Chapter Twenty-Three
Meryton
Elizabeth
The remainder of October passed in a manner Elizabeth would have found difficult to explain to anyone who asked her to account for it plainly, since, taken singly, none of it amounted to very much. Taken together, it amounted to a great deal.
She saw Mr. Darcy with a regularity that ought, by rights, to have felt remarkable, and had somehow, within the space of two weeks, come to feel almost ordinary instead.
He called at Longbourn twice more with Mr. Bingley, both visits conducted with the same careful propriety as the first, Mrs. Bennet presiding over the tea things with undiminished enthusiasm, while her father drew Mr. Darcy into arguments about books and estate management which plainly delighted them both rather more than either would readily admit.
She encountered him three more times entirely by chance, once while walking the lane towards Meryton on an errand for her mother, when he fell into step beside her without either of them troubling to remark upon the coincidence.
They met twice more upon Oakham Mount, though those walks were briefer than the first, for neither was so careless of propriety as to make a habit of lingering there together.
Still, Elizabeth could not help observing that two people who had once claimed to be strangers no longer seemed to require much excuse for finding themselves in the same place at the same hour.
There was a dinner at the Longs', where Mr. Darcy spoke rather less than the company generally expected of a gentleman and rather more, Elizabeth noticed, than he generally spoke to anyone besides herself.
There was an evening at Lucas Lodge, where Charlotte watched the two of them with an expression Elizabeth chose not to examine too closely, and where Mr. Darcy asked her to dance a second time in company, drawing precisely the kind of notice she told him, laughingly, she could not entirely forgive him for inviting.
Mr. Sotherton, mercifully, had grown considerably less determined since the assembly, whether from wounded pride or genuine discouragement Elizabeth neither knew nor troubled herself to discover. She counted it among the month's few uncomplicated blessings.
Mr. Darcy, meanwhile, had found his way into her letters from the very first, beginning with that hurried account written the morning after the assembly, and he had not left them since.
Every letter she sent Julia that month carried some fresh observation of him, gathered without Elizabeth quite deciding to gather it.
He preferred listening to speaking, and yet when he did speak, he rarely wasted the words.
He held opinions on nearly everything and volunteered almost none of them unprompted, which she had first taken for reserve and had slowly come to suspect was simply care, a reluctance to say anything he did not entirely mean.
He disliked crowds and endured them regardless, without ever making his endurance anyone else's burden to manage.
By the fourth week of October, those observations had grown too numerous, and perhaps too private, to be confined to a line or two between other news.
One evening near the month's end, with the last of the daylight fading over the fields towards Meryton, Elizabeth sat rather longer than usual at her writing desk, filling pages she had not intended to fill and admitting things to Julia she had not quite admitted to herself until she saw them set down in her own hand.
She sealed the letter before she could reconsider any of it and sent it the following morning with rather less than her usual composure.
Why parting with that particular letter should make her uneasy, when she had entrusted Julia with far more embarrassing confidences over the years, Elizabeth could not entirely say.
By the last day of October, Mr. Bingley had settled firmly upon the notion of a ball at Netherfield, a project Mrs. Bennet discussed with such constancy that Elizabeth suspected her mother had privately begun composing the guest list before any invitation had actually been extended.
Elizabeth found herself, rather to her own surprise, looking forward to it with an eagerness she did not usually bring to such occasions, an eagerness which had considerably less to do with dancing in general than with the particular gentleman she expected, with something between hope and certainty, to claim at least one set.
She did not yet know what Mr. Darcy wanted of her, if indeed he wanted anything beyond the easy friendship they had somehow built across a fortnight of chance meetings and careful visits.
She knew only that October had passed more quickly than any month she could readily remember, and that somewhere in the course of it, seeing Mr. Darcy had ceased to be remarkable.
It was beginning to be expected.
~
4th November 1811
Netherfield
Darcy
Having received from Mr. Humphrey a letter containing all he had been able to discover concerning Mr. Harding, Darcy had forwarded the particulars to his cousin in London, together with an earnest request that he employ whatever connections might prove useful in tracing the missing family.
Several days later, Richard's reply arrived.
Darcy read it with a growing suspicion that his cousin had taken rather too much pleasure in writing it, grimacing at the humour threaded through the letter almost as often as at the truths beneath it.
Darcy,
I have begun such enquiries as I can upon the information Humphrey supplied.
A fisherman who earned his living from one of the smaller ports along the coast is not a great deal to work with, particularly after several months, but I have written to two Bow Street Runners whom I am persuaded will learn something of Harding, if there is anything to be learnt.
You shall hear from me the moment I have anything worth reporting.
Having said all that, I come to a matter of rather greater importance. Have you told Miss Elizabeth?
And before you misunderstand me, I do not ask whether you have confessed to reading her letters. You made no mention of having done so in your last, from which I conclude that you continue to discover excellent reasons for postponing that particular conversation.
I ask whether you have at least told this fortunate young woman that you are in love with her.
From your first letter to me from Willowbrook to the one now before me, the matter has become painfully obvious.
You may continue denying it to yourself if the exercise affords you any satisfaction, but I beg you not to expect the same blindness from me.
You are in love with her, Darcy. You had better tell her.
You have enlisted Humphrey, enlisted me, and apparently made the recovery of Miss Harding your particular concern. I should therefore like some assurance that the lady for whose happiness we are all labouring has at least been given reason to understand that you love her.
Do not glare at the paper. It will not improve your situation.
I shall write again as soon as I have learnt anything more.
Yours etc.,
R. Fitzwilliam
Darcy lowered the letter and drew a slow breath. Richard's teasing had never possessed much power to offend him, chiefly because his cousin had an unfortunate habit of placing his finger upon truths Darcy would rather have been left to discover for himself.
He had not told Elizabeth.
The answer was sufficiently simple that he resented Richard for requiring him to consider it.
Elizabeth knew that he sought her company.
She could hardly have mistaken his preference after the assembly, his visits to Longbourn, and the increasing frequency with which they found themselves walking together.
Even without the letter forwarded from Willowbrook only the previous day, Darcy might have allowed himself to hope that her feelings had begun, however cautiously, to answer his own.
But he had read Elizabeth's letter.
Her third from Hertfordshire had contained no declaration, nor anything Elizabeth herself would likely have called one.
Yet Darcy had read enough of her words by now to recognise the alteration in them.
She wrote of him in all her letters. She remembered their conversations, repeated things he had said, wondered at his opinions, and had admitted to Julia an anticipation of seeing him again which she had not yet admitted to Darcy himself.
The knowledge should not have belonged to him. That truth had done remarkably little to lessen the happiness it had given him.
And still Richard's question remained.
He had told Elizabeth nothing. Not that he loved her. Not that he had first come into Hertfordshire because of her. And certainly not that, long before she had begun to know him, he had been reading the thoughts she believed herself to be sending only to Julia.
Darcy folded Richard's letter with rather more precision than was necessary.
His cousin, unfortunately, had a point.