressing, turning the day over with the same ruthless honesty she had brought to bear on every other examination of herself this week, and arrived, eventually, at a conclusion she did not particularly want but could no longer reasonably avoid: that a woman who watched another woman's hand upon a man's sleeve with that degree of private misery had moved a very great distance indeed from the cool, amused indifference she had once been so certain described her feelings on the subject entirely.
She did not know what to do with the conclusion, beyond sitting with it.
She had refused this man once, with considerable conviction, and had spent the better part of the following year revising her opinion of him by degrees, in a hundred small increments she could each individually justify and which had, taken together, amounted to something she was no longer able to pretend she had not noticed.
She was not yet certain what he felt in return, if he felt anything at all beyond the ordinary civility a good host owed his guests.
She had no right to assume otherwise, and she told herself this, several times, with diminishing conviction, before at last extinguishing her candle and lying down in the dark to consider it further — which was not, she reflected wryly, the same thing as sleeping, and did not pretend to be.
There remained, at least, this much comfort: Miss Beaumont's visit had a fortnight's natural limit.
Elizabeth reached for that thought as she blew out her candle, the way one reaches for any comfort that asks to be believed rather than earning the belief outright, and lay a long while in the dark, entirely unconvinced by it.