Chapter 1
Chapter One
The first consequence of Mr. Darcy's Tuesday call was that Mrs. Bennet revised history.
Within a week it was established at Longbourn — and shortly thereafter in Meryton, which received all Longbourn's establishments wholesale — that she had never for one moment believed Mr. Darcy proud.
Shy, yes; she had said so from the first, had she not, Kitty?
A great tall shy man wanting nothing but a little encouragement, which the neighbourhood, to its shame, had begrudged him, but which Mrs. Bennet, who flattered herself she understood young men, had supplied at exactly the proper moment.
The whole improvement was, by her account, her own work; and Elizabeth, who might have disputed the account, found she had no wish to open the ledger.
The calls continued. Twice more that week the two gentlemen rode over from Netherfield, and a pattern emerged of such domestic regularity that the household adjusted itself around it the way a house adjusts to a new clock.
Mr. Bingley belonged to Jane's corner of the parlour; nobody pretended otherwise any longer, least of all the principals.
And Mr. Darcy — Mr. Darcy, after the first quarter-hour's civilities, belonged increasingly to Mr. Bennet's library, into which her father, with the air of a collector who has trapped some rare migratory bird, had lured him on Thursday and kept him above an hour.
"He reads, Lizzy," Mr. Bennet reported afterward, with the mild astonishment he reserved for any evidence of sense in his fellow creatures.
"He reads, he does not say a quarter of what he thinks, and what he does say he has thought first. I begin to comprehend what you and the rain saw in him. I have lent him the Rambler."
"Papa. The third volume? You will not lend me the third volume."
"You bend the corners of the pages, my dear. He will not. A man with that waistcoat has never bent a page in his life."
The third volume of the Rambler came home on Saturday morning, carried by a Netherfield servant along with a note of thanks to Mr. Bennet so correct it might have been engraved.
Elizabeth happened to be in the library when it was brought in — she was often in the library now, a circumstance she declined to examine — and it was Elizabeth who took the volume to restore it to its shelf.
She would say afterward, in the privacy of her own conscience, that she had not been looking for anything.
She had only done what she always did with a returned book, which was to riffle the pages once to chase out whatever the borrower had left — her father's borrowers left hair-ribbons, tobacco shreds, once a pressed and forgotten violet — and to see, frankly, whether the un-bent corners had survived.
A paper slid out and fell at her feet.
It was a single sheet, folded small, written close.
No seal, no direction, no cover: a thing never finished enough to be sent anywhere.
The fold had been pressed flat in the book's middle pages, as though the sheet had been used to mark a place and then forgotten — as though it had lain there while its writer read, was carried home inside the borrowed volume, and had now been delivered, by a servant's punctual hands, to precisely the house it should never have entered.
Elizabeth picked it up to fold it back — she would always insist to herself that her first motion was to fold it back — and saw, in the opening line, the words My dear Bingley.
And saw the hand.
She knew the hand. She had seen it at Netherfield, the evening Caroline Bingley had hung over the writing-table praising every stroke of it — a small, even, upright hand, black and deliberate, the hand of a man who finishes one word entirely before beginning the next.
There were perhaps twenty lines of it on the sheet.
Several had been struck through — not scratched out in haste, but ruled through, neatly, the way a man corrects what he no longer believes.
The paper was in her hand. The hand was Mr. Darcy's. And the library, which had been her father's all her life, was suddenly very quiet around her, as though it too had stopped to look.