Chapter Four Netherfield
He had hoped that distance would be the corrective.
This was the word he had used, privately, with the precision he applied to all things he preferred not to examine too directly: corrective.
As in, the situation required one. As in, he was a rational man in possession of a rational mind and the application of distance between himself and a particular neighbourhood in Hertfordshire would restore, in due course, the appropriate balance.
He had been at Netherfield for six weeks. The distance between Netherfield and Meryton was three miles, which was not, as distances went, any kind of corrective at all.
Darcy stood at the window of the library on Tuesday morning with a cup of coffee that had gone cold and watched the grounds in the early November light and conducted, with himself, the same argument he had been conducting with himself in various forms since approximately the third evening of his acquaintance with Hertfordshire.
The argument was not, technically, about Miss Elizabeth Bennet.
It was about his obligations to Bingley, his assessment of the neighbourhood's general suitability for extended residence, his professional responsibilities in London that had been deferred longer than was strictly prudent.
These were the subjects of the argument.
Miss Elizabeth Bennet was merely the reason it kept recurring.
He was aware that this distinction was doing very little work.
Bingley appeared in the doorway at nine o'clock with his customary morning energy, which was the energy of a man who found each new day a reasonable proposition and could not quite understand why others didn't. He registered Darcy's cold coffee and untouched newspaper with the philosophical acceptance of a man long accustomed to his friend's morning temperament.
"Jane Bennet is ill," he said. "She came to Netherfield last evening on horseback in the rain, which Mrs. Hurst considers imprudent and I consider thoroughly consistent with the family's tendency to do things in the most direct manner available."
"Is she seriously unwell?"
"She has a cold and a fever and my housekeeper is convinced it will be worse before it is better. I have suggested she stay until she is recovered." Bingley said this with the careful absence of tone that meant he was suppressing a very great deal of tone. "Her mother has been informed."
Darcy turned from the window. He looked at Bingley for a moment and thought, as he not infrequently thought when observing his friend, that Bingley's transparency was in some respects a more sophisticated social instrument than most people's opacity.
It was impossible to be angry at a man who never pretended.
"And the Bennet family will respond to this how, precisely? "
"I imagine," Bingley said, "they will come."
He said it with the specific composure of a man who found this prospect entirely acceptable and was watching Darcy's face to see how Darcy found it.
Darcy returned his attention to the grounds.
"Yes," he said. "I imagine they will."
She arrived at eleven.
He knew the moment she entered the house because there was a change in the acoustic quality of the entrance hall below the library that he had no rational explanation for, and then there were voices, and then after a decent interval Caroline appeared in the library doorway with her face arranged in an expression that was technically hospitality and fundamentally neither.
"Miss Elizabeth Bennet has called to see her sister," Caroline said. "She walked."
"From Longbourn?"
"Three miles. Through the fields, evidently. One can tell."
Darcy said nothing. This was his preferred response to most of Caroline's communications and it consistently disappointed her.
"She looks," Caroline continued, "very well, I suppose, if one finds that sort of look well. Cheeks rather too bright. The hem of her petticoat was six inches deep in mud."
He had found his window again. He did not turn around.
He was aware, in the back of his mind, with the quality of awareness he had been managing for six weeks, that Elizabeth Bennet had walked three miles through November fields to see her sister and had arrived with bright cheeks and a muddy hem and that this was, in the specific economy of his private thoughts, a very great deal of information.
"She will stay for the morning, I suppose," he said.
"I have offered her a place at table. Bingley insisted." Caroline delivered this with a smile that was approximately the temperature of the coffee. "No doubt it will be very agreeable."
She left.
He stood at the window for another three minutes with the cold cup and the November light and the grounds, and then he went downstairs.
She was not, when he entered the sitting room, what he had been composing himself to encounter, which was to say that she was exactly what she always was, and this was the problem.
He had hoped, with the specific and entirely unreasonable hope of a man who has been trying not to think about a person and has instead thought about them continuously, that proximity might reduce the effect.
That seeing her in ordinary daylight, in an ordinary room, attending to an unwell sister with the practical attention of a woman who was simply being useful, would return her to the proportions of a normal member of the neighbourhood and remove the particular quality she had of occupying space in a way that made other things in the same space seem temporarily less important.
It did not.
She was sitting beside Jane's bed when he passed the open door, reading aloud in a low voice from a volume she had apparently brought with her, and she looked up when his shadow crossed the threshold because she had the quality of noticing things the way he noticed things, which was to say that she noticed them before they expected to be noticed and without indicating that she had.
They looked at each other for a fraction of a second and she nodded the kind of nod that was acknowledgment without concession, and he moved on.
At dinner she was present and, by the general law of Netherfield's social dynamics, placed at a sufficient distance from him that conversation required effort.
