Chapter 5
The carriage returned Darcy home at half past three. He gave his hat and gloves to Hewitt, walked directly to his study, and found his cousin in the chair he kept for visitors.
Richard looked up from a volume of Swift that had been in the library when Darcy had left the house at noon.
“How was your call?”
“You were waiting?”
“I was. I have had a glass of port and read three chapters of this.” He held up the book.
“Why are you here, Richard?”
“I think you know.” He closed the Swift and set it on the small table positioned at his elbow. “You will be glad to hear I am not here on a Miss Bingley question, a Miss Macomber question, or any other question of my aunt’s creation. I am here on the Hertfordshire question.”
“There is no Hertfordshire question.”
Richard shook his head. “I knew you would say that. My brother owes me five pounds.”
“Very good. You can see yourself out.”
Richard did not rise.
Darcy sighed and dropped into his own chair behind the oak desk.
“You were in Hertfordshire for six weeks,” Richard said.
“You returned ill at ease, and my aunt has noticed. I do not know what she thinks because she has not confided it; I know only that she did not enjoy her own dinner last night, which is so rare an occurrence as to be marked down in my journal.”
“And?”
“Wickham took tea with her on Saturday.”
Darcy did not understand what that had to do with anything. “I did not know that.”
“I should have been astonished if you had. He met me at the club this morning; he was pleased because Em is entirely recovered and he can stop fretting.” Richard looked at him steadily. “He told me he had spoken with Bingley on behalf of your mother.”
Darcy did not look up. Finally, he closed his eyes, and asked, “I was with Bingley today, and he did not mention it. What did Wickham have to say?”
“We were not alone so he did not relate the complete story, but he mentioned an insult at an assembly and something else about a dance at a private ball. He found the telling amusing, by which I infer you made a right arse of yourself.”
The light at the window was growing darker—evenings fell early in December. A footman came in, silently lit the Argand lamp on the desk, the candles on each side of the fire, and went out again.
He had heard Richard command his men once or twice.
That voice was the one he used now. “Here is what you must do, Darcy. Speak with my aunt. Now, in fact, before you have time to lose your nerve. Tell her the whole story, including everything Wickham omitted. She will be much more inclined to forgive you if she hears it from your own lips, and, with any luck, she may confine her displeasure to you, as you are the man who actually deserves it.”
Darcy leaned over the desk and put his head atop his folded arms. Was his ineptitude to follow him everywhere? “I cannot.”
Richard grunted. “Very well. You must do as you think best. But if your mother turns her eye on me, I shall develop some sudden and pressing business for the Crown in Scotland, and you shall be entirely on your own.” Richard moved to the door, but it opened from the other side before he reached it.
Hewitt stood there with a small silver salver. “Mr. Darcy, sir. A message from Lady Anne.”
Darcy took the note. Fitzwilliam, please join me in the morning room at your convenience.
Richard frowned at him. “Should I leave by the servants’ stairs?”
“Probably,” he said—not because he thought Richard ought to, but because it was amusing to think of Richard dodging the coal delivery on his way out.
He read the note again. At your convenience, in his mother’s idiom, meant immediately. Darcy waited for Hewitt to exit before he made his way up the stairs.
The morning room was warm, the fire well-kept, the curtains drawn. His mother sat on the small sofa by the window, very upright, a closed book in her lap.
“Sit down, Fitzwilliam.”
He sat in the chair opposite and waited.
“George took tea with me on Saturday and spoke with me this morning.”
“So I have heard.” Richard had not mentioned the second meeting. Perhaps he did not yet know about it.
His mother lifted her brows in the same way Richard had. “Today you accompanied Mr. Bingley to see a Miss Bennet.”
The servants withheld nothing from his mother that she deigned to ask.
“I did.”
Her gaze did not waver. “George came first to me on Saturday. He was concerned about Emmeline, who had a cold. You know how carefully he watches her health.” She smiled. “Poor girl was tired of his fussing and sent him to me. So we talked.”
Darcy understood, without having yet been told, what was coming.
“I asked him, before he went home to his wife, whether he could tell me what was troubling you. You returned from Netherfield much shadowed, Fitzwilliam, and I could not allow it to continue.”
He said nothing.
