He Insulted My Entire Family Before Proposing (Pride and Prejudice Variations)

Chapter 1

Elizabeth Bennet had made excellent use of Mr. Darcy's first insult.

This was not because the insult itself possessed any great merit.

As insults went, it had been lazy, ungenerous, and delivered with the air of a man who believed his boredom should be entered into the parish record.

But it had been public, and therefore useful.

A private slight could only be nursed. A public one could be turned, sharpened, and passed round at dinner until it became less a wound than a household joke with protective edges.

"Only tolerable," Lydia would say whenever a ribbon failed to please her.

"Not handsome enough to tempt me," Kitty would add of a cold pudding.

Even Mr. Bennet had once looked over his spectacles at a tax notice and declared it barely tolerable and in no danger of tempting him.

The phrase had survived because Longbourn was the sort of house where a sentence, once useful, was never allowed to retire.

Mrs. Bennet had applied it to a bonnet that sat too low on Kitty's brow.

Mary had said it of a hymn tune with more solemnity than the hymn deserved.

Lydia had tried to use it of a lieutenant and been corrected by everyone at once, since lieutenants, however tolerable, were not a subject on which she required encouragement.

By these methods Elizabeth had survived being dismissed at the Meryton assembly by the proudest man in the room. If Mr. Darcy had meant to diminish her, he had instead given Longbourn a phrase. She had laughed at it until it seemed impossible that it had ever hurt.

Months later, during her visit to Charlotte Collins at Hunsford, she discovered that a phrase could laugh and still keep its teeth.

Colonel Fitzwilliam had called in the late morning, bringing with him the easy manners of a man whose rank had not made him stiff and whose income had not made him secure.

Charlotte was in the village. Mr. Collins had followed Lady Catherine's carriage as a lesser planet follows a sun.

Maria Lucas had retreated to write a letter home full of shrubbery and terror.

Elizabeth was left to entertain the colonel, which was no hardship.

He had wit enough to know when he was being amusing, and sense enough not to be offended when she was.

"You are fortunate in your cousin," she said, after some minutes of talk that had wandered from Rosings to Kent roads to the strange ability of Lady Catherine to improve every subject by exhausting it.

"Darcy? Yes, in some respects. He is useful in a crisis."

"Is he often in one?"

"Not his own," said the colonel, smiling. "He is too orderly for that. But he has a decided talent for managing the crises of other people."

"That must be a comfort to the other people."

The colonel laughed. "It depends on whether they wished to be managed."

Elizabeth's needle paused. There was something in his tone: affectionate, amused, and entirely unguarded. "And do they?"

"Rarely, I imagine. But Darcy is not easily discouraged by lack of invitation. He congratulated himself only lately on saving a friend from a most imprudent attachment."

Elizabeth felt, rather than saw, the room alter around her. The window remained open. The little fire still burned too hot for the weather. The colonel still sat at his ease. But the word saving had placed its cold hand on her shoulder.

"A friend?" she repeated.

"Bingley. You know him, I believe?"

"Slightly."

It was the smallest lie that could be told without blushing.

She knew Mr. Bingley's open countenance, his quick laugh, his eagerness to be pleased, and the way her sister Jane's face had softened whenever his name entered a room.

She knew, too, the weeks after he left Netherfield, when Jane had called her disappointment reasonable while looking like a candle that had been quietly snuffed.

"Darcy thought the lady indifferent," Colonel Fitzwilliam said. "Or so he told me. There were family considerations too, I gather. Connections, expectations, all that old machinery."

"Family considerations," Elizabeth said.

The colonel, not yet aware of the trap his friendliness had opened beneath his feet, nodded. "I should not repeat private matters, except that Darcy made no secret of his satisfaction. He has very firm opinions on unsuitable connections."

The truth sharpened at once.

Not handsome enough to tempt me had grown legs.

It had crossed rooms, entered private judgments, and learned to wear the respectable coat of prudence.

Elizabeth saw, with a clarity that made her fingers cold, that Mr. Darcy's disdain had not ended in a ballroom.

It had followed Jane into rooms where Jane could not answer it.

Her sister too serene to be believed. Her family connections too useful as an objection. Elizabeth herself tolerable enough to be watched, perhaps even admired, but never quite free of the inferiority he had first assigned her.

"How benevolent," she said.

Colonel Fitzwilliam looked at her more closely. "You disapprove?"

"Of rescue? Never. I have always longed to be rescued from happiness by a gentleman with better information than my own heart."

He winced. "Miss Elizabeth, I fear I have blundered."

