Chapter Twenty Two
The news reached Longbourn on a Tuesday, delivered by Mrs. Bennet with the particular breathless energy she reserved for events of genuine consequence.
"Netherfield is let again! Mr. Bingley returns tomorrow, they say, for the shooting season, and to stay some weeks."
Jane's needle paused over her work, only for a moment, before continuing as though nothing at all had happened. Elizabeth watched her sister's composure and knew, from long practice, exactly how much effort it cost her to maintain it.
"I am sure it is nothing to us," Jane said, to no one in particular.
"Nothing to us! Jane Bennet, have you lost your wits entirely? A single man with five thousand a year, come back to the very neighborhood he left you in, and you say it is nothing."
Elizabeth caught Jane's eye across the room and saw, beneath the careful blankness, something that looked very much like hope trying not to be recognized as hope at all.
He called two days later, and Elizabeth's first sight of him confirmed what she had begun to suspect from her uncle's careful, evasive letters.
He was not alone. Darcy walked beside him up the lane toward Longbourn's door, and Elizabeth's whole body went taut with an awareness she could not disguise, however hard she tried to arrange her face into something like calm.
The visit that followed was, by any ordinary measure, unremarkable.
Bingley talked easily, warmly, his attention returning again and again to Jane with an obviousness that made Mrs. Bennet nearly incoherent with satisfaction.
Darcy said little, sat somewhat apart, and Elizabeth found herself watching him from the corner of her eye throughout, cataloguing every small thing, the careful stillness of his hands, the way his gaze found hers and held it a beat longer than politeness required before he made himself look away.
She could not speak to him properly, not with her mother's voice filling every silence and Kitty hovering nearby with poorly concealed curiosity.
She caught, once, the briefest exchange of looks between them, and read in it something she thought might be a question, though she could not yet answer it in a room this crowded.
They walked out together three days later, the whole party setting off toward Oakham Mount on a fine autumn afternoon, and it was Bingley's doing, whether by accident or design, that arranged the walking order so that Jane fell behind with him and Elizabeth found herself, some quarter mile along, entirely alone with Darcy, Kitty having peeled off toward the Lucases without a backward glance.
Neither of them spoke for the length of several minutes. The silence was not the strained, careful thing it had once been between them. It felt, instead, like a held breath, both of them aware of exactly what needed saying and neither quite ready to be the one who said it first.
"I must thank you," Elizabeth said, finally, "for what you did for Lydia. I know the whole of it now, from my aunt."
"I asked her not to tell you."
"She could not help it, once I asked her directly, and I would not have let the matter rest until she did.
" Elizabeth kept her eyes on the path ahead, though her whole attention was fixed on the man beside her.
"You did it for my sake, I think. Not merely from a sense of obligation about Wickham's character. "
"I did it for you," he said, simply, "entirely for you. I will not pretend otherwise, though I know you had every reason, after what passed between us at Rosings, to expect nothing further from me at all."
"I said cruel things to you at that gate."
"You said true things, spoken with more heat than perhaps they deserved, but true nonetheless.
I have had a great deal of time since to sit with them.
" He stopped walking, and she stopped too, some instinct in her matching the stillness of him.
"I do not ask you to forget any of it, Elizabeth.
I only wished you to know that what I did, I did because I could not bear the thought of you carrying that particular grief alone, when I had the means to ease it. "
She looked up at him, the autumn light catching the careful, unguarded honesty in his face, and felt something in her chest that had been holding its shape for months finally, entirely give way.