“George spoke with Mr. Bingley when they met at the club that evening, and the substance is this. You spoke unkindly of a young woman, a Miss Elizabeth Bennet, at an assembly soon after your arrival in Hertfordshire. The remark was overheard. The lady laughed, by Mr. Bingley’s account, and you were—I infer—made considerably more uncomfortable by that. ”
Darcy had not considered his response in those terms, but it was true, to an extent.
It had been a dreadful evening, with Miss Bingley taking his arm, implying a closer connection than existed to everyone in Bingley’s new neighbourhood.
What had vexed him was not the design itself, but the want of delicacy with which she had put those beliefs into action.
Her determined possession of his arm, and, worse still, her evident wish that others should remark upon it, had put him thoroughly out of humour.
There were two reasons he had not set Miss Bingley down, either in public or private.
The first was Darcy’s belief that his mother had carelessly encouraged Miss Bingley’s hopes.
The second was Bingley’s friendship. Yet even those considerations had grown less persuasive each time the woman took his arm when it had not yet been offered.
“If I have lately appeared out of humour, Mother, you must attribute some part of it to yourself, for you encouraged a woman you ought not to have.”
“Fitzwilliam,” said his mother with a sigh. “I suggested Mr. Bingley invite you to Netherfield. I did not speak of a single expectation.”
Darcy thought this rather like claiming one had merely struck the flint and not started the fire. “You did so knowing that Bingley had already invited me.”
His mother ignored this. “At the time, Miss Bingley appeared modest enough, and I believed the connection to her brother might suit you tolerably well. I did not foresee that she would mistake a suggestion for certainty.”
“She did not mistake a suggestion for certainty,” said Darcy. “Do not pretend that you were idle in all of this. You were quite attentive in the month before we removed from town. If she mistook your invitation to dinner or your calling her ‘dear Caroline,’ I do not think we can much blame her.”
His mother frowned slightly. “I call many people dear.”
“Not with that tone.”
“What tone?”
“The tone that informs the person to whom you are speaking that you have already selected a permanent place for them at the family table.”
To Darcy’s further irritation, his mother laughed. “That is an abominable exaggeration.”
“Is it? By the end of the second night at Netherfield, Bingley informed us we were to attend an assembly. At that assembly, Miss Bingley attached herself to my arm as though we were already six months married. And I should add that I had not offered it.”
His mother just shook her head at him. “Then you ought to have detached her.”
“In the midst of all her future neighbours?”
“Certainly not. You are too tall for such a scene. But afterward, perhaps.”
“And say what? ‘Miss Bingley, though my mother has behaved for the last month as if negotiating a treaty between our houses, you will never be my wife?’”
His mother pressed her lips together, which meant she was attempting not to smile. “I am certain you could have managed something more polite than that.”
“I was too occupied attempting not to insult Bingley’s sister in public.”
His mother’s brows rose. “How commendable. Though I am told your forbearance did not extend to every young lady in the room.”
Darcy leaned back in his chair with a sigh.
“Bingley wanted me to dance, and if I did, I would have to dance with his sisters. I did not wish to dance with his sisters for fear of raising Miss Bingley’s expectations higher still, but I could not tell him that, so I blamed it on the inferior company.
And when I saw that a young lady was listening to me embarrass myself, she bore the brunt of my frustration.
She was eavesdropping, and I gave her something to hear. It was ungentlemanly of me.”
“Eavesdropping?” His mother held his gaze. “Mr. Bingley told George the young lady was already seated and that you looked directly at her before speaking. Is that untrue?”
He had to admit that it was not.
“Fitzwilliam, we have all of us said something foolish at an assembly or ball, and Miss Elizabeth’s response did her credit. The lady won that particular hand. I should be content to leave it there.”
He waited for the rest.
“However, there was another insult at Miss Bingley’s ball, was there not?
” She did not pause for him to fill in the silence.
She simply went on. “I do not know what passed between you and the lady that Bingley’s sisters felt entitled to remark upon it in Mr. Bingley’s presence.
I only know what Mr. Bingley relayed to George, which was that you departed before the figure was complete and did not return to the lady afterward, that you did not, so far as Mr. Bingley is aware, ever seek out Miss Elizabeth to repair what you had done before you came away to London. ”