Chapter Eight
The letter came on a Tuesday, and Jane read it standing by the window with the particular stillness she wore when something had wounded her too deeply for immediate tears.
"They have gone," she said, at last. "The whole party. To London."
Elizabeth crossed the room and took the letter from her sister's hand before Jane's silence could turn into something worse. Miss Bingley's writing was elegant, effusive, and, on close reading, entirely hollow.
My dear friend, I do not pretend to regret anything I shall leave in Hertfordshire, except your society. Elizabeth read that line twice and thought, uncharitably, that Caroline Bingley regretted very little in her life beyond her own inconveniences.
Further down, worse. Mr. Darcy is impatient to see his sister, and I do not think Georgiana Darcy has her equal for beauty, elegance, and accomplishments.
I dare say I am not wrong in calling my brother most capable of engaging any woman's heart, and I do hope, with all these circumstances to favor the attachment, that we may soon call her sister.
"She means Miss Darcy," Jane said, quietly. "For Mr. Bingley."
"She means to discourage you, Jane, that is all she means. Do not give the letter more truth than it has earned."
"Perhaps." Jane's hands were folded very tightly in her lap. "But if he means to marry Miss Darcy, Lizzy, there is nothing more to be said."
Elizabeth wanted, badly, to reassure her, and found she could not entirely trust her own certainty enough to make the reassurance honest. She thought of Bingley's face at the ball, attentive and warm toward Jane in every particular, and could not reconcile it with a man about to abandon her for his friend's sister.
But she thought too, with a colder and more private unease, of how easily circumstances could be arranged by people determined enough to arrange them, and did not know how much weight to give either thought.
"We shall see him again," she said, finally. "A man does not forget a woman he has looked at the way he has looked at you, merely because his sister writes him a clever letter."
Jane managed a small smile, though it did not fully reach her eyes, and folded the letter away into her writing desk with the careful precision of someone who intended to reread it many times whether she wished to or not.
Elizabeth found Charlotte three days later, walking the lane between Lucas Lodge and Longbourn with an expression that suggested she had something to say and had not yet decided how to begin saying it.
"You will think me very foolish," Charlotte said, at last.
"I have thought worse of you and been wrong. Tell me."
"Mr. Collins has asked me to marry him. I have accepted."
Elizabeth stopped walking entirely. "Charlotte."
"I know what you think of him."
"I think you refused him nothing you did not already understand perfectly, and I will not insult you by pretending I do not know why you accepted.
" Elizabeth found her voice steadier than her feelings, which had gone somewhere sharp and unhappy on Charlotte's behalf.
"I only wish it were someone else asking. "
"So do I, if I am honest. But I am seven and twenty, Eliza, without beauty or fortune, and Mr. Collins offers a comfortable home and a respectable situation, and I have never expected romance to be part of my inheritance.
" Charlotte's voice was calm, practical, entirely without self-pity, which somehow made it worse.
"You are fortunate enough to have both wit and beauty.
I have neither in sufficient quantity, and I have made my peace with what I do have. "
"You have not made your peace with Mr. Collins's conversation, surely."
Charlotte almost laughed. "No. That, I suspect, I shall simply have to endure." She glanced sideways at Elizabeth, something more searching in her expression now. "You are unhappy about more than my engagement, I think."
"I am unhappy about a great many things at once, and none of them will improve by discussing them on a public lane."
"Is one of them Mr. Bingley's departure? Or something nearer to Mr. Darcy?"
Elizabeth said nothing, and Charlotte, wise enough not to press what would not yield, let the subject drop, and they walked the rest of the way in a silence that held more understanding than either of them cared to voice.