Chapter 5
Chapter Five
The question of the book came to Netherfield via Caroline, on Monday, over breakfast.
She had, Elizabeth would later reflect, excellent timing.
Bingley had just said, with his characteristic cheerful visibility, that Darcy had been in tremendous reading spirits of late — Cowper, of all things, which was hardly his usual line — and had seemed quite taken with it; and wasn't it something Miss Eliza had lent him?
Which Caroline of course already knew, having catalogued the parcel's arrival, assessed its wrapping, and drawn every correct conclusion with the wrong interpretation attached.
"Miss Eliza's book," said Caroline, with a smile that performed warmth while conducting a different operation entirely.
"How very kind of her. I understand it was her own copy — quite personal, I believe?
Poetry does make for intimate lending." She passed the toast with her eyes on Darcy.
"One does hope the volume was not — marked, or the worse for use?
Some people read very carelessly. It is not a quality one would want to encourage. "
"It was extensively marked," said Darcy, pouring his coffee with complete composure. "I found the marginalia the most valuable part of the edition. Miss Bennet's engagement with a text is exact and without convention. I was glad of it."
Caroline set down her cup.
Bingley, who had been following this exchange with the pleasant attention of someone watching a game whose rules he did not know, brightened. "Well, there you are, Caro. He liked it."
"I am sure he found it diverting," said Caroline, shifting half a step. "Miss Eliza has a great deal of spirit. Spirit is very amusing, at the right — season."
"It is useful in all seasons," said Darcy, "in a reader.
I have met very few people who argue with a text on its own terms rather than on received opinion.
She does." He looked up at last and met his hostess's gaze with the polite finality of a man who has made his point and does not intend to elaborate.
"I have returned the volume. You may inspect it, if you like; I believe it is improved for having been read twice. "
The breakfast table recovered its topics. Caroline found something to say about the ball's supper arrangements, and Bingley said something hopeful about the weather.
When Bingley excused himself to write to his sister, Caroline looked across the table at Darcy with an expression stripped of its smile.
"She is not your equal, Fitzwilliam."
"You are mistaken in the comparison." He said it without heat, without looking up from his cup.
"You cannot be serious."
"I am reliably serious." He rose. "And I am going to Longbourn this morning, if Bingley can be extracted from his letter."
Caroline let him reach the door before she said: "What will your aunt say?"
He paused just long enough to acknowledge the shot. "Whatever she likes," said Darcy. "She generally does." The door closed behind him, quietly, in a way that Caroline had learned over thirty years of acquaintance to be more definitive than a slam.
She sat alone in the breakfast room for a moment, revising a campaign she had been running for two years.
It was not, she told herself, that she had been wrong.
She had read the situation with perfect accuracy: a man of Darcy's position, his pride, his particular sensitivity to family and connexion.
What she had failed to account for was that he had also been reading — and that what he had found, in the margins of a lent book, in the afternoons of a provincial neighbourhood she had done her level best to make amusing, had apparently reorganised him in some way that her two years of careful proximity had not managed.
She had given him society. Miss Eliza Bennet had given him a pencilled argument about Cowper.
Caroline was not a stupid woman. She understood what had happened, and she sat with it for exactly as long as it took to finish her coffee.
Then she set the cup down and decided that if she was to be defeated, she would not be defeated messily.
She would dress very well for the ball. She would be charming to Jane Bennet, whom she had always genuinely liked.
She would find, in the next six months, something useful to do with the excellent taste and considerable intelligence she had been deploying in the wrong direction.
And she would not, under any circumstances, allow Darcy to see that the door had closed on more than one person this morning.
She called for more coffee, and began drafting an entirely different campaign.