Chapter Three
Jane's engagement to Mr. Bingley was announced at the end of November, and Longbourn erupted into a happiness so total that Elizabeth found herself, more than once, slipping from the room simply to breathe air that did not carry the weight of her mother's raptures.
"Ten thousand a year," Mrs. Bennet said, not for the first time, pressing her handkerchief to her eyes with theatrical relief. "I always said Jane's face would be the making of this family. Oh, my dear, dear Jane."
Jane bore it all with her usual gentle patience, glowing in a way that made even Elizabeth's private ache feel almost bearable by proximity.
She loved her sister too well to begrudge her a single moment of this happiness.
She only wished, walking the garden alone that evening while the house rang with celebration behind her, that some small corner of it might belong to her as well.
It did not. She had made her peace with that, she told herself, some weeks ago on a cold terrace, and repeated it now with rather more conviction than she felt.
Bingley's engagement required business in London, contracts and settlements that could not be managed from Hertfordshire, and Darcy accompanied him, both from friendship and from the private, unspoken relief of putting distance between himself and Longbourn before his own composure gave out entirely.
He had not counted on Mrs. Gardiner inviting the elder Miss Bennets to town for a fortnight, nor on the particular cruelty of fate that placed him, on a grey Thursday afternoon, in the very bookshop on Bond Street where Elizabeth had gone to choose a wedding gift for her sister.
He saw her before she saw him. She stood near the window with a volume open in her hands, her brow furrowed in the particular concentration she gave to everything, and something in his chest simply stopped.
He should have left. He knew it even as his feet carried him closer instead.
"Miss Bennet."
She startled, the book nearly slipping from her hands. "Mr. Darcy. I did not know you were in town."
"Business, on Bingley's behalf." He glanced at the volume she held. Poetry, he noted, though he could not see the title from this angle. "You are well, I hope. And your family."
"Tolerably." Her chin lifted, some private resolve firming behind her eyes. "Georgiana. Is she well?"
The question landed like a blow he had not braced for.
Georgiana had fallen ill four days prior, a fever that had begun as nothing and worsened overnight into something the physician would not name plainly but which had left Darcy sitting up through two nights running, watching his sister's face for signs of improvement that refused to come.
Scarlet fever, the physician had finally admitted, that morning, his expression grave enough that Darcy had not slept since.
"She is unwell," he said, and heard his own voice come out flatter and colder than he intended, the words clipped short by an exhaustion he had no room to explain. "I cannot say more than that."
Elizabeth's face changed, concern flickering there, quickly hidden. "I am sorry to hear it."
"Thank you." He should have said more. He should have told her the truth of it, the fear that had kept him from his own bed for two nights, the particular terror of watching the last member of his immediate family struggle for breath.
Instead he stood there, rigid with the effort of holding himself together in a public bookshop, and said nothing at all.
"I will not keep you, then," Elizabeth said, after a silence that stretched too long. "Please give her my good wishes, if it is not presumptuous."
"It is not." He hesitated, some words gathering that he had no right to say. "Miss Bennet, I."
She waited. The bookshop hummed around them, indifferent, a bell somewhere tinkling as another customer entered.
"Nothing," he said. "Forgive me. I hope your sister's happiness continues undimmed."
He bowed and left before he could do anything more foolish than he had already done, and did not see, because he did not look back, the way Elizabeth's face closed over like a door, quiet and final, as she watched him go.
She told herself, walking back to Gracechurch Street with her sister's gift unwrapped in its paper, that she had imagined the coldness. That a man with a sister gravely ill had every right to seem distracted, curt, unable to manage more than the barest civility.
But some small, cruel voice reminded her that he had managed considerably more warmth on a terrace in October, when nothing had been wrong at all beyond his own reticence, and considerably less now, when she had offered him nothing but sympathy.
"You are quiet," said Mrs. Gardiner, over tea that evening, watching her niece with the particular perceptiveness that made her Elizabeth's favourite confidante. "Did something happen in town?"
"I saw Mr. Darcy."
"Ah." Mrs. Gardiner's eyebrows rose, though she said nothing further, waiting.
"His sister is ill. He was distracted. I do not fault him for that.
" Elizabeth turned her teacup slowly in its saucer, watching the liquid tilt and settle.
"I only find myself very tired, Aunt, of trying to read a man who gives me nothing to read.
Warmth on a terrace when nothing is at stake, and coldness in a bookshop when I offer him only kindness.
I cannot make sense of it, and I confess I have grown weary of trying. "
"Perhaps," Mrs. Gardiner said gently, "the sense is not yours to make. Perhaps it is his to give, when he is ready to give it."
"And if he is never ready?"
Her aunt had no answer for that, and Elizabeth did not press for one.
She thought instead, staring into her cooling tea, of a letter she had once received in Kent, page after page of explanation freely given, and wondered what had become of that man, who seemed to have vanished somewhere between a proposal refused and a ballroom reopened, leaving behind him only silence and a cold correctness that told her nothing at all.
She resolved, that night, writing nothing of it in her own letters home, to expect nothing further from him. It was, she thought, the only sensible course left to her.
She did not yet know that four streets away, in a darkened nursery, Georgiana Darcy lay fevered and restless, a sealed letter tucked beneath her pillow where her brother had left it two days before, meant for Elizabeth's hands and reaching, for now, no one at all.