Chapter Two
Darcy had, in the whole of his eight and twenty years, cultivated exactly one great skill above all others, and it was not the skill his tenants praised him for, nor the one Bingley admired in him, nor even the one his father had valued most: it was the skill of governing what other people believed about him.
He had learned it young, at an age when a boy with his fortune and his name discovered very quickly that the world would form an opinion of him whether he assisted in the forming or not, and that a man who left the matter to chance would find himself, by thirty, entirely misunderstood by everyone he had ever met.
So he had governed it. He had cultivated a reserve that read, to those who did not know him, as pride, and he had allowed that reading to stand, because the alternative, explaining himself to every drawing room in England, was beneath him and beneath his time.
He had let people believe what was convenient for them to believe, confident that the people whose good opinion he actually valued, Georgiana, Fitzwilliam, Bingley when Bingley was not being managed by his sisters, knew the truth of him regardless of what the wider world assumed.
It was, he was discovering, a system with a flaw he had never before had occasion to test: it depended entirely upon his own silence being the only account in circulation.
It had never before occurred to him that someone else's account, garbled, secondhand, filtered through the imagination of a stranger, might reach London before he had said a single word himself.
"You will want to sit down," Fitzwilliam said, upon entering Darcy's study in Grosvenor Square with an expression his cousin rarely wore outside of actual military crisis, "and you will want, I think, a very large brandy, though it is not yet noon, because I bring news that will not improve with delay. "
Darcy did not sit down. "Say it plainly, Fitzwilliam. You have never in your life required preamble for bad news; do not begin the practice now."
"Very well." Fitzwilliam closed the door behind him, which Darcy noted with the particular attention a man pays to a small gesture that presages a large blow.
"Your proposal at Hunsford is known. Not merely to my aunt's household, which I might have accounted for and managed, but to London.
I had it myself this morning from Lady Metcalfe, who had it from her sister, who had it, as near as I can trace the thing, from a maidservant at the parsonage who overheard some portion of the conversation and has been embroidering upon it to whoever will listen ever since. "
Darcy felt the words land somewhere beneath his composure, a slow, cold spreading, before his face had time to arrange itself into anything at all.
"Known," he repeated. "Known in what particulars?"
"That is rather the trouble." Fitzwilliam had the grace, at least, to look genuinely uncomfortable, which was rare enough in his cousin that Darcy registered it even through the fog of his own shock.
"The particulars vary depending upon who is telling them.
In the version I had, you proposed to a young lady of no fortune while visiting my aunt's parsonage, were refused in terms severe enough that you quit Kent within the day without taking leave of anyone, and have not been seen at your usual engagements since, which, Darcy, is unfortunately true and has done nothing to discourage the speculation. "
"I have not been seen at my usual engagements," Darcy said, with the particular flatness of a man working very hard to keep his voice level, "because I have had a great deal to occupy my mind since Kent, none of which concerns anyone but myself."
"I know it. But the ton does not require accurate information in order to form an opinion, cousin, you know this better than most, having spent a decade cultivating a reputation for pride on the strength of nothing more than your own reluctance to make conversation with strangers.
They have decided the shape of the story already: a proud man, refused, humiliated, in retreat.
Some are saying you deserved it. Some are saying the young lady must be a fortune hunter of a very particular sort, angling for a second, better offer by refusing the first. A few, God help us, are saying there was no proposal at all, that the whole thing is an invention of a woman hoping to raise her own consequence by claiming to have caught and released the great Mr. Darcy. "
Darcy sat, finally, not because Fitzwilliam had suggested it but because his legs had made the decision without consulting him.
He thought of Elizabeth Bennet's face at Hunsford, white with anger, her voice shaking with a contempt he had not, until that moment, understood himself to have earned.
He thought of the accusations she had levelled at him, some just, some not, and of the letter he had written her afterward, the truest account of himself he had ever set to paper, sent without any expectation of forgiveness, only a desperate wish that she should not go on believing the worst of him on false grounds even if she continued, on true ones, to think ill of him regardless.
He thought, now, of that same woman becoming the subject of speculation in every drawing room from Mayfair to St. James's, her name, if it emerged, attached to theories of fortune hunting and invented courtships and God knew what else, none of it true, all of it beyond her power to correct, because a lady could not simply stand up in a ballroom and declare the precise truth of a private proposal without doing herself considerably more damage than the rumour already threatened.
"Her name," he said. "Is her name known?"
"Not yet, as far as I can determine. The story has her as 'a young lady of no fortune, visiting in Kent,' which narrows the field but does not close it.
It will not remain unknown long, however, if the story continues to circulate at its present rate; someone will trace it eventually, and I would rather you heard the danger from me now than discovered it too late to prepare for it. "
Darcy pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes, a gesture of such uncharacteristic disarray that Fitzwilliam, watching him, fell silent for a long moment out of what Darcy recognized, distantly, as genuine concern.
"I did this," he said, at last.
