He Proposed With a Ledger of Every Reason She Was Beneath Him

CHAPTER ONE

The music at the Meryton assembly had not yet found its second wind when Elizabeth Bennet first understood that she was being priced.

She had not meant to overhear it. She had only stepped near the refreshment table to escape Mr. Collins of Netherfield's set, a stout officer who trod on partners' hems, and found herself instead within a few feet of Mr. Bingley and his tall, silent friend.

"Come, Darcy," Bingley said, "you cannot mean to stand there all evening. Dance with one of the Miss Bennets. The second, perhaps. She looks a sensible sort."

"A sensible sort with a father worth two thousand a year and no sons," Darcy answered, not troubling to lower his voice, as though the arithmetic were too plain to require discretion.

"Five daughters, unentailed nothing to speak of, and a mother who has told three separate strangers this evening that her girls are all to be married by Michaelmas.

I need not dance with her to know her value. "

Bingley laughed, uneasy. "You make her sound like a horse at auction."

"I make her sound like what she is." Darcy's eyes moved once, briefly, toward Elizabeth, and found her looking directly back at him.

He did not flinch. He inclined his head, the smallest fraction, as one might acknowledge having been overheard without troubling to regret it, and turned back to his wine.

Elizabeth's face burned, but she did not look away first. That, she told herself later, walking home under a moon indifferent to her humiliation, had been the only victory available to her.

"He looked at you as if you were a column in a ledger," said Charlotte Lucas, who had witnessed the whole exchange from three feet closer than Elizabeth had realized. "Tell me you did not blush."

"I did not blush. I burned. There is a difference." Elizabeth pulled her shawl tighter. "He priced Jane's beauty at supper and mine at nothing, and did both without lowering his voice, as though we were deaf as well as poor."

"He did not say you were worth nothing."

"He said I need not be danced with to be valued. That is worse. A man who insults you at least troubles himself to look at you first."

Charlotte said nothing to that, which Elizabeth would come, in time, to recognize as Charlotte's particular gift: knowing when a thing was true enough that argument would only cheapen it.

Jane recovered from her cold at Netherfield with the grace she recovered from everything, but Elizabeth spent the four days of that visit doing arithmetic of her own.

She watched Mr. Darcy across the breakfast table and found him, invariably, watching someone.

Not with warmth. With attention. He watched Mrs. Bennet as she spoke of Jane's prospects and Elizabeth saw him note something down behind his eyes, the way a steward notes a fence in want of mending.

He watched Mary at the pianoforte and she saw him calculate, almost visibly, the exact distance between competence and accomplishment.

He watched Elizabeth herself, on the third evening, longer than propriety strictly allowed, and she could not tell whether she had been found wanting or merely filed.

"You are staring at me, Mr. Darcy," she said at last, when Miss Bingley had gone to persuade Mrs. Hurst into a duet. "I hope I have not left something in my teeth."

"I was considering," he said, "how it is that a woman with so little study of the accomplished arts can nonetheless command more attention in a room than any woman who has studied them properly."

"You say that as though it were a flaw in the room's judgment, not a compliment to mine."

"I say it as an observation. I make a great many observations. I do not always trouble to disguise them as flattery." He paused. "You would not thank me if I did."

"I would not know, sir. No one has yet tried."

He almost smiled. She saw it arrive at the corner of his mouth and be reconsidered, put away again like a coin returned to a purse, and something in her chest tightened at the sight of the reconsideration more than it would have at the smile itself.

The ball at Netherfield, when it came, gave her the second entry for her ledger, though she did not yet know she was keeping one.

She had refused him for the first two dances, unwilling to be handed off by Sir William Lucas like a parcel, and had regretted it within the half hour when Mr. Collins secured her for them instead, treading with the same grim thoroughness he applied to backgammon.

She had scarcely recovered her breath when Darcy appeared at her elbow and asked, with the particular formality he reserved for things that cost him something, whether she would do him the honor.

She had said yes before she had decided to.

They danced in silence for the length of the first turn. She broke it because silence, in his company, felt like another kind of accounting, a tally being kept against her.

"It is your turn to say something now, Mr. Darcy. I remarked upon the dance. You ought to remark upon the room, or the number of couples, or some other thing gentlemen remark upon when they have nothing to say."

"I was thinking," he said, "that you dance as though you had never once considered what it might cost you to be thought too lively."

"I have considered it. I have simply decided the price is worth paying." She looked up at him. "You, I think, have considered the price of everything and decided almost nothing is worth paying for it."

Something moved behind his face, quick and unguarded, gone before she could name it. "That is not entirely fair."

"Is it entirely untrue?"

He did not answer. The music turned them apart and brought them together again, and when he spoke next his voice had dropped, pitched only for her.

"When I said, at the assembly, that I need not dance with you to know your value, I did not mean it as it must have sounded."

Her heart lurched, unwillingly, toward hope. "How did you mean it, then?"

"I do not know that I can explain it and have it sound better.

" His jaw tightened. "I was raised to look at a thing and know at once what it would cost to keep it, and what it would cost to lose it, before I permitted myself to want it at all.

I did that to you before I had ever spoken to you.

It was not kind. I am not certain it was even accurate.

" He looked at her fully then, and the look had none of the ledger in it, only something rawer.

"I have not stopped doing the sum since. "

She could not answer that. The dance ended and he bowed, and she curtseyed, and neither of them said anything further, but she carried the exchange home in her chest like a stone she could not decide whether to be grateful for or resentful of, and that night, for the first time, she found herself repeating his words back to herself, word for word, as though memorizing evidence.