He did not make the effort. He watched her, instead, with the same critical attention he applied to things he was trying to understand, and he understood the following:
She had her mother's total absence of self-consciousness in social situations and none of her mother's reasons for it.
She was at ease not because she failed to observe the room's dynamics, but because she observed them and found them inadequate grounds for unease.
She asked Caroline a question about the housekeeper's medicinal preferences that was so exactly the right question that Caroline was compelled to answer it civilly, which Caroline found visibly inconvenient.
She ate her dinner without performing any feelings about it.
When Bingley talked, she listened as though what he said was actually what she was listening to, which was, Darcy had observed, rarer than it appeared.
She did not look at him directly during dinner. He noted this. He also noted, with the self-awareness he tried to apply to such notings, that noting it was itself a piece of information about himself that he did not particularly welcome.
After dinner, in the sitting room, Caroline attempted the pianoforte and Bingley attempted conversation and Hurst attempted the newspaper with moderate success, and Darcy sat near the fire with a book he was reading with approximately a third of his available attention and watched Elizabeth do her needlework with the quiet efficiency of a woman whose hands knew what they were doing and had released her mind for other purposes.
He thought, in the somewhat more honest mode that the evening quiet permitted: that he had done her a considerable injury.
Not the refusal to dance. That was a small thing, the kind of social imposition that assembled rooms inflicted on their occupants as a matter of course and that she appeared, from available evidence, entirely capable of absorbing without damage.
He meant the other thing. The thing he had said to Bingley in the corner of the Meryton assembly room with the specific carelessness of a man who did not believe anyone was listening, because no one, in his experience, ever was.
He had looked at her that first evening.
He had registered her in the first moment in the way that his mind registered things that it would subsequently be unable to stop returning to, which happened rarely and always without his permission.
She had been laughing at something. She had been standing with a woman of about her age and the laugh was not performed for the room.
It was the laugh of a woman who found something genuinely funny and was not monitoring the effect.
And then Bingley had seen him looking and had, in the friendly disastrous way of Bingley, said so.
He had not been ready. He had been caught, which was the sensation he was least equipped to manage, and what came out when he opened his mouth was the first thing available, and the first thing available was dismissal, and he had delivered it with enough conviction to deceive even himself temporarily, and it had taken him approximately four hours to admit, in the privacy of his own room, that it had been an outright and intentional lie.
Not handsome enough. He set the book down on his knee.
She was, he thought, looking at her in the quiet of the Netherfield sitting room with the fire doing its patient work on the room's temperature, one of the most alive people he had ever been in a room with.
This was not the same as beautiful. Though she was, he would now be honest about it even if only to himself, very handsome in the way that required looking at more than once to fully account for, which was a more interesting kind of handsome than the other kind.
But the specific quality that made it impossible to be in the same room with her without being aware of it was not a matter of feature.
It was the quality of being entirely present.
Of looking at everything as though it contained information worth having.
Of finding the world, on available evidence, genuinely interesting.
He was a man who had built his interior life at some distance from the world. He had found this arrangement broadly satisfactory for thirty-two years. He was beginning to understand why it was now failing to satisfy.
She glanced up from her needlework. He moved his eyes to the fire.
He was, he thought, in very great trouble.
That was the word he used. Trouble. Specific, honest, contained.
He sat with it for the remainder of the evening while Caroline played and Bingley talked and the fire settled into its later evening mode, and he acknowledged that the corrective had not worked, and that six weeks of attempting not to think about Elizabeth Bennet had resulted in a quantity of thought about Elizabeth Bennet that was, by any reasonable measure, the opposite of a corrective.
He did not, that night, know what to do about this.
He thought, not for the first time and with the particular unease of a man whose pride had been, on the whole, one of his more reliable instruments: that she had no idea.
That she had laughed with Charlotte Lucas and danced with officers she did not know and looked at him across the rooms of Hertfordshire with nothing more than mild curiosity, and that she did not know and had never had any reason to know that he had noticed her from the first moment, and that the thing he had said to Bingley had been the word of a frightened man, not an honest one.
He sat with this for a long time.
He resolved, as he had resolved before and would apparently need to resolve again, to master himself.
He was a rational man. He had obligations.
He had a clear sense of what the world was and what it required of him and who he was required to be within it.
Elizabeth Bennet was a gentleman's daughter with no connexions, no fortune, a family that had spent the Meryton assembly demonstrating everything that connexion with them would entail, and a mother whose design upon Bingley for Jane was worn so openly it had become a neighbourhood spectacle.
These were real things. They had real weight. He would attend to them.
He put the book down, said goodnight to the room, and went upstairs.
From the door of Jane's room, as he passed, there came the sound of Elizabeth's voice, low and continuing, reading something to her sister in the dark.
He did not stop walking. But he slowed, for three paces, before he caught himself and did not.