Chapter 1
Chapter One
Elizabeth Bennet came down to breakfast determined not to look at the door.
She managed it as far as the landing. Then she remembered the volume of Cowper was gone from the shelf — she had wrapped it herself, in brown paper, corners quite visibly bent, and given it to the Netherfield servant before her nerve could file an objection.
It was done. A book was a book. Darcy would read it, perhaps raise an eyebrow at her margins, and return it with the same punctual correctness he had shown the Rambler.
She poured her tea and was almost comfortable.
"Lizzy," said Jane, settling beside her with the soft attention she brought to anything worth noticing, "you look as though you are expecting a letter."
"I am expecting nothing."
"You are looking at the door."
"The door is there. It is natural to look at it."
Jane smiled into her cup. She had a gift, Elizabeth's eldest sister, for letting a silence do the work of ten questions; and the silence she produced now was gentle, patient, and entirely merciless.
"I lent Mr. Darcy a book," said Elizabeth. "Cowper. My own copy."
"I know. I saw you wrap it."
"You said nothing."
"I was waiting," said Jane, "to see how long before you told me yourself." She looked up. "The margins, Lizzy?"
"Armed to the teeth," said Elizabeth, and drank her tea.
Jane received this with a considering expression that on any other face might have been alarm. On Jane it was simply love, turning a problem over with care. "And you are not in the least anxious about it."
"I am completely anxious about it. I have the full use of my anxiety; it has been with me since six o'clock. I am simply choosing not to dignify it."
Before Jane could answer, the door opened and Mr. Bennet appeared, his best morning look on his face — the one that meant he had already found something worth enjoying in the day and intended to make it last.
"Lizzy," he said, consulting no one in particular, "Cowper is gone from the shelf in the library. The second shelf, the one below the window. I have been looking for him."
"I lent him, Papa."
"Lent him." Mr. Bennet took his chair at the head of the table with the deliberation of a man settling in for a good story. "To whom?"
"Mr. Darcy."
The pause that followed was exactly the length of a man choosing between six replies and selecting the finest. "You lent a man of ten thousand a year your personal copy of Cowper. With the margins."
"Yes."
"Lizzy." He reached for the marmalade. "I have been trying to introduce that man to your mind for three weeks.
I put Johnson in his path and he disputed it back, which is the highest compliment the library has received in fifteen years.
And you have gone and simply handed him the unabridged edition.
" He shook his head, in profound and happy admiration.
"Your mother will marry you off the moment she hears, and she will take full credit, and there is absolutely nothing you can do about any of it. "
"Then I beg you will not tell her until the book comes back."
"Oh, I shall tell her nothing," said Mr. Bennet, with the serenity of a man who has already told her nothing for twenty-three years. "But she finds things out, my dear. She has excellent instincts, when the subject is matrimony and the income is adequate."
Mrs. Bennet's excellent instincts, fortunately, were at that moment occupied with the ball.
The guest list required revisions; the question of whether four dances with Mr. Bingley constituted a formal understanding or merely a promising start had been under active debate since Sunday; and Lydia had produced, from some source, a theory about officers and the supper arrangements that wanted urgent correction.
"Lizzy," said Lydia, appearing in the doorway with the expression of someone about to settle a great matter, "do you think Captain Carter will stand up with me twice, or only once?
Because if only once, I am sure Colonel Forster's wife will arrange it so he stands up with Maria Lucas first, which would be very unfair, and I intend to arrive before Maria Lucas so that cannot happen. "
"I think," said Elizabeth, "that Captain Carter will stand up with whoever he pleases, and there is nothing you can do about it."
"That is no help at all." Lydia disappeared again. From above there came the sound of a wardrobe being opened with more force than was strictly necessary.
"And Lizzy—" her mother's voice, from the direction of the parlour— "we must discuss your hair. You will not do it as you did it at the Lucases'. It looked very well from the front but Hill says from the back it was quite?—"
Elizabeth escaped upstairs before the full verdict on the back of her hair could be delivered.
She stood at the window of her room and looked out at the frost on the garden and thought, with great precision, about nothing at all.
The book was at Netherfield. Her name on the flyleaf in her own young handwriting. Three years of arguments in the margins. Sent, of her own free will, to a man who had spent a fortnight demonstrating that he missed nothing.
She was either very confident or very foolish, and she had not yet determined which.
The truth was that it had seemed, on the garden walk, the right kind of answer — to a man who had offered the blots in his own writing and asked to be trusted with hers. The sentiment had lasted cleanly until the moment she handed the parcel to the servant. After that it had begun to complicate.
The book would be back by Thursday. Probably returned with a polite line about Cowper's merits, and she would put it back on the shelf and they would never speak of it, and she would be entirely fine.
She was, she decided, looking out at the frost, almost fine about it right now.