CHAPTER SIX
A letter arrived from Jane in the second week, full of careful, hopeful restraint, the particular style Jane employed when she wished very much to be optimistic and did not yet trust herself to be.
Mr. Bingley, it seemed, had called at Longbourn twice since Elizabeth's departure, and had spoken, on the second occasion, of perhaps returning to Netherfield before the autumn was entirely out, a piece of news Jane reported with the studied casualness of someone determined not to hope too visibly, in case hoping aloud might somehow undo it.
Elizabeth read the letter twice over breakfast, and found herself smiling in a way that had nothing to do with the ledgers, and looked up to find Mr. Darcy watching her with an expression of mild, genuine curiosity.
"Good news from home, I hope."
"My sister Jane. Mr. Bingley appears to have called on her twice since I left Hertfordshire." She folded the letter, unable to keep the warmth entirely from her voice. "She does not say it outright, but I believe she is happier than she has allowed herself to be in some months."
Something passed across his face, quick and complicated, gone before she could entirely name it. "I am glad to hear it."
"Are you?" The question came out sharper than she had intended, an old grievance surfacing before she had quite decided to voice it.
"I had understood it was you, in part, who persuaded Mr. Bingley away from Netherfield last autumn, on the grounds that my sister's affections were not sufficiently engaged to justify the connection. "
The silence that followed was long enough that she half regretted having spoken at all.
"I did," he said finally, "advise him to be cautious.
I believed, at the time, that your sister's composure, which I now understand to be simply her nature rather than any want of feeling, indicated an indifference that did not match what I observed in Bingley himself.
I was, I think, wrong in that judgment, and I have told him as much. "
"You told him as much."
"Some weeks ago. I do not say it to claim particular credit, Miss Bennet.
I say it because I think you deserve to know that whatever interference I offered last autumn, I have since attempted to correct, as far as it remains within my power to correct it.
" He held her gaze a moment longer than strict propriety required.
"I find I have been wrong about a number of things, this past year, that I was once entirely confident in. "
She did not know what to say to that, and was saved from having to find an answer by Mrs. Reynolds' arrival with the post tray, and the moment passed, though Elizabeth found, returning to the study afterward, that her concentration on the ledgers had thinned considerably, replaced by the uncomfortable, persistent echo of his voice saying I have been wrong about a number of things.
The assembly at Lambton, three days later, was a smaller and more provincial affair than anything Elizabeth had attended in Hertfordshire, but Georgiana had been so eager for her company there, and Mr. Darcy had seemed, in his quiet way, so genuinely pleased at the prospect of the outing, that Elizabeth had agreed without much resistance.
She found herself, partway through the evening, separated briefly from her party near the refreshment table, and it was there, behind a half screen of potted greenery that did very little to actually conceal her, that she overheard two matrons of the neighborhood deep in the particular pleasurable cruelty of well informed gossip.
"...staying at Pemberley itself, if you can credit it, in the family wing, no less, and not so much as a chaperone of any real consequence to speak of."
"Miss Bingley says the whole arrangement is in exchange for some debt of her father's.
A fortune-huntress in muslin, was her phrase, I believe, and really, when one considers it, what young woman of no particular fortune would refuse such a convenient excuse to install herself beneath a wealthy man's roof. "
"Poor Mr. Darcy. So generous a nature, and so easily taken advantage of by a clever girl with an eye to the main chance."
Elizabeth stood very still behind the greenery, her face gone hot and then, almost immediately, cold, the particular vertigo of hearing oneself discussed as though one were not a person at all but a character in someone else's entertaining story, a story she had no power to correct because she had not even been permitted to know it was being told.
She thought of the ledgers, and the old Mr. Darcy's careful private note, do not press him on it, and the dignity her father had been so determined to preserve, all of it now reduced, in the mouths of two strangers behind a potted fern, to a fortune-huntress in muslin.
She thought of Mr. Darcy's voice that morning, quiet and unguarded, I find I have been wrong about a number of things, and felt something in her chest twist at the thought that whatever fragile, unnamed thing had begun to grow between them might already, before either of them had properly acknowledged it, be poisoned beyond saving by a story neither of them had told.
She did not return to the refreshment table. She found Georgiana instead, made some excuse about a headache, and asked, with a composure she did not at all feel, whether they might be permitted to return to Pemberley a little early.
Across the room, watching her go, Mr. Darcy saw something in her face he could not yet name, and felt, without knowing why, the particular cold certainty that whatever had shifted in her this evening, it had shifted badly, and that the easy rhythm of the past fortnight had just come, without warning, to its end.