CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Bingley proposed to Jane on a Thursday, by letter, because Bingley was the kind of man who did the emotionally essential thing by whatever means were immediately available and did not allow the imperfection of the instrument to prevent the message from being delivered.
The letter was four pages, considerably more effusive than precise, and Jane's answering note, which arrived at Pemberley on Saturday in Elizabeth's hands via their aunt, was three lines of such restrained, luminous happiness that Elizabeth read it twice and then pressed it to her chest and breathed for a moment in the manner of someone who has been short of air without fully realizing it.
She was in the process of a very particular and private joy, sitting on the window seat in her room with Jane's letter in her lap and the Derbyshire morning doing something unexpectedly golden outside, when Bingley knocked at the sitting room door and came in with the expression of a man whose happiness is too large for his face and has simply overflowed onto everything around him.
"She said yes," he announced, as though Elizabeth might not have gathered this from the letter.
"She did," Elizabeth said, and meant the warmth in her voice entirely.
"I know you knew she would. I knew she would.
Darcy told me months ago he had been wrong to advise caution and I ought to go back, and I did, and she did, and I think," Bingley sat down in the armchair with the boneless ease of a man entirely at peace with himself, "I think I am very possibly the happiest man in England this morning. "
"I think you very likely are." Elizabeth folded Jane's letter with great care. "Mr. Bingley, I am genuinely glad. My sister deserves this and so, I believe, do you."
Bingley's face did something complicated then, the happiness still present but shaded by something more careful, the expression of a man who has wanted to say something for some time and has been working up to the moment.
"Miss Bennet," he said, "I want to speak to you, if I may, about the assembly."
She waited.
"I heard what you said to Mrs. Ashworth.
I was not close enough to hear all of it, but I heard enough, and several people were good enough to repeat the rest to me verbatim, which is the thing about a room full of people who have nothing better to do than listen to what other people are saying.
" His voice was level in a way that was not entirely natural to him, the careful level of a man who has genuinely worked himself up to something and is not going to be deflected from it.
"I also know what Caroline has been doing, Miss Bennet.
I am not as oblivious as she believes me, and I have been watching this particular performance for the better part of two months, and I find I am considerably more angry about it than I expected to be when I finally named it to myself. "
"Mr. Bingley, you need not"
"I do, actually. I think I do." He leaned forward, his hands loose between his knees, his face entirely open in the way she had always liked best about him.
"Caroline is my sister, and I love her, and she is, in her way, trying to protect what she imagines are my best interests, which is a motivation I can respect even while finding the execution rather entirely wrong.
But she has treated you badly, Miss Bennet, in this house, as a guest of this house, and she has said things in this neighborhood, about you and about Darcy, that were not only false but designed to damage, and I am not going to simply allow that to have been the last word on the subject. "
"What do you mean to do."
"I mean to do what I have already done, which is to write to three acquaintances in the neighborhood who are, between them, on speaking terms with everyone at that assembly, and tell them the actual particulars of Miss Bennet's residence at Pemberley, in the most boring and entirely accurate terms available, which I find tends to be more effective against gossip than indignation, because indignation sounds like a story and accuracy sounds like a fact, and people have considerably less appetite for a fact than for a story.
" He sat back. "I also mean to have a conversation with Caroline that is, I think, somewhat overdue, the kind of conversation I have been avoiding because it is uncomfortable and because I have always found it easier to assume she will come round in her own time, which is a strategy that has served no one well, including Caroline herself. "
Elizabeth regarded him with considerable respect. "I had not expected this from you, Mr. Bingley."
"I had not expected it from myself, entirely.
I find that becoming engaged rather clarifies one's priorities.
" He smiled, and the uncomplicated warmth of it was so entirely characteristic that she felt her chest loosen slightly.
"I am not a complicated man, Miss Bennet, and I know it, and I have made my peace with it.
But I am not an indifferent one, and I want you to know that whatever happens with Darcy, and I am not going to pretend that nothing is happening with Darcy, because I may not be complicated but I am not blind, you have friends here.
