I Have Faults Enough (Netherfield Park Adventures #1)

CHAPTER 1

“I have faults enough, but they are not, I hope, of understanding. My temper I dare not vouch for. It is, I believe, too little yielding— certainly too little for the convenience of the world. I cannot forget the follies and vices of other so soon as I ought, nor their offenses against myself. My feelings are not puffed about with every attempt to move them. My temper would perhaps be called resentful. My good opinion once lost, is lost forever.”

― Jane Austen

The ball had been over some hours, and Netherfield slept, or attempted it; but Mr. Darcy, standing at his window with his coat already discarded and his cravat loosened by his own hand, found no such refuge.

Below him the last carriages had long since quit the drive.

Above him the sky was impregnated with looming showers, indifferent to the disorder of a single guest's mind.

As he stood and looked out, over his window, he wished, not for the first time that evening, that he possessed some of that indifference himself.

He had danced with her. That was the whole of the offence.

It was a set with a country neighbour's daughter, undertaken at her provocation and concluded without incident.

But Darcy did not deal in the plain statement of things; he dealt with the consequence of that half hour on his being.

It was due to that rather delightful dance of shared wit that he had spent the remainder of the evening in an ill temper, which he had eventually carried up the stairs with him like a coal in his pocket, and it burned there still.

He told himself it was irritation. Miss Elizabeth Bennet had a way of speaking that assumed a license she had not been granted.

She had such a precise way of turning his own words back upon him with an alteration so slight and so exact that he could not object to it without appearing to prove her point.

Darcy told himself it was this habit of hers that had provoked him.

It surely was not the quickness of her eye when she meant to be arch, nor the manner in which she had failed, quite pointedly failed, he thought, to be impressed by anything he said, as though his opinions were interesting to her only in so much as she could find folly in them.

He turned from the window, and put his hand over his eyes, before pinching the top of his nose, and exhaling in a grumble.

It occurred to him, with the particular clarity that comes to a man at an hour when he ought to be asleep, that he had been out of temper in her company a very great deal. For a woman who had done him no injury, Miss Elizabeth seemed to have a knack for fueling his frustration.

After a long sleepless night, in the morning Darcy had reasoned himself into a course of action, which was, in its way, a kind of relief. At least a course of action could be executed, where a feeling could only be endured, he told himself gravely..

He found Bingley at breakfast, cheerful and entirely unsuspicious.

During the meal, Darcy offered his remark, with the particular flatness he adopted when a thing had been decided before it was said, that Bingley's business in town had gone neglected a fortnight past its proper attention, and that a man in his position could not continue to absent himself from his affairs merely because the neighbourhood happened to be agreeable.

"Is it Netherfield's shooting or its society you'd have me abandon?" said Bingley, who suspected nothing beyond his friend's habitual seriousness.

"Both, for a week or two, if your affairs are to be managed as they ought." Darcy did not look up from his coffee as he said it. "You have let a great deal accumulate."

It was not, strictly, a falsehood, for Bingley's affairs had indeed wanted looking into, in the way that the affairs of an amiable young man with more fortune than application generally did.

That this was not the whole of Darcy's reason, Bingley never thought to suspect; he took the explanation as readily as he took most things offered him in good faith, and troubled himself no further with the examining of it.

Darcy did not correct the impression, as he could not have corrected it without confessing what he was not yet willing to confess even to himself, that he wished to be rid of Netherfield, and of Hertfordshire entirely, only because Hertfordshire held Elizabeth Bennet, and Elizabeth Bennet had disordered his thinking to a state he found impossible to acknowledge, try as he might, to reverse.

Of course, Bingley’s sister, Caroline, required no persuasion at all.

She had been urging the scheme for a fortnight under a variety of pretexts, none of which Darcy had troubled to credit, and she accepted this one with an alacrity that ought, perhaps, to have told him something about the company he was keeping in his own resolutions.

