Something Unmistakeable
The assembly rooms at Meryton were full, the candles bright, and the music loud enough to cover the greater part of Mrs Bennet’s observations on the party from Netherfield.
The set was a lively one, and Henry Lucas was making the most of it.
“What do you make of Mr Bingley?” he said, turning his partner neatly at the head of the line. “Father thinks him very agreeable.”
“He appears so,” Elizabeth replied.
Mr Bingley was all open good humour. His sisters observed rather than engaged, with an attention that seemed less easily pleased. The tall young gentleman who stood with them had looked about the room with composure, though not with ease.
“And the other one?” Henry asked. “Mr Darcy, I believe. He was at Cambridge, a year or two above me. Never met him myself, but he had a reputation.”
“Of what kind?”
“Studious. Serious.” Henry glanced across the room as the dance brought them briefly together. “The sort who always seemed to have somewhere more important to be.”
Elizabeth followed his glance without meaning to. Darcy was dancing with Jane, who looked particularly well, and who attended to her partner with her usual gentle courtesy.
He returned the attention properly. He moved correctly, said what was required at the proper moment, and looked, Elizabeth thought, like a young man doing his very best to find the right words and not quite certain he was succeeding.
“That matches my own observation,” she said lightly, and let the music carry her away.
Henry caught her eye as they passed. “Told you,” he said cheerfully. “Somewhere more important to be.”
Elizabeth laughed, and did not look across the room again. The set ended. Henry bowed, she curtseyed, and they moved towards the edge of the floor in companionable silence. It was then that she felt it. Not a sound, not a word. Simply the particular quality of being watched.
She turned her head, and found him. Mr Darcy was still on the floor.
Jane had been claimed by Mr Bingley for the next, and he stood alone for the moment, looking directly at Elizabeth.
Not the way he had looked at the room on his arrival.
Something quieter than that. Something she could not immediately account for.
She met his gaze. He did not look away. Neither did she. Then Henry said something about lemonade, and she turned, and the moment was gone.
“Yes,” she said. “Lemonade would be very welcome.”
But she was smiling, and she was not entirely sure why.
William Lucas found her next after his younger brother left.
“Henry has been waylaid by the punch bowl,” he said, appearing at her elbow with the ease of long acquaintance. “I have been sent as an envoy.”
“A poor substitute,” Elizabeth said, “but I shall make do.”
William smiled. He was not much given to Henry’s cheerful commentary, but he was a comfortable companion, and they stood together in easy silence for a moment, watching the floor. It was William who noticed them first.
“I believe,” he said quietly, “that my father is about to distinguish himself.”
Elizabeth looked. Sir William Lucas was making his way towards them, evidently bearing excellent news, and beside him, half a head taller and looking as though he was not entirely certain how he had come to be there, was Mr Darcy.
“My dear Miss Elizabeth,” he said, beaming.
“Allow me the very great pleasure of presenting Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy. Mr Darcy, Miss Elizabeth Bennet.” He gestured expansively.
“And my sons, William, whom I believe you may have encountered at Cambridge, and Henry, who is…” He looked around. “Where is Henry?”
“The punch bowl,” William said.
“Ah.” Sir William was undeterred. “No matter. Mr Darcy, I hope you are finding our little assembly to your taste?”
“Very much so, sir,” Mr Darcy said. He looked at Elizabeth. “Miss Elizabeth.”
“Mr Darcy,” she replied.
Close up, he was somewhat younger looking than she had expected. The gravity she had observed from across the room did not disappear, but there was something underneath it that she had not been able to see from a distance. Something that was not quite certainty.
Henry arrived, slightly breathless, with two glasses of lemonade, and stopped short at the sight of Mr Darcy.
Sir William clapped Henry on the shoulder as he arrived. “Ah, and here he is at last. My younger son, as you see, Mr Darcy, prompt as ever.”
“The punch bowl required attention,” Henry said, entirely unabashed. He looked at Mr Darcy with the cheerful recognition of someone who had observed him from a distance. “I believe we overlapped this past year. Different colleges, but I think I saw you at a debate once or twice.”
“Very likely,” Mr Darcy said, with the polite neutrality of a man who could not quite place him but was too well-bred to say so.
