Chapter Three The Officer
He arrived on a Thursday.
The news preceded him by approximately six hours, which was the standard lead time for intelligence of that kind in Meryton, and Elizabeth heard it first from Kitty, who had it from Maria Lucas, who had reason to know because the regiment had been billeted in part at Lucas Lodge and Sir William had been informed directly.
A Mr. Wickham had joined the corps as a lieutenant.
He had, by Kitty's account, come down from London and had the specific quality of a new arrival that was different from most new arrivals, which was to say that he was handsome, and had been mentioned with approval by two different officers already, and had a manner that people found immediately agreeable.
Elizabeth received this information with polite interest, because she received most information with polite interest, and thought no more of it until the following morning when Mrs. Bennet proposed an errand to Meryton and the entirety of the younger Bennet daughters found themselves available at once.
Meryton on a Friday had a particular kind of energy when the militia was in residence.
There was more to look at. There was more that appeared to wish to be looked at.
Kitty and Lydia conducted themselves through the main street with their heads on a continuous slow pivot and a running commentary that Elizabeth attended to with half her mind while the other half was occupied with a letter she was composing to the Gardiners and a question she had been meaning to ask the bookseller.
They were in front of the draper's shop when the group of officers came around the corner.
Denny was among them, and Denny had with him a man Elizabeth had not seen before, and she understood immediately why he had been described with approval, because there was nothing in his appearance or manner that was easy to disapprove of.
He was above average height, well built without being imposing, and he had the face of a man who had considered which version of himself to present and had chosen, with excellent judgment, the most accessible one.
His smile arrived before the introductions and stayed after them, which was a skill, and when he was introduced to Elizabeth he gave her his full attention with the quality of someone who was genuinely curious, rather than someone performing curiosity, which was a rarer skill still.
His name was Wickham.
She had heard the name, she thought, once, recently, in a context she could not immediately locate. She filed the thought and gave her attention to the present.
Lydia was already enthusiastically absorbing his existence.
Kitty was providing a supportive counterpoint.
Denny was managing introductions with the cheerful efficiency of a man who knew exactly what social currency he was spending and found it worth the investment.
Elizabeth, standing a little to the side of this, was watching Wickham do the thing she had just identified as a skill, which was to give the impression of entire presence to a social situation that contained seven people, each of whom felt they had been individually seen.
She was thinking that she would like to talk to him properly, in a context smaller than this one, when she heard the sound of horses.
Two riders coming from the direction of the London road. The sound reached the group half a second before the riders came around the far corner of the street, and Elizabeth looked up in the automatic way of a person responding to movement, and found herself looking at Mr. Bingley.
She found herself looking at Mr. Darcy.
They were riding together and had apparently been in conversation until the moment the horses rounded the corner, at which point Bingley's expression shifted immediately into the happy legibility of a man who had spotted people he liked.
He lifted a hand. He called out Jane's name with the easy warmth of someone who was not performing ease.
Elizabeth was watching Darcy.
She saw the moment he registered the group.
She saw his eyes move, with the unhurried efficiency of a man who processed social information quickly, across the assembled party.
She was not certain when he reached Wickham because she was also watching Wickham, and what happened on Wickham's face in that moment was the most interesting thing she had seen in Meryton in several weeks.
It was brief. It was almost entirely suppressed by the time anyone without Elizabeth's specific quality of attention would have noticed it.
But the colour, she was quite sure, had shifted in his face, and the quality of his composure had changed from the comfortable kind to the maintained kind, which were different in ways that were visible only if you were looking for them.
Darcy's face, for its part, had done something equally brief and equally suppressed.
He looked at Wickham for approximately two seconds with an expression that contained nothing she could name and everything she could feel, and then his face closed entirely, the way a door closed when the person inside it had decided to be at home to no one.
He touched his hat. He spoke to Jane. He was, within thirty seconds, engaged with Bingley in whatever they had been saying before and appeared to have returned fully and without visible effort to the prior conversation, and only Elizabeth, watching his jaw, could see the particular quality of tension in it that told her the prior conversation was no longer occupying as much of him as he intended it to appear.
They rode on.
The moment held in the air for approximately three seconds, and then Denny was talking again and Lydia was laughing at something and the Meryton street resumed its usual properties.
Elizabeth glanced at Wickham.
His composure had returned. It was, she thought, very good composure. The shift was seamlessly repaired and the expression he wore now was the one he had worn before, pleasant and present and engaged, and only the fact that she had seen the other one made this one carry a question.
She filed the question. She was, she thought, becoming very well organised.
The errand was completed. The party dispersed.
On the walk home, Lydia reported the entirety of the interaction with Wickham in a register that contained the word handsome at intervals that Elizabeth did not bother to count.
Mrs. Bennet, walking with them, attended to Lydia's account with half her mind and kept the other half on the question of what Bingley might have meant by looking at Jane's hair specifically when he said good morning.
Jane, beside Elizabeth, was quiet and pleased and trying not to be too pleased.
Elizabeth was thinking about two faces on a Meryton street, and about the exact quality of colour that left a man's expression when he did not want to be surprised, and she said nothing about it because there was nothing useful to say yet.
