Chapter Seven The Ball
Netherfield had been transformed.
This was the word people used when a house was dressed for a ball and candles were multiplied and flowers arrived from somewhere improbable and the furniture was rearranged to suggest that the rooms had always been designed for exactly this purpose.
Elizabeth thought, arriving with her family in the cold November evening, that transformed was not quite accurate.
Netherfield had simply been asked, for one night, to perform its best self, and it was performing it with the reliable competence of a house that had always known what it could do and had merely been waiting for the occasion.
The occasion was Bingley's ball, which meant that the occasion was largely Jane's ball, in the sense that Bingley had arranged it with the specific energy of a man who wanted to give something to a particular person and had the social resources to give the entire neighbourhood instead.
Elizabeth watched her sister's face when they entered and counted the giving as successful.
The rooms were full. The neighbourhood had come in its entirety with its most festive intentions, and the result was warmth and noise and the particular social electricity of a large number of people who had been looking forward to something for several weeks and found, on arrival, that it was worth having looked forward to.
The music was already going. The punch was better than expected.
Elizabeth had come determined to enjoy herself, which she invariably did when she was determined to, and which she sometimes found a useful strategy for managing evenings whose other features were less certain.
She danced first with an officer whose name she had been confusing with another officer's name for three weeks and who turned out, on closer acquaintance, to be distinguishable from the other officer primarily by the fact that he had stronger opinions about card games. She danced second with Mr. Collins.
This required its own species of determination.
Mr. Collins danced with the conviction of a man who had decided that dancing was a virtue and whose execution of it confirmed that conviction and virtue were not always accompanied by competence.
He steered. He counter-steered. He apologised, at one point, to a woman who was not in his immediate path and was already well clear of any danger.
Elizabeth performed the movements of the dance with the body language of a woman who had made a decision and was honouring it, and she smiled at Mr. Collins in the way that she smiled at situations she had chosen and must therefore see through without complaint.
She had reached the bottom of the set and was recovering the use of her feet when she heard her name.
Not her name. Her family name, deployed in the form of a request.
She turned.
Darcy was standing not four feet from her with the expression of a man who had arrived at a decision and was past the point of revisiting it.
He was in evening dress, which ought to have made him look the same as every other man at the ball in evening dress, and did not.
She had noticed, over the course of the last several weeks, that Darcy occupied his clothing differently than other men did, not with peacock awareness of it but with the simplicity of a man who wore things because they were what was worn and thought no further about it, and the result was that he looked like someone had stripped away everything that was performance and left what was underneath.
She was observing this with the lateral attention she gave to things she was not officially observing.
"Miss Bennet," he said. "Would you honour me with the next set?"
There were a number of things available to her in that moment.
The most obvious was refusal. She was good at refusal.
She had a range of its varieties at her disposal and could deploy any of them without visible effort.
But refusal required an explanation, or the obvious absence of one, and she had no explanation that she was prepared to give in a Netherfield ballroom in front of a hundred people who were already attending to the interaction, and the absence of explanation would itself become a neighbourhood event by morning.
She accepted.
She accepted and they took their places in the set and the music started and there was nothing between them but the figures of the dance and the distance the figures required, which was, she thought, the most honest amount of distance she had been from him since the library.
For the first thirty seconds she attended exclusively to the dance.
Then he spoke.
"You have been in good spirits this evening," he said.
It was a simple observation. It had no edge to it. She considered whether to give it one and decided, for reasons she did not fully examine, that she would not.
"I am generally in good spirits at balls," she said. "I find the format agrees with me. One is required to move and to speak in intervals, which is an improvement on most social arrangements."
"You prefer movement."
"I prefer alternation. Moving and being still. Speaking and being silent. It is the continuous obligation to either that I find taxing."
He was quiet for a moment. They passed each other in the figure. His hand was briefly in hers, warm and deliberate, and she attended to the next couple with more focus than they required.
"You find this evening's company agreeable?" he asked when they were parallel again.
"Very much so. Bingley has managed the guest list with great skill. There is almost no one here I am required to like."
She felt rather than saw the fractional shift in his expression. "That is an unusual criterion for approval."
"I find obligation the enemy of genuine feeling," she said. "When I am not required to like someone, I can decide for myself whether I do, which is so much more satisfying."
Another pass. Another interval in which she watched the pattern of the dance and not his face.
"And have you decided?" he asked. The question had a quality she had learned to identify in his conversation: not rhetorical, not social. Genuine inquiry, the kind that wanted an answer.
"About what specifically?"
"Whether you like the company."
She looked at him then, directly, for the first time since the dance had started.
He was looking at her with the focused attention she had encountered in the library and at the dinner table and that she still had not entirely classified, because it had about it the quality of a man who found what he was looking at genuinely important.
"Some of it," she said.
He said nothing for a moment. The music moved through its phrase. She was aware that several couples nearby were attending to their conversation with the interest that a Netherfield ball and the presence of its most talked-about guest warranted.
"I owe you an apology," he said.
She stopped.
Not physically. She kept dancing. Her feet continued through the figure with the muscle memory of a woman who had been dancing since she was twelve, and her expression remained precisely as composed as it had been a moment before, and none of this was visible from outside.
But inside, in the specific place where she had been carrying the doorway for six weeks, something changed register.
"Mr. Darcy," she said, very carefully, "you have not given me any offence that I am aware of."
This was true and not true in a ratio she was not prepared to calculate in the middle of a reel.