William smiled. “I have just come down myself. King’s.”
“Trinity,” Mr Darcy said, and they exchanged the brief nod of men who had shared a town for three years without ever quite sharing a conversation.
“Henry has been dining out on Cambridge ever since he went up,” William added. “We are all very tired of it.”
“I have barely started,” Henry said cheerfully. “I go back in October. Formidably studious, were you not, Mr Darcy? It was your chief distinction from where I stood.”
Elizabeth glanced at Mr Darcy to see how he would take this. He looked, for just a moment, as though he did not quite know whether to be amused or not. It was the most human expression she had seen on him all evening.
“I had other distinctions,” he said at last. “They were simply less remarked upon.”
“Now that,” Elizabeth said, “I find very easy to believe.”
He looked at her then, and she felt the distinct impression that she had surprised him.
The musicians were beginning to tune for the next set. Mr Darcy glanced towards the floor, then back at her.
“Miss Elizabeth, would you do me the honour of the next?”
“I would,” she said.
He offered his hand. She took it, handed her lemonade to Henry without looking at him, and allowed herself to be led towards the floor.
Behind her she heard Henry say something to William in a low voice, and William’s quiet laugh in response.
She did not turn around. He danced well.
She had not expected that. He was precise and quiet, attending to the figures with the same careful focus he seemed to bring to everything.
What he did not do, at least at first, was talk.
Elizabeth waited. The first figure carried them apart and back again.
“Henry says you were formidably studious,” she said. “I wonder what you make of an assembly.”
He considered this. “It is not entirely unlike a library,” he said at last. “Everyone is looking for something.”
She looked at him. He was watching the figure rather too carefully.
“And have you found what you were looking for?” she asked.
“I am not certain yet,” he said after a moment.
“Then how will you know,” she said, “when you have?”
He turned to look at her properly, and for a moment the careful guardedness she had observed all evening was simply gone. He looked, she thought, very young. And rather as though no one had ever asked him that question before.
“I expect,” he said at last, “that it will be unmistakable.”
Elizabeth moved through the next steps with enough attention to avoid error, though not enough to keep from wondering whether Mr Darcy always spoke so gravely of ordinary things. When they came back together she had recovered herself sufficiently to smile.
“That,” she said, “seems a very sound method.”
“I have found it serves,” he said, and there was something in his voice that had not been there at the beginning of the dance.
The figure separated them for a time, passing them through other couples and back again. When they came together once more, it was Elizabeth who found herself without something ready to say. Which was unusual enough to be noticed.
“Do you stay long in the neighbourhood?” she asked at last.
“For some months, I believe. My friend Bingley has taken a lease on Netherfield.”
“And you are helping him settle in.”
“I am.” He glanced at her briefly. “He asked for my opinion on the estate.”
“Does he often ask your opinion?”
“Frequently,” Mr Darcy said, with a gravity that might, Elizabeth thought, have contained something like affection. “I am not always certain he takes it.”
“That,” she said, “is the mark of a very good friend.”
He looked at her again, and this time he did not look away quite so quickly.
“Yes,” he said. “I suppose it is.”
The music was drawing towards its close. Elizabeth was aware that the evening had taken an unexpected turn. She had thought him guarded, and he was. But there were gaps in it, small ones, where something genuine showed through before he could think better of it.
It was, she decided, enough to make him rather more interesting than she had expected. They had not been standing long when Jane appeared, Mr Bingley still at her side, both of them with the look of people who have been having a very pleasant conversation and are not entirely ready to stop.
Mr Bingley turned to Elizabeth with the natural warmth of a man who finds everyone he meets immediately agreeable. “Miss Elizabeth, I believe? Your sister has been telling me about the neighbourhood. I find I am very glad we came to Hertfordshire.”
“Hertfordshire is generally glad to be found,” Elizabeth said.
He laughed as though she had said something very clever, which she had not, and she liked him immediately for it.
Henry turned to Jane with the ease of long acquaintance. “Miss Bennet, will you dance?”
“With pleasure,” Jane said.
Mr Bingley looked at Elizabeth. “Then I wonder if you would do me the honour as well?”
“With pleasure,” Elizabeth said, and took his arm.
