Chapter Thirteen
Caroline Bingley learned of the committee's decision from her brother, who delivered it with the particular obliviousness of a man too happy in his own engagement to notice he was detonating someone else's careful scheme.
"Darcy is to marry Eliza Bennet after all," Bingley said, spreading marmalade with cheerful abandon. "The committee approved it yesterday. Fitzwilliam wrote me the whole account. Apparently she argued the case herself, before Lady Catherine and the Earl both."
Caroline's knife stilled against her toast.
"She argued it herself," she repeated.
"Rather magnificently, from what Fitzwilliam says. Talked Lady Catherine into a corner she couldn't climb out of." Bingley shook his head, admiring. "I always said there was more to that girl than Hertfordshire manners."
Caroline set down her knife with great care, because the alternative was throwing it, and rose from the table with an excuse about correspondence that fooled no one who troubled to look at her face.
She sat at her writing desk for a long while afterward, not writing anything at all, turning over the wreckage of a year's careful letters.
She had meant, she told herself, only to protect the family's dignity.
She had meant only to see Darcy settled well, with a woman of proper connection, the way things ought to be arranged among people of consequence.
She had not meant, or had not let herself examine too closely that she meant, to keep him from a woman who had never once tried to win him and had won him anyway.
The unfairness of it sat in her chest like a stone.
She had spent three years being everything a wife of consequence ought to be, elegant and accomplished and endlessly, patiently present, and Elizabeth Bennet had done nothing but exist, sharp-tongued and unimpressed, and had somehow ended with everything Caroline had worked for.
She did not write to Lady Catherine again.
There seemed, at last, no further use in it.
But she sat with the bitterness a long while, and did not examine, that day or for some time after, whether the sourness she felt was truly about Darcy at all, or about a world that so rarely rewarded the careful and so easily favored the bold.
The wedding took place at Longbourn in the first week of June, a double ceremony that saw Jane married to Bingley and Elizabeth to Darcy within the same hour, the small church crowded past its ordinary capacity with everyone Meryton could claim any acquaintance with, real or invented for the occasion.
Mrs. Bennet wept through the entire service and several hours afterward, declaring at intervals that she had never been so happy in her life, that ten thousand a year was as nothing to whatever sum Mr. Darcy possessed, that she had always known, always, that her girls would do well.
Mr. Bennet said very little, as was his custom, though Elizabeth caught him watching her during the vows with an expression she had rarely seen from him, something proud and a little sorrowful both, the look of a man losing a favorite to a life he could not follow her into.
"You will write to me," he said afterward, taking her hands, "and tell me honestly whether your husband bores you as much as I suspect he might, in his better moments."
"He does not bore me at all, Papa."
"Give it time." But his eyes were warm, and his grip on her hands lingered longer than strictly necessary before he let her go.
Georgiana, seated near the front beside Colonel Fitzwilliam, cried openly and without embarrassment through the whole ceremony, and caught Elizabeth's eye afterward with a look of such fierce, unguarded happiness that Elizabeth crossed the churchyard to embrace her properly before anyone else could claim her attention.
"You found the letter," Elizabeth said, low, just for the two of them. "I do not think I have properly thanked you for it."
"I only did what any sensible person would have done." Georgiana's smile turned wry. "Which, I am learning, is apparently a rarer quality in this family than I once believed."
"A very rare quality indeed," Elizabeth agreed, and laughed, and found Darcy's eyes on her from across the churchyard, warm and steady and entirely unguarded, the look he had spent a full year afraid to give her in public finally, freely offered.