Chapter Two
Miss Bingley's letter to Lady Catherine de Bourgh was three pages long, written in a hand of studied elegance, and contained precisely enough truth to make its lies effective.
Your ladyship will, I am sure, wish to know that Mr. Darcy's attentions this autumn have been fixed with a persistence I find quite alarming upon a young woman of Hertfordshire, a Miss Elizabeth Bennet, whose family connections I need not describe to one so alive to such distinctions as yourself.
I mention it only from the deepest respect for your ladyship's wishes regarding your nephew's establishment, and from no small concern for dear Georgiana, whose interests I know weigh so heavily upon us all.
She sealed it with more satisfaction than she generally allowed herself to feel over correspondence, and told herself it was concern for the family's dignity that moved her, and not the particular sting of having watched Mr. Darcy's eyes follow Eliza Bennet across a ballroom while never once, in three years of careful cultivation, having followed her own.
Darcy received the summons to London eleven days later, delivered by a rider who had clearly been instructed to make good time.
Come to town at once, the solicitor Hargreave had written, in a hand so tight it looked cramped with disapproval before Darcy had even opened the seal. Lady Catherine has written with concerns regarding your conduct that the committee cannot, in good conscience, ignore. A meeting has been arranged.
He read it twice in his study at Netherfield, the fire burning low, Bingley's borrowed house too quiet around him.
He knew, without being told, what the concerns would be.
He had seen his aunt's expression at Rosings, in the spring, when he had left off his refusal of Elizabeth's rejection with rather more feeling than was wise to display before a woman who watched everything and forgave nothing.
He had known, even then, that Lady Catherine possessed a network of correspondence that would put half the Foreign Office to shame, and that news travelled to her faster than sense generally travelled anywhere.
He thought of Georgiana. Sixteen years old, still fragile in the aftermath of Ramsgate, still learning to trust her own judgment after Wickham had so thoroughly abused it.
If the trust reverted, she would have a competence, certainly.
She would not starve. But she would not have Pemberley's full protection either, not the security their father had intended for her, the kind that let a young woman refuse a bad match without fear, that let her make mistakes without those mistakes becoming catastrophes.
He would not risk it. He told himself this with the particular fervor of a man convincing himself of something he had already decided, and packed for London within the hour.
The meeting, when it came, was everything Darcy had expected and somehow still worse.
Lady Catherine sat at the head of the table in Hargreave's chambers as though she had been born to preside over legal proceedings, her expression set in the particular grim satisfaction of a woman who believed herself entirely vindicated.
The Earl, Fitzwilliam's father, sat beside her with considerably less relish, though no less resolve.
Hargreave himself shuffled papers with the air of a man who found the entire business distasteful but necessary, which was, Darcy supposed, as close to sympathy as the solicitor's nature permitted.
"We have received," Lady Catherine began, without preamble, "a report of your conduct this autumn that I confess has given me very great concern."
"I am aware of the source of the report," Darcy said. "I would ask that its accuracy be examined with some scrutiny."
"Are you denying that you have shown particular attention to a Miss Elizabeth Bennet of Hertfordshire?"
The room was very quiet. Darcy thought of the terrace at Netherfield, of the way his hand had lifted toward her before he stopped himself, of the six words he had said and the thousand he had not.
"I have shown her the ordinary courtesy due any acquaintance," he said. "Nothing more."
It was, technically, not a lie. He had made certain of that.
Lady Catherine's mouth thinned. "You have always had a talent for careful phrasing, Darcy, but I did not raise you to play games with your father's memory. He drew up that codicil to protect Georgiana from exactly this manner of imprudence."
"He drew up that codicil," Darcy said, with more heat than he had intended, "to protect her from fortune hunters. Miss Bennet has never once sought my attention. If anything, she has actively discouraged it."
"Then you admit there is attention to discourage."
He had walked into it. He said nothing, and the silence was answer enough.
The Earl leaned forward, his tone gentler than his sister's but no less firm.
"Fitzwilliam, no one here wishes to see you unhappy.
But your father's wishes were explicit, and the timeline is not a formality.
You have until your thirtieth birthday, which is a little under a year hence, to marry with this committee's approval, or the trust reverts.
Georgiana's security is not a small thing to gamble on a woman of, forgive me, no fortune and indifferent connections. "
"I have gambled nothing," Darcy said. "I have done precisely as my father asked.
I have shown restraint. I have shown, I might add, considerably more restraint than is comfortable, and I would ask that this committee credit me with the discretion it demands rather than punishing me for a report written by a woman with her own interest in the outcome. "
Lady Catherine's eyes narrowed at that, sharp enough that Darcy wondered if she suspected the source as clearly as he did.
"We are not punishing you," she said, more quietly. "We are reminding you of the stakes. See that you remember them."
He left Hargreave's chambers with his jaw set and his hands cold, and did not, for once, seek out his club or his cousin's company. He walked instead, aimlessly, through streets grown grey with early winter, and thought of Elizabeth's voice on the terrace.
That is not an explanation. It is merely a more elegant way of saying nothing.
She had been right, of course. She generally was.
He had two choices, as he understood them.
He could continue as he had begun, distant and correct, and trust that his silence, however painful, protected Georgiana until the moment when he might safely speak.
Or he could write to Elizabeth now, tell her everything, and risk that the telling itself, if it reached the wrong ears before the committee's suspicions cooled, would be the very evidence Lady Catherine wanted.
He thought of his father in the last weeks of his illness, gaunt and exacting, extracting promises with the particular desperation of a dying man trying to control a future he would not live to see.
He thought of Georgiana at fifteen, weeping in his arms after Ramsgate, certain she had ruined everything, certain she deserved nothing good.
He would wait. He would be careful. He would find some way to make it safe, and then he would speak, and if the waiting cost him something in the meantime, in Elizabeth's good opinion, in his own peace, he would bear it, because that was what the situation required of him.
He did not yet understand that a man could choose silence out of love, and still wound as deeply as if he had chosen it out of contempt.
Elizabeth learned, three weeks later, that Wickham's regiment had been quietly reassigned, the young lieutenant's particular attentions to a certain officer's daughter having grown troublesome enough that Colonel Forster had requested the transfer himself.
"Mr. Bingley arranged it," Lydia announced at supper, with the careless authority of a girl repeating gossip she did not fully understand. "Colonel Forster said as much to Papa. Something about a word from a gentleman of consequence who did not wish his name known."
"How very mysterious," said Mrs. Bennet, delighted by intrigue of any kind. "Mr. Bingley is so generous. It is no wonder Jane is so taken with him."
Elizabeth said nothing, though something in her chest twisted at the news. Bingley, again. Always Bingley, quiet and kind and credited with a generosity that seemed, on reflection, rather more calculated than his open, easy nature usually produced.
She thought of the terrace again, the words Darcy had not said.
She thought of a man capable of clearing a debt without seeking thanks, of arranging a transfer without claiming credit, and wondered, with a small unwelcome hope she tried very hard to extinguish, whether she had been crediting the wrong friend all along.
She dismissed it. It was easier, she told herself, to believe him simply cold, than to believe him capable of such quiet care and still choosing, again and again, to offer her nothing but distance.