Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
The night of the Netherfield ball arrived in the way long-anticipated events always do — abruptly, having somehow used up the week while nobody was watching.
Longbourn got up early and dressed at length and descended in a cloud of optimism and competing muslin.
Mrs. Bennet directed operations from the landing with the authority of a general who has been planning this campaign since October.
Lydia was ready first and most audible. Kitty was ready second and mislaid her gloves.
Jane came down last, in white, glowing with a composed delight that made Elizabeth's chest ache with uncomplicated happiness.
She had taken some care with her own dress and then stood back from the glass and told herself she had not.
The gown was new — or new enough; she had trimmed it herself, last week, in the particular way she had, which her mother called careless and Charlotte Lucas called distinctive. It was neither. It was simply hers.
The drive to Netherfield was accomplished in thirty minutes of maternal projection, and then the house came up bright and warm against the dark, and there was music already, and Bingley in the doorway with the face of a man who has been waiting since Tuesday.
Elizabeth saw Darcy at the far end of the entrance hall, attending to an arriving party with the courtesy he had been hiding all autumn behind his battlements.
He was looking toward the door. Their eyes met and he inclined his head, the barest formality, and she answered it, and the exchange lasted two seconds and contained more than most conversations she had had this month.
Caroline received the party with the perfected warmth of a woman who has decided to lose with dignity, which Elizabeth found more alarming, in a way, than the alternative; she did not yet know what form the revised campaign would take.
Jane was immediately claimed by Bingley, who had, endearingly, clearly thought about nothing else since Monday.
Lydia and Kitty dissolved into the regiment like sugar into warm water.
Mrs. Bennet located the best chair with the unerring instinct of a woman who has been to parties for thirty years.
Mr. Bennet stationed himself near the card room and caught Elizabeth's eye with a look that said: this is your doing and I am enjoying it enormously.
The ball opened. Elizabeth danced the first two with Mr. Lucas, who was kind and undemanding, and spent them watching the room with the particular attention of a woman who is trying not to appear to be watching one part of it.
Darcy did not dance the first two. He stood at the edge of the floor with a glass in his hand and the expression she had once read as disdain, and now read as a man working very hard at being exactly where he was.
He spoke to Bingley, briefly, between sets.
He was cornered for five minutes by Sir William Lucas, who could be cornered by no one but had a gift for corners himself, and bore it with patience.
He declined two invitations to the card room.
Once, when she turned at the end of a figure, he was looking directly at her.
He looked away at exactly the speed of a man who had been doing it for some time and had decided, at that particular moment, not to mind being caught.
Between the second and third sets, he came to her side with the directness he had been practising.
Caroline saw it. Elizabeth noticed that too — the precise moment Miss Bingley's attention sharpened from across the room, her conversation with a neighbouring lady continuing without interruption while every other faculty oriented toward the two figures at the edge of the floor.
She had the look of a woman adding figures and arriving at a total she had been hoping to avoid.
"Miss Bennet. Would you do me the honour of the next?"
He had said it clearly enough to be heard by Charlotte Lucas on her left, and by Sir William on her right, who would tell his wife, who would tell Meryton, who would have formed several opinions about the matter before the set was finished.
Elizabeth suspected Darcy knew this. She suspected it was not an accident.
Sir William, whose social antennae were tuned to exactly this frequency, straightened immediately.
"Capital!" he said, with the warmth of a man who considers himself in some measure responsible for the happiness of Hertfordshire.
"Capital — there is nothing like a dance, Mr. Darcy — nothing in the world — I said so myself at St. James's, where the forms are of course more — but the spirit is the same, and here we are — Miss Eliza, your partner is here and" — he clasped his hands with the satisfaction of a man completing a puzzle — "I shall tell Lady Lucas. "
He departed before either of them could speak, leaving a small warm hole in the social fabric and the distinct impression that by morning this exchange would be a story, with improvements.
From the other side of Elizabeth, she was dimly aware of her mother's head turning — not at her, not yet; Mrs. Bennet was across the room in conversation with Mrs. Long, but she had her daughter's peripheral vision and the instincts of a woman who has been looking for exactly this kind of development since October.
Elizabeth did not look directly. Looking directly would confirm it.
She kept her eyes on Darcy and felt her mother's attention settle on them both like warm weather.
Charlotte, who had observed all of this with the composure of a woman who had been right about something for several weeks and saw no reason to say so, caught Elizabeth's eye.
Something passed between them — a question on Charlotte's side, an acknowledgment on Elizabeth's — and Charlotte nodded once, with the particular nod of a friend who has been patient and is glad to have been.
She turned back to her own conversation and did not make anything of it, which was, Elizabeth thought, the act of a very good friend indeed.
She would have something to say later, privately, with her customary accuracy and no softening — but later.
For now she simply stepped aside half a pace, which was both social courtesy and a kind of permission.
Across the room, Caroline had gone still.
Not visibly — she was still talking, still smiling, still the most polished figure in the room — but in the way a person goes still when they are expending all available resource on not showing a thing.
Elizabeth had been watching Caroline's management of the evening with a reluctant admiration for three hours.
She had been gracious in her reception, careful in her seating, brilliant in her table conversation.
She had not, until this moment, let the campaign show.
Now, across twenty feet of ballroom, with Sir William already heading toward Lady Lucas with news and her brother's expression entirely unguarded and Darcy standing where he was standing — the management showed, just for a second, in the slight set of Caroline's jaw before the smile resumed its post.
"I would," said Elizabeth, "though I should tell you I intend to dispute your correction about the third poem. I have been saving it."
"I should be alarmed," said Darcy, "if you had not."
Caroline turned back to her conversation with a smile that had not changed by a fraction, and did not look at them again for the remainder of the set, which told Elizabeth everything.