"Then you are the first man in Kent to notice when he has done so. You must not apologize too quickly. It is refreshing."

The colonel stood, crossed to the mantel, and picked up a little porcelain shepherdess as though she might advise him. "I spoke thoughtlessly. Darcy's actions may have been more complicated than I know."

"They generally are, I suspect. Men of large fortune seldom do simple harm when complicated harm will flatter them more."

He set the shepherdess down with care. "You are angry."

"No," Elizabeth said, because anger was too small a word for the thing opening in her chest. "I am informed."

When he left, he did so with every appearance of regret and no useful ability to gather his words back from the air.

Elizabeth remained seated, her work fallen into her lap.

Outside the window, the lane to Rosings lay bright beneath a clean spring sky.

Somewhere beyond it, Mr. Darcy existed in the confidence of a man who had injured Jane for her own good, insulted Elizabeth for his own amusement, and considered himself not cruel but careful.

That was the trick of it, she thought.

A vulgar man said, I think myself above them.

A proud man said, I protected my friend.

And a woman was expected to feel the difference as an improvement.

By the time Charlotte returned, Elizabeth had resumed her sewing. Her stitches, had any person inspected them, would have revealed a spirit unfit for needlework.

"You look as if Mr. Collins has praised you," Charlotte observed, removing her gloves.

"Worse. I have been enlightened by a gentleman."

"That is severe."

"I am trying to bear it with Christian fortitude."

Charlotte's gaze sharpened. She had not married Mr. Collins because she was foolish. She had married him because she could count incomes, prospects, and the narrow choices allowed to women without fortune. "What has happened?"

Elizabeth told her enough. Not all. Not the little private grave where Jane's hopes had been buried under everybody else's sense. But enough for Charlotte's mouth to tighten.

"Men call it prudence when they arrange a woman's disappointment before she can object," Charlotte said.

"And when they dislike her connections?"

"Then prudence becomes moral courage."

Elizabeth laughed once. It was not a pleasant sound. "I used to think Mr. Darcy merely proud."

"And now?"

"Now I think pride may be the ribbon on the parcel. I should like to know what is wrapped inside."

Charlotte went to the window. "Take care. Men like Mr. Darcy do not enjoy being unwrapped."

"Then he should not have presented himself tied in such an impressive bow."

That evening, at Rosings, Mr. Darcy watched Elizabeth more than he spoke to her.

He had done so often enough that it should not have mattered.

But now she understood the look differently.

It was not admiration unbending itself by degrees.

It was inspection. A man could study a woman and still be measuring the cost of her family.

Lady Catherine spoke for twenty minutes on the proper boiling of asparagus. Mr. Collins glowed as if each stalk had been a theological revelation. Anne de Bourgh coughed delicately into a handkerchief. Colonel Fitzwilliam, more subdued than usual, avoided Elizabeth's eye.

Mr. Darcy did not.

At one point, Lady Catherine demanded Elizabeth's opinion on whether younger sisters ought to come out before the elder were married.

Elizabeth answered with all the liveliness expected of her, but she felt Darcy listening beneath the conversation.

Family considerations. Unsuitable connections. Saved his friend.

The words arranged themselves like witnesses.

When they returned to the parsonage, Mr. Collins informed them that Lady Catherine had never been more gracious, which proved he had survived a different evening from everyone else.

Elizabeth excused herself early.

In her room, she opened her little travel desk and took out a sheet of paper.

She did not yet know what she meant to write.

A letter to Jane, perhaps, though Jane would suffer twice from any truth told too sharply.

A list, then. Lists were honest. They did not pretend pain was more elegant than it was.

Mr. Darcy's offenses, she wrote.

Beneath it:

1. Public insult at Meryton.

2. Continued contempt of my family.

3. Interference between Mr. Bingley and Jane.

4. Interference dressed as prudence.

She paused, then added:

5. Looking at me as if the above may be overcome by his generosity.

It was a foolish entry. It looked especially foolish because the ink had blotted beneath generosity, as if even the pen objected to the word. Elizabeth considered crossing it out, then decided the blot improved the entry.

It was also the one that made her hand shake.

Outside, a carriage passed on the road to Rosings. Elizabeth put down her pen and listened until the sound faded. Then she folded the paper and tucked it into her desk.

A woman in a novel, she thought, would weep.

Elizabeth Bennet had no objection to weeping where it served. But tonight it seemed inadequate. Tears would not restore Jane's winter. They would not call back a sentence from a ballroom or remove the polished contempt with which one family might be weighed and found wanting.

No. If Mr. Darcy had made a record, then so would she.