CHAPTER THREE
Darcy stood at the window of his room at Netherfield with the estate ledgers open on the desk behind him, untouched since supper, and found that for the first time in his adult life the columns would not hold his attention.
He had come to Hertfordshire prepared to endure a fortnight of country society, and he had instead acquired a habit he could not seem to break: cataloguing Elizabeth Bennet.
Her wit, which improved on acquaintance rather than wearying, as most wit did.
Her walk, unhurried even when the ground was wet and her petticoats ruined for it.
The particular tilt of her chin when she disagreed with him, which she did often, and always as though she expected to be contradicted in turn and welcomed the exercise.
He had been raised to itemize. His father had taught him, before he was ten years old, that a gentleman who did not know precisely what a thing cost him, in fortune, in reputation, in the good opinion of those whose good opinion mattered, was a gentleman who would be ruined by someone who did.
It had served him well with tenants, with stewards, with the careful management of Georgiana's fortune against men who would have taken advantage of a girl of fifteen.
It had never once occurred to him, until this fortnight, that the same faculty might be turned against a woman he was beginning, against every sound instinct he possessed, to want.
He had said the thing at the assembly without thinking, the way a man reads a figure aloud from long habit.
Five daughters, no sons, an unentailed nothing.
He had watched her hear it and had seen, with the particular clarity he reserved for numbers, exactly what it had cost her, and had known at once that it was the first sum he had ever calculated that he wished he could unmake.
He had not unmade it. He had, instead, gone on doing it.
At the ball he had told her as much, had watched the words leave him and land somewhere he could not retrieve them from, and had felt, for the first time in his memory, that honesty and cruelty might be the same act performed from two different distances.
"You have been standing at that window a quarter hour," Bingley said from the doorway, in his shirtsleeves, holding a candle he had clearly meant to carry to bed and had instead carried here. "Are you composing a sermon, or merely brooding?"
"Neither. I am attempting to finish the Pemberley accounts before we quit for London." This was not entirely a lie. The ledger was, in fact, open.
"You have not turned a page since I came in.
" Bingley set the candle down and regarded him with the particular frankness he permitted himself only with Darcy, and only late at night.
"You danced with Miss Elizabeth Bennet tonight as though the two of you were negotiating a treaty. What did you say to her?"
"Something I ought not to have said the first time, and confessed to for the second.
" Darcy shut the ledger, finally, with more force than the gesture required.
"I told her, at the assembly, before we were even properly introduced, precisely why I need not trouble to dance with her.
Her family's want of fortune, her mother's want of conduct, her connections generally.
I said it aloud, as though reading a column of figures, and I did not lower my voice. "
Bingley's easy face went, for once, entirely still. "Darcy. That is not like you. You are proud, God knows, but you are not cruel."
"I did not intend cruelty. I intended accuracy.
I have since discovered I am not certain there is a difference, when the person doing the sum has never once asked whether the person being summed wished to be counted at all.
" He turned from the window. "I told her tonight that I have not stopped doing the sum since.
I meant it as confession. I am not certain she received it as anything softer than a second insult. "
"Then unsay it."
"I cannot unsay a sum, Bingley. I can only show my work again, and hope the second calculation comes out differently than the first." He said it lightly, an attempt at his friend's own ease, but it did not sit lightly in his own chest. He had meant to leave Hertfordshire within the fortnight untouched, his ledgers balanced, his heart precisely where he had left it.
He was beginning to understand, standing in a borrowed room with an unread column of figures behind him, that this particular accounting might not close so cleanly.
He thought of Georgiana, fifteen years old and nearly ruined by a man who had counted her fortune before he had troubled to count her feeling, and understood, with a discomfort he did not examine too closely, that he had come nearer that same failure than he cared to admit, only the currency he had priced was not thirty thousand pounds but a woman's worth entire.
He resolved, blowing out the candle Bingley had left behind, that he would be more careful.
He did not yet know that carefulness, in a man who could not stop counting, was not the same thing as kindness, and that Elizabeth Bennet, three miles distant and wide awake in her own narrow bed, was at that very hour beginning, in ink, an account of her own.