The gathering that evening was at the Phillipses', which was not large but had the advantage of being loud enough to allow for conversations that felt private without requiring any actual privacy.
Mrs. Phillips kept a good table and a warm room and had the hostess quality of someone who considered the evening a success as long as everyone was adequately placed near something they liked, whether that was a card table or a plateful of tarts or a particular person.
Wickham had been invited. Elizabeth noticed his arrival with the specific quality of attention she had been allocating to him since the street, which was to say with more of it than the occasion strictly required, though she had a reasonable cover for this in the fact that he was the newest person in the neighbourhood and it was always reasonable to attend to novelty.
He made his way through the room with the easy confidence of a man who did not find the navigating of social spaces effortful.
He spoke to Mrs. Phillips. He spoke to Mr. Philips.
He spoke to two officers she did not know by name, and he did all of this with the same quality she had noticed in the street, which was genuine interest in whoever was currently in front of him, the kind that made people feel they had been selected rather than found.
When he reached Elizabeth, he sat down in the chair beside her with the unstudied air of someone who had been moving in that direction all along.
"Miss Bennet," he said. "I hope the remainder of your morning was pleasant."
"It was very adequately pleasant, thank you," she said. "Meryton on a Friday is much like Meryton on any other day, except more willing to admit it."
He smiled. It was an easy smile, the kind that did not require the full involvement of the man behind it, but there was enough behind it that the ease felt genuine rather than vacant. "You have been here long, I collect?"
"All my life, which is both longer and shorter than it sounds."
"And do you find it confining?"
It was a direct question, more direct than the occasion invited, and she considered it for a moment because she considered questions on their merits before answering them. "I find it comprehensible," she said finally. "Which is not the same as confining, though people often confuse the two."
He looked at her with a quality that she identified, on brief reflection, as assessment. Not the kind that reduced. The kind that revised. "You are more particular about words than most people."
"My father kept a library. The occupational consequence is unavoidable."
He asked about the library. She answered.
They talked for twenty minutes about books she had read and ones he claimed to have read, and she was not certain about the claim but found the conversation agreeable enough that she did not press.
He was good at conversation. He had the quality of a man who listened as much as he spoke and found exactly the places where his listening could be most usefully deployed.
It was not until the conversation turned, as conversations in Hertfordshire inevitably did, to the neighbourhood at large that she noticed something shift in the quality of his attention.
He had not mentioned Darcy. She had not mentioned Darcy.
The subject had not naturally arisen, except that it always naturally arose in Hertfordshire because Darcy was in Hertfordshire, and eventually the question of the Netherfield party came up in the course of mapping the neighbourhood for him as a new arrival.
She said, on the subject of Mr. Darcy, something careful and lightly delivered: that she had formed no very warm opinion, that he was considered proud, that she herself had found no particular evidence against the characterisation.
Wickham listened to this.
His expression did not do what it had done on the street, which was important, because a man of his composure would not make the same kind of error twice.
What his expression did was subtler. It arranged itself into something that said I have heard this before and am not surprised without saying any of it aloud, and then it said nothing further for two seconds, and in those two seconds Elizabeth felt quite clearly that she was in the proximity of information.
He did not provide it.
He said something pleasant about the neighbourhood's general good opinion of things.
He said something else about the regiment's appreciation of the welcome it had received.
He asked a question about the Netherfield estate that could have been general curiosity or could have been something else entirely, and Elizabeth answered it while watching the thing she had felt approach and then, with perfect, deliberate control, retreat.
The door had been opened a crack, she thought.
That was all. He had not said: there is a history here and it concerns me.
He had simply not closed the door when it would have been easy to close it, and the result was the same as an invitation, except that the responsibility for walking through it was now entirely hers.
She found she was not ready to walk through it yet.
She wanted, first, to think about the street.
She wanted to think about two faces that had moved through a very rapid sequence of expressions in the space of four seconds and had each arrived, by different routes, at the same destination, which was the expression of a man who has decided not to feel what he is feeling until he can feel it in private.
Two men, she thought. The same street. The same moment. And two very different species of control.
She filed this as well.
On the walk home, Mrs. Phillips's hall was loud with departure, and Elizabeth stood near the door in the fresh air and looked at the dark Meryton street and thought about what she had and had not been told, and about what she intended to do with both the having and the not having, and about the specific quality of a door left open by a man who knew exactly what he was doing with it.
She thought about Darcy. She thought about his jaw on the Meryton street.
She thought, because she was Elizabeth Bennet and she could not stop doing it, about the sequence of information she now possessed, which was: a man who had dismissed her in a dark passage without knowing she was there, and a man whose composure had broken on a public street in a way he would not have permitted if he had known she was watching, and between the two of them, in the bright and ordinary rooms of a Hertfordshire evening, a story that had not been told yet but was, she was now quite certain, in the process of wanting to.
She did not know which version of it she would believe, when it came.
She knew only that she would listen, when it did, through a particular kind of filter that she carried now, which was shaped like a doorway, and made of four seconds in the dark, and had been with her since Meryton, and was hers entirely, and was not, she had decided, anyone else's to know.