Chapter Five
Elizabeth returned to Longbourn in the second week of December, her aunt's fortnight in town having stretched to three weeks by Mrs. Gardiner's insistence and Jane's evident reluctance to leave Bingley's company.
She came home with a new bonnet, a wedding gift wrapped in silver paper, and a resolve, hard-won over sleepless nights in Gracechurch Street, to think of Mr. Darcy no more than the ordinary demands of politeness required.
The resolve lasted eleven days.
It broke over a conversation she was never meant to hear, at a dinner given by Sir William Lucas in honour of Jane's engagement, when Elizabeth stepped into the small anteroom off the drawing room to retrieve a dropped fan and found Mrs. Long and Lady Lucas deep in conversation just beyond the half-open door.
"I had it from my cousin in town," Mrs. Long was saying, her voice pitched for confidence and carrying nonetheless. "Mr. Darcy is all but promised. A young lady of excellent family, approved by his aunt and the whole of his relations. The wedding is expected within the year."
"Well," said Lady Lucas, with the particular satisfaction of a woman confirming her own suspicions, "I always said a man like that would marry where he was told to marry. There is too much at stake in a fortune like his for sentiment to enter into it."
Elizabeth stood very still, the fan forgotten in her hand.
She did not hear the rest. She did not need to. She retreated the way she had come, found Jane, made her excuses with a headache that was not entirely a fabrication, and sat awake that night turning the words over until they had worn a groove in her.
A young lady of excellent family, approved by his aunt.
It fit, she told herself. It fit precisely with the coldness in the bookshop, the silence on the terrace, the whole pattern of a man who had once, briefly, shown her his heart, and had since decided the showing had been a mistake.
"You are very pale," Jane said, the next morning, pouring tea with the particular gentleness she reserved for her sister's worst moods. "Did something happen at the Lucases'?"
"Nothing worth repeating." Elizabeth stirred her tea though she took no sugar in it. "I have only concluded, Jane, that I have wasted a great deal of feeling on a man who was never mine to feel it for, and I intend to stop."
"Lizzy."
"I mean it." She set down the spoon with more force than necessary.
"He is to be married, apparently, to some lady approved by his aunt.
I wish him joy of her. I hope she is very dull and very rich and entirely satisfied with a husband who says good night and walks away before he has said anything worth hearing. "
Jane's eyes were kind and a little sad. "You do not sound as though you have stopped feeling anything at all."
"I am working toward it," Elizabeth said, and meant it, and did not entirely succeed, because the ache in her chest did not care what she intended.
She threw herself, in the weeks that followed, into the business of Jane's wedding with an energy that even her mother remarked upon as excessive.
She helped choose ribbon and lace, wrote letters to distant relations, walked to Meryton on errands that did not strictly require her presence, anything to keep her hands and her mind occupied with something other than a terrace in October and a bookshop in November.
It worked, mostly, in daylight. It worked considerably less well at night, when she lay awake and let herself, just for a moment, remember the way his hand had lifted toward her and stopped.
Lydia's behaviour, meanwhile, grew more reckless by the week.
The regiment's imminent departure for winter quarters had put every officer in Meryton in a mood of last flirtations and careless promises, and Lydia, always the most eager to seize whatever attention was offered, had attached herself with alarming persistence to a Captain Denny newly arrived from Brighton, a man Elizabeth did not like the look of and liked considerably less once she heard him speak.
"He is very charming," Lydia announced at supper, flushed with the pleasure of being singled out. "He says Brighton is the gayest place in England, and that Mrs. Forster has invited me to come and stay with her when the regiment removes there."
"You will do no such thing," said Mr. Bennet, without looking up from his book, though something in his tone suggested he had heard more of the conversation than he let on.
"Papa!"
"I have said what I have said. Eat your supper, Lydia."
Elizabeth caught her father's eye across the table, and saw there, for once, a wariness that matched her own. She thought little more of it that night, occupied as she was with her own sorrows, and did not yet understand how much that wariness would matter before the year was out.
It was Mrs. Gardiner's next letter that undid the last of Elizabeth's careful composure.
My dear Lizzy, her aunt wrote, in the middle of a long and otherwise ordinary account of London gossip, I must tell you, though I hesitate to do so, that I have heard a somewhat different account of Mr. Darcy's situation than the one apparently circulating in Hertfordshire.
It seems his sister was gravely ill this autumn, scarlet fever, and that he scarcely left her bedside for a fortnight.
Whatever engagement is rumoured, I confess I find it difficult to credit that a man so occupied would have had leisure to arrange one.
I do not know the truth of the matter, but I thought you should have the fact of the illness, at least, whatever you make of the rest.
Elizabeth read it three times, standing in the cold hallway where the post had been delivered, her breath fogging faintly in the unheated air.
Georgiana had been gravely ill. Not merely unwell, as Darcy had said in the bookshop, his voice clipped and strange, but gravely, dangerously ill, for a fortnight.
She thought of his face that day. The exhaustion she had read as coldness. The words he had started and not finished. Miss Bennet, I.
Something in her, some careful wall she had built these past weeks out of hurt pride and Mrs. Long's gossip, cracked very slightly, and she did not know, standing there with the letter trembling in her hand, whether to feel relief or a fresh and different kind of grief, that she might have misjudged him so badly and still have no way of telling him so.
She wrote nothing of it in her reply. She was not yet certain what there was to say.