The Hursts, who required only that wherever they went there be adequate provision for cards, offered no objection.

By the end of breakfast it was settled, the following morning they were to London and business, and a departure fixed for so soon as the necessary notes could be written.

Darcy himself did not write a note to anyone, there being no one to whom he owed an account of his movements, and told himself this too was a kind of freedom.

***

At Longbourn the morning after the ball arrived much as mornings generally did, though its business was almost entirely made of yesterday's.

Mrs. Bennet held forth at breakfast upon the excellence of the supper, the number of dances Jane had stood up for, and Mr. Bingley's particular attention to her eldest, an attention she declared, with the confidence of a woman who had decided that there was practically an understanding between her eldest and Mr. Bingley.

Elizabeth, buttering toast she did not want, watched her sister across the table and saw what her mother, in her raptures, did not trouble to look for, Jane looked equal parts tired for a long night, but also quintessentially happy at Mr. Bingley’s attentions.

Elizabeth knew that Jane had liked him. Jane, who liked everyone, had liked this one differently, and had said as much to no one but Elizabeth, and had said it so quietly that a less attentive sister might have missed that anything had been said at all.

"You are not eating," Elizabeth said to Jane, once their mother's attention had been drawn off by Kitty's complaints of a headache brought on, in Mrs. Bennet's diagnosis, by too much dancing and not enough sense.

"I am not very hungry." Jane smiled, and the smile did its work; it was a very good smile, and had persuaded a great many people of a great many things. However, it did not persuade Elizabeth, who had grown up beside it and knew its seams.

"He asked you twice," Elizabeth said, a single eyebrow raised. “He has all but singled you out, Jane. How do you feel about his attentions?”

"Yes," Jane agreed. "He did ask me twice; I suppose it is not nothing.

" And she said no more, and asked instead whether Elizabeth thought it would rain, and Elizabeth allowed the subject to be changed, because there was nothing to be gained by pressing her elder sister to talk, when she was disinclined.

Elizabeth did not doubt that Jane would do very well.

This was not indifference to her sister's feelings but the opposite of it, a conviction, arrived at over one-and-twenty years of observing her, that Jane's heart, however tender, was not a fragile thing; it bent readily and broke rarely, and where Elizabeth herself would have given a disappointment its due in temper and then been finished with it inside the week, Jane would simply go on, gentle and unclaiming, and in time the ache would wear itself thin against her own good nature, as aches generally did against Jane's.

It is one of the very few advantages of a temperament so thoroughly unlike my own, thought Elizabeth. What cost Elizabeth a quarrel cost Jane only a silence, and silence mends faster, Elizabeth decided.

She resolved to say nothing further on the subject unless Jane raised it, and to watch her sister rather more closely than she watched anyone else for a week or two besides, and having resolved this, went to fetch her bonnet, because Mrs. Bennet was already calling that they should be too late to hear the news from Lucas Lodge, and there was, this being Meryton and not London, always some fresh report of folly.

Lucas Lodge, when they reached it, was already comfortably full of the same conversation that had occupied the Longbourn breakfast table, though conducted here with rather more variety of opinion, Lady Lucas and Mrs. Bennet not being persons who required much encouragement to differ once they had settled themselves in the same room together.

Charlotte found Elizabeth within a few minutes of the party's general settling, and drew her toward the window seat.

"You look as though you did not sleep," Charlotte said, without preamble, "which I collect means either the dancing agreed with you a great deal, or Mr. Darcy disagreed with you a great deal, and I confess I do not know which is the likelier cause, given how thoroughly you have complained of him to me already this week, let alone you having accepted his offer to dance. "

Elizabeth rolled her eyes with a teasing smile.

"Both, perhaps, though I will own the second more freely than the first. I do not think I have met a more disagreeable man in my life, Charlotte, nor one so evidently persuaded of his own consequence that he could not trouble himself to stand up with anyone he had not already decided was worth the trouble. "