You leave Pemberley, whenever you leave, as someone who was treated badly by my sister and treated this family, and this house, with considerably more integrity than she did.
I wanted to say that plainly before you went. "
The kindness of it arrived with a completeness she had not entirely prepared for.
She looked at him, this guileless, generous, entirely uncomplicated man, and thought of Jane's three lines of luminous happiness in her pocket, and thought that her sister had chosen very well, and that goodness in a person was an underrated quality when one was busy admiring cleverness and irony and all the more decorative intellectual virtues.
"Thank you," she said, simply, because there was nothing more precise than that.
The conversation between Bingley and Caroline took place that same afternoon, behind the closed door of the small sitting room at the west end of the house, and Elizabeth, who was in the library and could hear nothing of it, was nonetheless entirely certain it was occurring from the particular quality of the house's silence during the hour it lasted, the specific absence of sound that means everyone in a house has paused in their ordinary business because something real is happening somewhere else.
When Caroline emerged from the sitting room an hour later, she was composed, in the way marble is composed, and she went directly to her rooms and did not come down for dinner, and when she came down the following morning it was with the manner of a woman who has been forced to revise her position and has decided to manage the revision with dignity rather than contrition, which was, Elizabeth thought, probably the most one could ask of her.
She did not speak to Elizabeth directly. She sat at breakfast and was pleasant to Georgiana and civil to Darcy and said nothing to Elizabeth at all, which was, compared to everything that had preceded it, almost a luxury.
Georgiana, who had clearly been told some portion of what had transpired, came to Elizabeth's side after breakfast with the particular fierceness of a girl who has decided that her feelings about a matter are no longer going to be kept private.
"I want you to know," she said, in the corridor outside the breakfast room, her voice low and entirely serious, "that what Caroline did was wrong.
I have told Fitzwilliam so, and I have told Charles so, and I would have told Caroline herself if Charles had permitted me to be in the room, which he did not, but only on the grounds that it was his responsibility rather than mine, which I accepted because I believe he is right about that.
" She paused for breath. "I also want you to know that whatever you decide about going home, I think you are the bravest person I know, and I shall write to you every week, and if Jane is to marry Charles then we shall be connected regardless, and I find I am very glad about all of it except the part where you are potentially leaving. "
Elizabeth took the girl's hand, as she had done in the corridor weeks before, but found that the roles had shifted: Georgiana was steady, and Elizabeth was the one whose hand wanted steadying.
"I have not yet decided," she said.
"I know." Georgiana looked at her with the directness she had developed since Ramsgate, the specific directness of someone who has learned that what is left unsaid tends to do more damage than what is said clearly.
"But I think you know what you want to decide, and I think the only thing stopping you is that you are not sure he will meet you there.
" She hesitated, and then said, very quietly, "He rode out at five this morning and came back looking like a man who had made a decision.
I think you might be surprised, Lizzy, if you stopped being brave in the wrong direction and tried being brave in the right one. "
It was the first time Georgiana had used her given name.
Elizabeth noticed it, and noticed the girl noticing that she had noticed it, and the small, mutual acknowledgment of it passed between them without ceremony, the way the best things tend to, quietly and without needing to be made into an occasion.
"I am packing," Elizabeth said. "I have begun packing, because I told Mrs. Reynolds I would be ready by Thursday and I intend to be ready by Thursday, because I made a statement and I keep my statements.
" She met Georgiana's eyes. "But I am not going without saying what I have to say first. I have made rather a habit, this past year, of not saying things, and I think the habit has cost me more than it has protected me, and I am attempting, with some difficulty, to break it. "
Georgiana nodded, grave and entirely unsurprised, the expression of someone who has been expecting this particular sentence for some time.
"Good," she said simply. "I am very glad.
" And she went back into the breakfast room, and Elizabeth stood in the corridor for a moment and then went upstairs to finish what she had started the night before, which was the most difficult and the most honest thing she had written in her life, and possibly the bravest, if she was going to make that particular claim to Georgiana and intend anything serious by it.