Chapter Seven
Darcy called upon Bingley the following morning, before his friend had finished his breakfast, with a directness that Bingley, still blinking sleep from his eyes, seemed to find alarming in a man generally so careful of the proprieties.
"Darcy. This is early, even for you. Has something happened?"
"Something has, and I require your assistance in preventing its consequences from spreading further than they already have.
" Darcy did not sit, though Bingley gestured him toward a chair; he had walked the length of Grosvenor Square twice before arriving, working through the particular words he intended to use, and found now that standing suited the urgency of his purpose considerably better than sitting would have.
"Your sister has been speaking of a lady, a Miss Bennet from Hertfordshire, in terms that come very near to naming her as the subject of a proposal I made this spring and was refused.
I need to know, Bingley, whether you are aware of what she has been saying, and whether there is any hope of your persuading her to stop before the damage becomes irreparable. "
Bingley set down his cup with an expression of such genuine distress that Darcy, for the first time since the conversation began, permitted himself to hope his friend had not been complicit in his sister's indiscretion.
"Miss Bennet." Bingley's voice carried a note Darcy recognized, though it took him a moment to place it: the particular anguish of a man realizing that a woman he cared for stood to be injured by his own family's conduct. "Darcy, you cannot mean Miss Elizabeth Bennet, of Longbourn, whose sister"
"I mean precisely that lady, yes. I did not know, until recently, that your own acquaintance with the family ran so close, though I collect, from your expression, that it does."
Bingley was quiet a moment, and Darcy watched something settle in his friend's face, some private reckoning arriving at its conclusion.
"Miss Jane Bennet," he said, finally, "is a lady I have thought of a great deal these past months, Darcy, more than I have admitted even to myself, and if Caroline's gossip does injury to her sister, it does injury, by extension, to a family I have very particular reasons for wishing to see well of. "
Darcy absorbed this with an unexpected pang of guilt, remembering, with sudden and uncomfortable clarity, his own role in separating Bingley from Miss Bennet the previous autumn, a piece of interference he had confessed to Elizabeth in his letter and had not, until this moment, fully reckoned with the ongoing cost of.
"Then we are agreed on the urgency of the matter, if not, perhaps, on the whole history behind it." He drew a breath. "Your sister must be made to understand the harm she is doing, Bingley, and persuaded to stop, whatever means that requires."
"I will speak with her today." Bingley rose, and there was a firmness in the gesture Darcy had rarely seen him display where his sister was concerned.
"I confess I have allowed Caroline a great deal of latitude over the years, Darcy, more than I ought, out of some misguided notion of keeping peace in my own household.
But I will not stand by while her tongue does real and lasting harm to a family I hold in genuine regard, whatever peace it costs me to say so plainly. "
The conversation, when it occurred, did not proceed as smoothly as Bingley had hoped. Caroline, summoned to her brother's study that afternoon, received his reproach with an affronted composure that gave way, gradually, to something closer to genuine anger.
"I have said nothing that is not, in its essentials, true, Charles. Mr. Darcy did propose to a lady in Kent and was refused; that much is common knowledge, and I have merely observed that the description matches Miss Eliza Bennet rather precisely."
"You have done considerably more than observe, Caroline.
You have named her, in every drawing room willing to listen, and you have done it, I think, not from any concern for accuracy but from a wish to see her reputation suffer for daring to refuse a man you had rather hoped to secure for a connection of your own. "
Caroline's face, at this, lost some of its composure entirely. "I do not know what you imagine my motives to be"
"I imagine them precisely, Caroline, because I have watched you cultivate Mr. Darcy's good opinion for three years with a persistence that has never once wavered, and I imagine the news of his proposing to someone else, someone you have always considered beneath your notice, struck rather closer to the bone than you are presently willing to admit. "
The silence that followed this observation told Bingley, more clearly than any protest could have done, that he had struck close to the truth of the matter.
Caroline recovered herself after a moment, drawing her dignity about her like a garment, but her voice, when she spoke again, carried less certainty than before.
"Whatever my reasons, Charles, I fail to see why I should be made to answer for the consequences of a proposal I did not make and a refusal I did not orchestrate."
"You will answer for it," Bingley said, with a firmness that surprised them both, "because you have taken a private sorrow, one Darcy has not asked anyone's opinion of and does not deserve to have paraded through every drawing room in Mayfair, and turned it into entertainment at the expense of a lady whose only crime was declining an offer she had every right to decline.
You will stop speaking of it, Caroline, entirely, from this day forward, or I will be obliged to reconsider a great many things about the household we presently keep together, including whether it continues to be to your advantage to keep it with me. "
It was, Darcy learned later from Bingley himself, the sternest speech his friend had ever delivered to his sister in the whole course of their acquaintance, and though it did not entirely silence Caroline's private resentments, it did, for a time at least, silence her public tongue, which was the only victory presently available to them, and one Darcy accepted with more gratitude than he generally permitted himself to show.