Which left Mr Darcy on the edge of the floor with William and Charlotte.
Elizabeth caught Charlotte’s eye as she moved away. Charlotte’s expression was entirely serene.
The drawing room at Longbourn was warm and lamp-lit, Mr Bennet already installed in his chair with his book when they came in, his expression that of a man who had been enjoying the quiet and was braced for the end of it.
He was not kept waiting long.
“Well, Mr Bennet,” said his wife, settling herself with the energy of someone who has been saving up a great deal for several hours, “we have had a very agreeable evening. Very agreeable indeed. Mr Bingley is everything one could wish: so easy, so open, and he danced with Jane twice. Twice, Mr Bennet.”
“I have not lost the ability to count,” Mr Bennet said, without looking up.
“And his friend, Mr Darcy, ten thousand a year, they say, when he comes of age, danced with Jane as well, and then with Lizzy, which I thought very attentive of him, though he is not so handsome as Mr Bingley, or perhaps he is, it is difficult to say, but he did not smile nearly enough and…”
“Lizzy,” said Mr Bennet, lowering his book by precisely an inch, “did you enjoy yourself?”
Elizabeth looked up from the fire. “Very much,” she said.
Mr Bennet studied her for a moment. Then he raised his book again.
“Good,” he said.
Mrs Bennet talked for another half hour at least. Elizabeth sat by the fire and listened, or appeared to listen, which was not quite the same thing.
Kitty and Lydia had their own contributions: the officers, a particular shade of muslin on one of Miss Bingley’s gowns that Lydia considered excessive and Kitty thought beautiful, and a spirited disagreement about whether Captain Carter had danced three times with Mary King or only twice. Mrs Bennet had opinions on all of it.
Mr Bennet closed his book.
“I find,” he said pleasantly, “that I have heard quite enough about Mr Bingley and Mr Darcy for one evening. Possibly for several evenings.”
Mrs Bennet drew breath.
“Good night, my dears,” he said, and left.
When Jane and Elizabeth were alone, the former, who had been cautious in her praise of Mr Bingley before, expressed to her sister how very much she admired him.
“He is just what a young man ought to be,” said she. “Sensible, good humoured, lively. And I never saw such easy manners.”
They spoke for a few minutes of Mr Bingley.
“Dear Lizzy.” Jane hesitated, smoothing the coverlet. “And Mr Darcy? He danced with you.”
“He did.”
“And talked with you for the whole of the set.”
“We exchanged a few words.”
Jane looked at her with the gentle persistence of someone who knows when they are being managed. “Charlotte noticed,” she said simply.
Elizabeth looked at the candle. “Charlotte notices a great deal.”
“She does.” Jane smoothed the coverlet again.
“Miss Bingley spoke of him a little. She said he is very particular in his attentions. That his family have long had expectations of a certain kind of match.” She hesitated.
“She was very kind about it. She said she would not wish anyone to form false hopes on the strength of a single evening.”
Elizabeth was quiet for a moment.
“How very thoughtful of her,” she said at last.
“Lizzy.”
“I am sure she meant it kindly.” Elizabeth rose, dropping a kiss on her sister’s cheek. “Good night, Jane.”
* * *
The library at Netherfield was quiet, the fire burned low, and Bingley had been talking about Miss Bennet for twenty minutes without showing any sign of stopping. Darcy did not mind. It required very little of him.
“She is the most amiable creature I have ever met,” Bingley said, for the third time, or possibly the fourth. “Did you not think her amiable, Darcy?”
“Very.”
“And handsome.”
“Extremely.”
Bingley looked at him with mild suspicion. “You are agreeing with everything I say.”
“You are saying things I agree with.”
Bingley settled back in his chair, satisfied. “And Miss Elizabeth? You danced with her. I thought her very lively.”
“Yes,” Darcy said.
Bingley waited. “That is all? Yes?”
Darcy looked at the fire.
Then how will you know, when you have?
“She asked me a question,” he said, “that I have not yet finished answering.”
Bingley stared at him. “At an assembly?”
“Yes.”
“Good God,” Bingley said, with something between admiration and bewilderment. “What on earth were you talking about?”
Darcy almost smiled. “Libraries,” he said.