"I have been," he said, and she could hear the deliberateness of it, the way he was choosing not speed but accuracy, "less than easy in company since my arrival in Hertfordshire. I am aware that this has been observed. I do not find it easy to correct in the moment, but I am aware of it."
She looked at him. She was genuinely looking now, not the lateral observing of the past six weeks but direct attention applied without the filter of anything that she had decided before.
He looked like a man who had said a true thing and was not sure what it cost him yet.
"That is," she said, and her voice had a quality she was managing carefully, "more self-knowledge than one typically encounters in a ballroom."
"It is the only kind of knowledge I find consistently useful," he said. "Though I will admit I am not always prompt in applying it."
The dance ended.
They stood opposite each other in the brief stillness before the figures dissolved and the music paused and the social world reconvened around them.
She was aware, with the peripheral intelligence she applied to all social situations, that they were being looked at.
She was aware of this and found, which was itself a piece of information, that she was less interested in the being-looked-at than in the specific two feet of air between herself and a man who had just said something she had not anticipated.
She curtsied. He bowed. They separated into the room's general current.
She went to find Charlotte, because Charlotte was always where Elizabeth went when she needed to think beside a person rather than alone.
She had been with Charlotte for perhaps ten minutes when the rest of the evening began to make its demands.
Mr. Collins found her. He had been building to something for several days in the manner of a man who had made a decision and was circling toward its execution with the determination of someone who confused momentum with suitability.
Elizabeth, who had seen the circling and had been navigating around it with the skill of a woman who knew what she was doing, found herself, in the corner of the Netherfield ballroom behind a pillar that Collins had apparently identified as suitable for private conference, out of room to navigate.
He proposed.
He did it at length. He did it with the conviction of a man who had arranged his arguments in the order he found most persuasive and had not considered whether the arguments themselves were persuasive.
He cited her family's situation. He cited Lady Catherine.
He cited the entail, which he had cited before on occasions that had made Elizabeth's father's mouth do something that was not quite a smile.
He cited his affection, which arrived fourth in the list, and Elizabeth attended to its placement and thought that this, perhaps more than anything else, was the information she required.
She refused him with the directness that was her only available approach to situations she found clearly impossible.
She was clear. She was not unkind. She was, in the end, unambiguous in a way that required several additional minutes of his declining to accept the unambiguity, and when she had finally impressed it upon him she came out from behind the pillar into the ballroom's general current and found that she needed a glass of water and a moment of not speaking to anyone.
She did not get either.
Her mother was there, visible across the room, in conversation with Mrs. Long in the specific volume of a woman who had been told something she found extraordinary and had not yet decided how extraordinary to find it.
The something, Elizabeth understood within thirty seconds of attending to the room's acoustic landscape, was the refusal.
Collins had, apparently, disclosed the refusal to whichever nearest person was available.
This was not the result of malice. It was the result of a man who did not understand that some information benefited from privacy.
Mrs. Bennet's response to this was proceeding at a volume that gave Elizabeth a very clear sense of how much of the room was now in possession of it.
She looked for Jane. Jane was with Bingley, in a part of the room that had not yet been reached by the acoustic current of Mrs. Bennet's feelings, and Elizabeth looked at her sister's face in the candlelight and thought: let her have tonight. Let tonight remain what it is.
She turned instead to manage her mother, which was what she did when the alternative was watching something she cared about be damaged by proximity.
It was during this management that she became aware, with the particular peripheral precision that she deployed without choosing to, that Darcy was nearby.
Not adjacent. Across the room. But near enough that the acoustic radius of Mrs. Bennet's opinion would have reached him clearly, and she looked at him without meaning to and found him looking at her.
His expression was not contempt. She had expected contempt. She had been prepared for contempt, had the specific emotional posture ready that she adopted when she received judgment on her family from someone she had already decided was entitled to judge.
His expression was something she could not read.
Not from the distance. Not in the candlelight, with her mother's voice still present in the room and the ball going on around them as though it were the only thing happening. She could not read it, and the not reading was its own small disturbance, a pebble in a place she had thought very still.
She returned her attention to her mother.
She managed. She said the things that redirected and deflected and compressed the situation back to a size the room could absorb.
She was competent at this in the specific way of someone who had been doing it for twenty years and had developed the competence at some cost she no longer tracked.
At the end of the evening she found Jane for the carriage home.
Jane was quietly radiant. Elizabeth took her arm and felt the warmth of it and said, with the specific casualness of a question that was not casual: "Bingley danced with you twice."
"He did," Jane said, with the smile that tried not to be visible and failed.
"And was agreeable throughout?"
"He was everything agreeable." Jane glanced at her. "You danced with Mr. Darcy."
"I did."
"And?"
She was quiet for a moment. The carriage was ahead of them and the night air was cold and clean and the kind of cold that made thoughts feel more available than they were.
"I had formed my opinion of him early," she said finally. "Very early. And with very great confidence."
She was not sure why she said it in that way, in the past tense, with the quality of something being examined rather than asserted. She was not sure what she meant by it, or whether she meant it as a concession or merely as a statement of fact.
Jane stopped walking. She looked at Elizabeth in the dark with the specific gentle attention of a sister who had known her for twenty-four years.
"Were you right?" Jane asked.
Elizabeth opened her mouth.
She did not answer. The carriage was there, and their mother was already inside and loudly present, and there were practical requirements that intervened between the question and any possible response.
But the question rode home with her in the way that questions did when they had found the right moment and the right person to ask them, and it sat in the back of her mind in the dark, all the way back to Longbourn, neither answered nor dismissed.