Chapter Two
By the following Sunday, the story had grown legs Elizabeth had not given it.
She discovered this at church, when Mrs. Long, intercepting her on the path with the particular urgency of a woman bearing fresh intelligence, seized her arm and said, "My dear Miss Eliza, I have heard the whole shocking business, and I must say, if a gentleman spoke so of ME at an assembly, I should never set foot in that room again. "
"It was hardly shocking, ma'am. Only a little rude."
"Rude! To call a girl not handsome enough, in front of half the room!
I call it an insult to every unmarried woman in Hertfordshire.
" Mrs. Long's eyes were bright with the particular pleasure of righteous indignation on someone else's behalf.
"You are quite the talk of it, my dear. Everyone is saying how ill you were used. "
Elizabeth felt her face go warm. "I assure you, I have recovered entirely."
"Of course, of course. Though I did hear Mrs. Bennet say the poor girl cried half the night over it."
"I did no such thing." The words came out sharper than she intended.
Mrs. Long's eyebrows rose, delighted by the sharpness, reading it as confirmation rather than denial, and moved off toward Lady Lucas to deliver the next installment.
Elizabeth stood on the path a moment, watching her go, and felt the private wound she had folded so carefully into a joke begin to unfold itself in public, in versions she had not authored and could not retract.
She found Charlotte inside, waiting near the Lucas family pew.
"You have heard, I suppose," Charlotte said, not unkindly. "It has traveled rather far."
"My mother's doing, I think."
"Your mother's doing, and Mrs. Long's help, and every idle tongue between here and Meryton. I would not distress yourself over it, Eliza. These things blow past."
"I am not distressed." Elizabeth straightened her gloves, which did not need straightening. "I only wish people would find some other entertainment. It is a very small insult to have built an entire week's conversation upon."
Charlotte gave her a look that Elizabeth recognized and disliked, the look of a friend who suspects the wound runs deeper than its owner admits, and is too well bred to say so directly. "It is not so small, if the man was rude enough to say it where you could hear."
Elizabeth did not answer that. She took her seat beside Jane and fixed her eyes on the front of the church and did not think, at all, about how many people in this room now knew a private humiliation she had told no one the true weight of.
The invitation to Netherfield came three days later, delivered by a servant in fine livery who managed to look faintly superior even standing in the Longbourn hall. Mrs. Bennet received it with the reverence due a papal bull.
"Miss Bingley writes so prettily," she said, reading it aloud for the second time.
"She invites Jane to dine, since the gentlemen are engaged elsewhere that evening.
Jane, you must go on horseback, for it looks like rain, and then you will be obliged to stay the night, and see him at breakfast besides. "
"Mamma," Jane said, "that seems a very roundabout scheme."
"Nonsense. It is an excellent scheme." Mrs. Bennet was already ringing for Hill.
Elizabeth, half amused despite herself, said nothing to discourage it.
She had her own private curiosity about Netherfield, though she would not have named it aloud.
Somewhere in that house was a man who had decided, in the space of one careless sentence, that she was not worth the trouble of a dance, and she found she wanted very much to know whether he had thought of it since, or forgotten it entirely, the way one forgets stepping on an insect.
She got her answer sooner than she expected, and in the worst possible circumstances.
Jane's note arrived the next morning, damp with rain and worry. A putrid cold, Mr. Jones says I must not be moved. Elizabeth read it twice at the breakfast table, then set down her cup and stood.
"I shall walk over."
"Walk! Three miles, in this mud?" Mrs. Bennet looked scandalized and pleased in roughly equal measure. "Whatever will Mr. Bingley think?"
"I imagine he will think I love my sister," Elizabeth said, already reaching for her boots.
The walk took the better part of an hour, across fields gone soft with rain, over stiles, through mud that climbed past her ankles and did not care in the least for the state of her petticoat.
By the time Netherfield's chimneys came into view she was flushed, disheveled, and entirely unrepentant, and she walked into the breakfast parlour with her hem six inches deep in dirt and her hair coming loose from its pins.
The room went quiet in a way that told her exactly how she looked.
Miss Bingley's eyes traveled the length of her, slow and cataloguing. Mrs. Hurst's mouth made a small, involuntary shape of distaste. And Mr. Darcy, seated near the window with a cup of coffee halfway to his mouth, simply looked at her, and did not look away.
She had expected, if she had expected anything, a repeat of the assembly.
A glance, a dismissal, a return to whatever more interesting thought had occupied him before she walked in.
Instead his eyes moved over her face, her flushed cheeks, the mud she had not bothered to disguise, and something in his expression shifted that she could not immediately name. Not distaste. Not indifference either.
She looked away first, unsettled by it, and addressed herself to Mr. Bingley, whose concern for Jane was at least uncomplicated.
"She is upstairs, I take it? I should like to see her at once, if I may."
"Of course, of course." Bingley was already moving toward the door to summon a servant. "I confess we have been quite worried. Caroline, will you take Miss Elizabeth up?"
Miss Bingley's smile did not reach her eyes. "Of course."
Elizabeth followed her out, aware, without turning to check it, that Mr. Darcy's coffee cup had not moved from its suspended position by the time she reached the door.
She thought little of it at the time. She had Jane's fever to attend to, and no leisure that morning for cataloguing the behavior of a man she had already decided did not merit her attention.
But she remembered it later, that suspended cup, that look that was not distaste, and found she could not quite fit it against the sentence she had carried since the assembly, the two things sitting oddly together in her memory like pieces from different puzzles.