CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The invitation to the Derbyshire autumn assembly arrived with the rest of the post on a Wednesday, and it was Bingley, presently installed in the guest wing after arriving early from Netherfield and showing no particular inclination to leave, who brought it up at breakfast with the cheerful enthusiasm of a man who found assemblies uniformly pleasant and could not imagine why anyone else might not.
"Capital," he said, turning the card over approvingly. "Just the thing. Darcy, you cannot object this time, your own county and all that, you cannot tell me the neighborhood is insufficiently handsome."
"I have not objected," Darcy said, from behind his newspaper.
"You have that look, though."
"I always have that look."
"Miss Bennet?" Bingley turned to Elizabeth with his open, guileless smile. "I think you ought to come. Miss Darcy has told me you have not yet seen the Lambton assembly rooms properly, and they are very fine, in their way."
Elizabeth, who had been watching Georgiana's hands tighten fractionally around her teacup at the mention of Lambton and then release, with conscious effort, as she met Elizabeth's look and gave a small, firm nod, said that she would be delighted, and meant it rather less than she sounded.
It was Caroline Bingley who approached her that afternoon, finding her in the gallery where she had developed the habit of walking when she needed to think without the interruption of ledgers or company.
She had known it was coming. Caroline had been quieter since the music room confrontation, a contained quiet, the specific silence of a woman deciding when to deploy a weapon she had not yet finished sharpening, and Elizabeth had been watching for it the way one watches for weather, not in hope but in the knowledge that it would come regardless and the only sensible preparation was to be steady when it did.
"Miss Bennet." Caroline fell into step beside her with the graceful ease of a woman for whom every room was a stage she had long since learned to move across. "I wonder if I might speak plainly with you."
"I have found, Miss Bingley, that you are most dangerous when you ask permission to be plain. I would prefer you simply be so."
A slight pause. "Very well. I have reconsidered certain things, since our conversation in the music room."
"Have you."
"I have reconsidered them in light of certain information I have obtained, regarding the specific terms of the arrangement between your father and the Darcy estate, and in light of the fact that my brother appears to be" Caroline stopped, composed herself, and continued, "very seriously attached to your sister, which I have accepted, finally, as a circumstance I cannot alter, whatever I might think of its wisdom.
I accept it because Charles is, despite everything, my brother, and I would not see him unhappy. "
"That is generous," Elizabeth said carefully, uncertain yet where the blow was coming and certain it was still coming.
"It is practical. I am rarely generous without practical cause, as you have correctly identified.
" Caroline's tone remained pleasant, almost conversational, a model of surface civility concealing something cold at its center.
"My point, Miss Bennet, is this: I am going to the assembly on Thursday.
I have also obtained, or rather retained, certain information about the debt that your father owes to this estate, information that is not in your father's letter, which you retrieved, but which I had already noted in my own memorandum before you came for the letter.
The specific figure, the terms, the duration, and the somewhat particular arrangement by which the debt is being discharged.
" She turned to look at Elizabeth directly.
"I do not wish to use it. I want you to understand that I say this not from kindness but from a precise understanding of my own best interests: using it now, publicly, at an assembly, would make an enemy of Mr. Darcy in a permanent and unrecoverable way, and I am not yet sufficiently certain of my own alternatives to court that consequence. "
Elizabeth understood, with cold clarity, what was coming next.
"However," Caroline continued, "I am also not in a position to pretend that my interests in this household and yours are anything other than entirely opposed.
You are aware that Mr. Darcy's regard for you has become" she paused, choosing the word, "significant.
You are aware that this is not merely a convenient arrangement for settling accounts, and that it has not been so for some time.
And I think, if you are honest with yourself, you understand that a connection between Fitzwilliam Darcy and the daughter of a man who has lived for nine years on borrowed money from this estate is not a connection that will be received, in London, in his wider circle, by anyone whose opinion he values, with anything other than contempt. "
"You are threatening me," Elizabeth said, very quietly.
"I am offering you a choice, which is kinder than a threat.
" Caroline's voice remained perfectly, damnably smooth.
"Leave Pemberley before the assembly. Tell Mr. Darcy the ledgers are completed, or near enough, and that you have family obligations that require your return to Hertfordshire.
Leave cleanly, and with your father's dignity intact, because I give you my word, for whatever you believe that is worth, that if you go before Thursday, nothing of what I know will go any further.
" She let that settle. "Stay, and come to the assembly, and continue in whatever direction this is evidently moving, and I cannot be responsible for what happens when certain neighbors of long acquaintance begin to ask questions about the young woman from Hertfordshire who has been living in the family wing of Pemberley for six weeks, auditing the master's accounts, in exchange for what precisely. "
The gallery was quiet around them, the painted faces of Darcy's ancestors arranged along the walls in their various attitudes of composed authority, looking down at the two living women below with the magnificent indifference of the long dead.
"I see," Elizabeth said.
"I think you do. I think you are probably the cleverest woman I have met in a long time, Miss Bennet, and I find that both irritating and somewhat useful to acknowledge, because a clever woman understands when a situation has reached its natural conclusion.
" Caroline stopped walking. "The assembly is Thursday. That gives you two days."
She left Elizabeth in the gallery, and Elizabeth stood for a moment in the sudden quiet, looking at nothing in particular, her hands very still at her sides.
She had known it would come to this. She had known it since the first week, really, since the gossip at Lambton, since the note under her door, since all the small careful machinations Caroline had been running simultaneously from the moment she arrived and assessed the situation.
She had handled Wickham. She had retrieved her father's letter.
She had managed, with some effort and only occasional near disasters, to maintain her own dignity in a house where someone had been methodically, patiently trying to take it from her.
And now she was being offered the clean exit, the face-saving withdrawal, the ending that preserved everyone's public reputation at the cost of the only thing at Pemberley she had not yet found a way to stop wanting.
She walked back to her rooms, and sat at the small writing desk, and looked at the blank paper in front of her, and thought, carefully and without comfort, about what kind of woman she intended to be.