"You did not spread the story, Darcy. A servant's loose tongue did that, and my aunt's household is not yours to govern."
"I did not spread the story," Darcy agreed, "but I earned it.
Every word being said of me now, the pride, the arrogance, the man who thought a woman of no fortune ought to be grateful for an insult dressed as a compliment, I earned every syllable of it at Hunsford, and now she will bear the cost of my earning it, because the world will always find it easier to punish a woman for refusing a rich man than to credit that the rich man gave her ample reason. "
He had not, until he heard himself say it aloud, fully understood the shape of his own anger, which was not, he realized, anger at the gossip at all, but anger at himself, sharpened and given new edges by three weeks of solitary reflection at Rosings and on the road home, reflection that had stripped away every comfortable assumption he had ever held about his own character and left him with an account of himself he did not much like.
"What will you do?" Fitzwilliam asked, quietly now.
"I do not know." It was, Darcy thought, perhaps the first time in his adult life he had said those words aloud to another person without shame attached to the admission.
"I cannot correct the story without naming her, and naming her does her more harm than the story already threatens.
I cannot ignore it, because my silence is already being read as confirmation of every worst account in circulation.
I cannot undo Hunsford, though God knows I have spent three weeks wishing I could conduct the whole conversation again, differently, with every advantage of hindsight I did not possess at the time. "
"Then you will have to decide," Fitzwilliam said, "which is worse: being known as the man who made a terrible proposal, or being known as the man who let a lady's reputation burn to protect his own silence."
Darcy did not answer. He did not need to; the question had already answered itself, somewhere beneath his conscious reasoning, in the same instant he had thought of Elizabeth Bennet's name emerging into drawing-room speculation and felt something in his chest go cold with a protectiveness he had no right, any longer, to claim.
He rose and went to the window, looking down into the square, where the ordinary business of London continued exactly as it had the day before, indifferent to the fact that his own carefully governed world had, in the space of a single conversation, come entirely apart.
"Georgiana," he said, after a long moment. "Does she know?"
Fitzwilliam's silence was answer enough.
"I will speak with her," Darcy said. "Before she hears it from anyone else."
He found his sister in the music room an hour later, seated at the pianoforte with her hands resting silent upon the keys, not playing, which was itself unlike her.
She looked up at his entrance with an expression he recognized, because he had worn it himself not two hours before: the particular stillness of a person who had heard something they did not know how to raise.
"Georgiana."
"Fitzwilliam, is it true?" She did not preamble either, which told him she had been rehearsing the question.
"The servants are saying, they do not know I hear them, but I do, they are saying you proposed to a lady and she refused you, and that you said something very cruel to her beforehand, cruel enough to deserve it. Is it true?"
Darcy crossed the room and sat beside her on the bench, an old habit from her childhood that neither of them had entirely outgrown.
"It is true that I proposed," he said, "and true that she refused me. As for what I said beforehand, I did not consider it cruel at the time, but I have had three weeks since to reconsider that judgment, and I find I cannot defend myself as thoroughly as I would like to."
Georgiana's eyes, so like his own, searched his face with an intensity that made him understand, freshly, how much of his character she had absorbed simply by watching him.
"You do not sound like yourself," she said. "You sound as though you believe them. The servants, I mean. As though you believe you deserved it."
"I am beginning to think I did."
"Fitzwilliam." Her voice caught, and he saw, with a fresh stab of guilt, that she was frightened, not of the gossip itself but of what it implied about the brother she had spent her whole life trusting absolutely.
"You are the kindest person I know. You have never once, in all my life, treated me with anything but gentleness, even when I have deserved considerably less of it than you have given me.
I do not understand how the same man could have said something cruel enough to be refused for it. "
He thought of how to answer her honestly, without laying before a girl of sixteen the whole weight of Wickham's history and the wound it had left, without frightening her further with an account of his own pride that he was still, himself, working to fully understand.
"I have not always been as kind to strangers as I have been to you," he said, at last. "I have let my reserve, and my consequence, and my certainty of my own opinions, stand in place of the effort it costs to actually understand another person before I judge them.
I did this to a lady who deserved better of me, and she told me so, in terms I did not enjoy hearing but have come, since, to believe were largely just. That is the truth of it, Georgiana, as much of it as I can give you without doing her a further injury by discussing her more than I already have. "
Georgiana was quiet a long moment, her hands still resting on the silent keys.
"Do you love her?" she asked, finally, with the directness only a sister of sixteen could deploy without artifice.
Darcy did not answer at once. He thought of Elizabeth Bennet's fine eyes, sharpened with anger at Hunsford; of the letter he had laboured over the whole night following, trying to find words equal to an account he had never before been obliged to give anyone; of the ache that had followed him the length of the journey home, not the ache of a man denied something he wanted, but the ache of a man who had, for the first time in his life, been shown himself clearly, and found the reflection wanting, and did not know, yet, how to become someone worth a different answer.
"Yes," he said. "God help me, Georgiana, I believe I do."