Chapter Five The Length of Five Days
She had not intended to stay.
The first morning had been necessity: Jane's fever was higher by breakfast and the housekeeper had a look about her that Elizabeth knew from childhood as the look of a woman who had seen enough sickbeds to have a considered opinion of this one, and the considered opinion was that it was not finished.
Elizabeth had written to her mother and her mother had written back a letter whose primary content was the glad interpretation that remaining at Netherfield was an excellent opportunity, a letter which Elizabeth folded and set face-down on the writing table with a patience she was approximately half certain she felt.
She stayed.
Five days.
She was later, when the five days had become something she thought about with the specific mixture of honesty and irritation that characterised her most useful self-examinations, unable to account for all of them precisely.
They had the quality of time that passes not quickly but thoroughly, the kind that leaves its mark on things without announcing it.
Jane improved slowly and then more quickly.
Elizabeth nursed her with the systematic attention of a person who finds practical care clarifying and whose mind, freed from the need to construct something to do, applies itself to whatever the room contains.
The room, which was Netherfield, contained rather more than rooms usually did.
Caroline Bingley was useful in the way that useful things sometimes were without intending to be.
Her hostility to Elizabeth was not crude, which would have made it easier, but architectural: built into the structure of every interaction so that you had to attend to its construction rather than its surface.
She complimented Elizabeth's hair in a tone that was technically a compliment.
She offered assistance with Jane's care in a way that communicated that the offer was more important than the following through on it would be.
She positioned herself between Elizabeth and the conversation of the men at dinner with the body language of someone tending a border.
All of this was information.
The information it gave Elizabeth was specific and not particularly about Caroline: a woman whose sense of her own position was directly threatened by Elizabeth's presence did not threaten an unimportant presence.
Caroline Bingley had calculated something about Mr. Darcy's attention and found it alarming, and the fact that she found it alarming was a piece of knowledge Elizabeth picked up from the room and held and did not yet know what to do with.
She did not particularly want to do anything with it. She was not there to be looked at by Darcy or to alarm his friend's sister or to be anything other than Jane's nurse and a tolerable guest.
And yet.
He engaged with her.
This was the thing she had not anticipated and spent a portion of each of the five days re-anticipating after it happened.
She had expected, from everything she knew of him, that proximity would produce either condescension or indifference or the specific variety of polite vacancy that very proud men sometimes deployed when they could not be bothered to condescend. She had prepared for all three.
He did not deploy any of them.
On the second evening, at the dinner table, she had said something about a novel she had found in the Netherfield library, something ironic about the author's apparent conviction that the inner lives of women could be adequately summarised in three-quarters of a volume with one quarter left over for their resolution.
She had not said it to him. She had said it to the table, in the general way she said most things in social situations, releasing the observation into the room and attending to wherever it landed.
It landed with Darcy.
Not in the way of a man laughing at something because the woman who said it was present and laughter was appropriate.
In the way of a man who found the observation itself worth the attention, and who responded, after a fractional pause that she recognised as actual thinking rather than social calculation, with a counter-argument that was both unexpected and not entirely wrong.
She had engaged with it because she engaged with arguments on their merits.
They had spoken for perhaps eight minutes.
Not exclusively to each other. Through the medium of the table's general conversation, with the particular indirection of two people who are saying things to a room that are actually being said to each other.
At the end of it she had not conceded his point and he had not conceded hers, and Caroline had redirected the conversation with the crisp efficiency of a woman who had observed the eight minutes with precision and found them, on balance, roughly as welcome as the mud on Elizabeth's petticoat hem.
Elizabeth had drunk her wine and thought: interesting.
Not in the way she had found him interesting before, which had been the naturalist's category, the observation of an unusual specimen from a safe and scientific remove. Something slightly less safe than that.
The third morning she was in the library when he came for a book.
He had not known she was there, which was clear from the quality of his pause in the doorway, and she had looked up from the window seat with the collected expression of a woman who had been reading for an hour and was not particularly surprised by anything the morning had to offer.
"I did not know the library was occupied," he said.
"I hope it does not require exclusive possession. I find it a generously sized room."
He looked at her for a moment. She returned her eyes to her book.
He came in and went to the shelves with the specific efficiency of a man who knew where the book he wanted was, which told her he used this library regularly, and she thought of the cold coffee in the sitting room that she had noticed on the first morning, the newspaper untouched, and revised her sense of how much of his time at Netherfield was spent inside his own head in rooms that happened to contain furniture.
He found the book and could have left.
He sat down at the table near the window.
She went on reading. He went on reading.
The fire was the only sound for a period she estimated at twenty minutes, and at the end of the twenty minutes she realised she had read the same paragraph three times and that the paragraph concerned the migratory habits of certain birds in the northern counties and that she had absolutely no feeling about the migratory habits of certain birds in the northern counties and never had.
He looked up from his book. She was already looking out the window.
"What are you reading?" he asked.
The question had the quality of a question asked because someone wanted to know the answer. She had considerable experience with questions asked for other reasons and could distinguish between them.
She told him. He was quiet for a moment, and then he said something about the author that was informed, direct, and contained a mild reservation she had not seen attributed to the author before.
She asked about the reservation. He explained it.
She found herself disagreeing, and said so, and he did not look the way men sometimes looked when she disagreed, which was to say that he did not appear to require correction, or to soften in the way that meant he was deciding to find the disagreement charming rather than actually engaging with it.
He engaged with it.
They spoke for perhaps half an hour. About the book, about the question the book raised, about a tangential question that interested her more than the original one.
The conversation moved in the way good conversations moved, which was by following its own logic rather than the logic of what was appropriate between two people of their particular social positions in a borrowed library on a Tuesday morning.
At the end of it she heard the breakfast bell and stood, and he stood, and there was a brief interval in which they occupied the same small portion of the room with the usual physical distance between two people who have not been introduced by anything more than proximity, and she noticed, with the impartial honesty that was one of her more reliable qualities when she applied it to things other than herself, that the distance felt different than distances usually did.
She did not examine this. She went to breakfast.
Caroline, at the breakfast table, was warm to her in a way that was approximately one degree warmer than usual, which Elizabeth identified immediately as the warmth of surveillance and received with uncomplicated appetite for the eggs.
The fourth day brought letters from Longbourn.
Her mother's continued glad interpretation of the situation.
A note from her father containing a single dry sentence about the restorative properties of country air for both the ill and the nurse, which was his way of saying he found the arrangement broadly acceptable.
And a brief, cheerful letter from her aunt Gardiner mentioning that she and Mr. Gardiner were planning a tour in the summer and had been debating the northern counties, and had Elizabeth any thoughts on the matter for their eventual planning.
Elizabeth folded this last letter and held it for a moment.
London, she thought. The Gardiners. The specific quality of her aunt's company, which was intelligent and curious and free of the particular domestic pressure of Longbourn.
She thought of this as a future thing she was permitted to look forward to, and set it in the place in her mind where she kept future things, and felt the small distinct pleasure of a person who has something to look forward to.
The fifth day was the last.