Chapter Six
The Netherfield ball arrived a week later, and Elizabeth dressed for it with more care than she liked to admit, and told herself the care had nothing to do with the tall, silent man who would certainly be present.
She was wrong about that too, though she did not discover how wrong until the dancing had already begun and Mr. Darcy crossed the room toward her with a directness that startled her more than any careless remark ever could.
"Miss Bennet." He did not ask so much as present the question, hand extended. "The next two dances."
She should have refused him. She had every reason to, four months' worth of reasons, carefully catalogued and ready to hand.
Instead she found her hand already in his, the warmth of his glove through hers doing something complicated to her composure, and heard herself say, "I did not think you danced with women you had already judged unworthy of it. "
"I judged wrong," he said, and led her into the set before she could decide whether that was apology or simply fact.
They danced the first figures in silence, the particular silence of two people who have too much to say and no safe way to begin. It was Elizabeth who broke it, because she had never in her life managed to leave a silence alone when a sharp word might fill it instead.
"You dance a great deal better than your reputation would suggest, Mr. Darcy."
"My reputation says I do not dance at all."
"Precisely my meaning."
His mouth did something that was almost a smile, gone before it fully arrived. "Perhaps my reputation is not entirely accurate."
"Perhaps it was built on a single, memorable evening."
He missed a step. Only a fraction of one, barely noticeable to anyone watching, but she felt it through their joined hands, felt the small hitch of him recalculating something. When he spoke again his voice had lost its ease.
"I have wondered," he said, "whether you would ever forgive me that evening, or only ever wound me with it."
"I had not considered forgiveness necessary. You have not asked for it."
"Would you accept it, if I did?"
The music turned them apart before she could answer, the figure of the dance separating them for eight full bars, and she used the distance to compose an answer that would not give him too much.
When they came back together his eyes were on her face with an intensity that made the composed answer difficult to remember.
"I do not know," she said, honestly, which surprised her more than it seemed to surprise him.
They finished the dance without further conversation, and he returned her to her place with a bow correct in every particular, and walked away, and she stood there with her heart doing something entirely unreasonable, watching him go.
She did not have long to compose herself before her mother's voice found her from three feet away, pitched at a volume that carried the length of the supper table and several tables beyond it.
"Did you see, Mrs. Long? My Lizzy danced with Mr. Darcy himself! After the shocking way he insulted her at the very first assembly. I told him myself, when he asked her, I said, well sir, I hope you find her handsome enough tonight, for I am sure everyone else always has."
The nearest six guests went quiet. Elizabeth felt her face go hot with an entirely different kind of humiliation than any she had suffered from Darcy's careless sentence, this one loud and public and impossible to escape.
She looked across the room and found Darcy already looking back at her, his expression unreadable, though something in the set of his jaw suggested he had heard every word.
Caroline Bingley, seated near enough to have heard it too, leaned toward her sister with a smile that did not reach her eyes.
"How very affecting," she said, not troubling to lower her voice much.
"I had not realized the Bennets nursed their grievances with such devotion.
One begins to understand why certain families cannot secure good connections. "
"Caroline," Bingley said, sharply, from further down the table.
"I only observe, Charles. A woman who cannot let a single remark rest for four months is hardly likely to make a comfortable wife for any man of sense."
Elizabeth's fork did not move. She kept her eyes fixed on her plate and her spine very straight and told herself the burning in her throat was simply the heat of the room.
Jane, beside her, reached under the table and found her hand, and Elizabeth held onto it as though it were the only steady thing left.
Across the room, she was aware, without looking, that Darcy had not returned to his own conversation.
She was aware that whatever had passed between them during their dance, whatever careful ground they had begun, gingerly, to build, had just been trampled flat by two women who did not know or care what either of them had actually felt.
She excused herself before the next course arrived, on the pretext of finding her mother's shawl, and stood for a moment in the cool of the hallway with her back against the wall and her eyes shut, trying to remember how to breathe evenly.
She had almost succeeded when she heard footsteps, and opened her eyes to find Darcy standing three feet away, his expression stripped of its usual composure.
"Miss Bennet."
"I would rather not discuss it, Mr. Darcy."
"I did not come to discuss it." He took a step closer, close enough that she caught the low, careful note in his voice, close enough that the hallway suddenly felt very small.
"I came to say that I am sorry. Not tonight only.
The assembly. I have owed you that a long while, and I have been a coward about paying it. "
She looked up at him, startled by the plainness of it, by the absence of any performance in his face.
"Why," she said, "did you say it at all?"
"Because I was tired, and unhappy to be there, and Bingley would not stop pushing, and I wanted the conversation to end." He held her gaze, unflinching, though something in it looked almost like pain. "None of that excuses it. I have known for months that it did not."
The hallway held them both in a silence that felt, for the first time since the assembly, entirely honest. She did not know what to do with the wound now that someone had finally, properly touched it.
She only knew that standing this close to him, in this narrow hall, with the noise of the ball muffled behind the door, she felt something shift that she was not at all prepared for, and had no idea, yet, whether to trust.