Chapter Twenty-Three
Three days after the Bennets' departure, Darcy was deeply dissatisfied with the art of letter writing.
The fault did not lie in any deficiency of subject.
Had the quantity of feeling he wished to express borne any relation to the quantity of paper before him, he might have filled a library.
Unfortunately, the act of transferring one to the other proved considerably more difficult.
Every letter seemed inadequate almost as soon as it was begun.
What appeared sincere in his head looked pompous on the page; what appeared restrained upon the page felt cold upon a second reading.
He had now reached the point of distrusting every sentence that he coaxed—unwillingly—from his pen.
The latest attempt lay abandoned upon the desk. Darcy stared at it for some time before deciding that further observation was unlikely to improve it.
Permission to write had seemed a great triumph whilst he was standing in the middle of the road, having achieved some sort of small victory. From the comfort of a writing desk, it appeared a far less complete solution.
The house itself did little to assist his spirits.
In the space of a few short weeks, the Bennets had contrived to make themselves part of the fabric of daily life.
Their absence lingered in unexpected places.
Jane's quiet good sense seemed inseparable from the breakfast table.
Mrs Bennet's observations had become strangely attached to the drawing room.
Elizabeth appeared to have left traces of herself everywhere.
A knock at the door interrupted these reflections and Bingley entered without waiting for an answer. "You are still writing."
"I am attempting to write."
Bingley's gaze travelled briefly across the desk. "I see. Well no use beating a dead horse, Darcy, come and have some tea. We are to be off tomorrow and I fear Mrs Makepeace has copious pearls of wisdom to impart before we go."
He clapped his hands together and turned, leaving Darcy with little choice but to follow him.
???
A quarter of an hour later they found themselves in the small parlour where so much of the previous month had been spent.
The room looked exactly as it always had, which only served to emphasise how much had changed.
Mrs Makepeace occupied her usual place beside the hearth.
Georgiana sat near the window with some embroidery work in her hands, though she appeared to have accomplished very little of it.
Conversation soon settled upon the subject which had occupied all of them in one form or another since the Bennets' departure.
Mrs Makepeace was the first to speak openly of it.
"I had forgotten," she observed whilst pouring tea, "how quickly a house may grow accustomed to particular people."
Bingley accepted a cup with unusual solemnity. "It is remarkably quiet," he agreed. "Well, not so much quiet as unsettled. It feels deuced unsettled and I cannot set myself to rights."
"I miss them," Georgiana said softly.
There was no embarrassment in the admission. She looked down at her stitching for a moment before continuing. "I knew I should. I had not expected it to feel quite so strange."
"It is perfectly natural," said Mrs Makepeace. "People spend half their lives travelling about the country forming acquaintances, and every now and then one of them has the impertinence to become important."
For a few moments the conversation wandered through recollections of Lyme. A walk, a dinner, an afternoon spent upon the Cobb. Every memory seemed to contain a Bennet somewhere within it. At length the discussion arrived at the subject of correspondence.
"Have you written?" Georgiana asked her brother.
"Several times."
"And sent them?"
"None as of yet."
Mrs Makepeace looked unimpressed. "That many?"
Bingley laughed.
"It requires some courage."
"Young people in love always imagine letters require eloquence. What they generally require is posting."
Darcy coloured, but found himself unable to disagree.
"I begin to suspect," he said, "that letters are a very poor substitute for conversation."
Mrs Makepeace handed him a cup. "They are."
Nevertheless, the dissatisfaction remained. The distance between Lyme and Hertfordshire seemed greater now than it had whilst the Bennets were actually travelling it.
Bingley, who had been unusually thoughtful throughout much of the afternoon, set down his cup and leaned back in his chair. "I have been considering something."
Mrs Makepeace sighed. "Whenever a young man begins a sentence in that manner, it is wise to sit down."
"We are already sitting down."
"Then we are admirably prepared."
Bingley ignored her. "It occurs to me that I ought eventually to settle somewhere."
Darcy raised an eyebrow.
This was not a new idea. Bingley had spoken often of taking an estate and fulfilling his family’s greatest wish of joining the landed gentry after the family fortune had been made in trade a generation before.
Bingley coughed self-consciously. "And I wonder if Hertfordshire might be just the thing. It is an easy distance from London, and I am sure the neighbours would be quite to my liking." He beamed and rubbed his hands together, very satisfied with this plan.
Georgiana laughed. "Mr Bingley, that is quite the best news I have heard in days!"