Honest Figures
The carriage had not reached the end of Netherfield’s drive before Mrs Bennet began.
“I do not understand it. I do not understand it at all. Two sets with Miss Bingley, Miss Bingley of all people, when he might have… when everyone expected… and then to say whatever he said to you on the floor that made you look like that?
“I looked like nothing, Mama.”
“You looked like you had been slapped,” Mrs Bennet said. “And I was watching. Whatever he said to you, Lizzy, it was not pretty.”
“He said nothing of any consequence.”
“Then why did you look like that?”
Elizabeth looked out of the window at the dark road.
From his corner, Mr Bennet watched her with the quiet, precise attention he generally chose to conceal.
“At least Mr Bingley was all that was agreeable,” Mrs Bennet continued. “Jane, my dear, he could not have been more attentive. But Mr Darcy…”
“Mama,” Jane said gently.
“I am only saying what everyone was thinking.”
“No, Mama,” Elizabeth said. “You are saying what you were thinking.”
“And what is the difference, pray?”
“The number of people involved.”
Mr Bennet made a small sound that might, in other circumstances, have been amusement.
Mrs Bennet turned on him at once. “Oh, Mr Bennet, do not laugh. It is no laughing matter. Mr Darcy has behaved very strangely, very strangely indeed, and if he has raised expectations only to dance attendance upon Miss Bingley, I should like to know what he means by it.”
“So, I imagine,” Mr Bennet said quietly, “would Lizzy.”
Elizabeth did not answer. The carriage moved through the dark and Mrs Bennet continued, more quietly now, which was in some ways worse. Jane’s hand found Elizabeth’s in the dark. Elizabeth did not look at her.
She looked at the window and thought about Mr Darcy dancing with her, telling her he was leaving, saying after August as though it were a promise, and then turning away and saying something unforgivable.
She thought about Mr Wickham smiling and saying I like your Miss Elizabeth very much, and about the library, and the lane, and a horse called Wicked standing under an oak in the November rain.
She thought about Mr Wickham. He had been perfectly amiable. He had said he liked her. He had said nothing that could be objected to by any reasonable person.
And yet. She could not say what it was exactly. Only that his approval had felt less like a compliment and more like an assessment. And that Mr Darcy, standing within hearing, had gone very still when he said it.
The carriage turned in at Longbourn’s gate.
She did not know if that was enough.
Longbourn was quiet when they arrived. The younger girls had come home earlier, and Mr Bennet disappeared into his library without comment. Mrs Bennet followed him to the foot of the stairs and delivered her final observations on the evening to his retreating back.
Elizabeth and Jane went up together. The bedroom was cold. Jane lit the candle while Elizabeth unpinned her hair, and for a few minutes neither of them spoke, which was its own kind of conversation.
“Lizzy,” Jane said at last.
“I am perfectly well.”
“I did not ask.”
Elizabeth looked at her in the glass. Jane had plainly decided to say something and was choosing how.
“You danced the second set with Mr Darcy,” Jane said carefully. “And it looked, it looked very well.”
“And then you danced with Mr Wickham. And Mr Darcy danced with his sister.” Jane paused. “And then something happened. I did not hear what was said but I saw your face.”
“I looked like nothing,” Elizabeth said. “I told Mama so.”
“You looked,” Jane said gently, “like someone who had expected better and was not entirely surprised to be disappointed.”
“That is very precise,” Elizabeth said.
“I have known you a long time,” Jane said.
Elizabeth set down the pin in her hand. “I do not know what I expected.”
Jane came to stand behind her. In the glass, their faces were pale and tired, the candlelight softening everything except the truth between them.
“I think you expected him to be better than he was,” Jane said.
Elizabeth laughed once, without amusement. “That is a very small expectation.”
“No,” Jane said. “It is not.”
Elizabeth looked down at her hands. “He warned me,” she said. “Not in words I could use. Not in any way that would satisfy a sensible person. But he warned me.”
Jane did not look away. Elizabeth looked back at the glass. For a moment there was only the small sound of the candle flame and the distant murmur of Mrs Bennet below stairs.
“What did he say?” Jane asked.
Elizabeth’s fingers stilled on the last pin. “Nothing.”
“Lizzy.”
Elizabeth closed her eyes briefly. “He said I was of no consequence to him.”
Jane said nothing at all. That, somehow, was worse than any exclamation.
“At least,” Elizabeth said, opening her eyes again, “that is what he said where I could hear him.”
“You believe he meant something else,” Jane said.
“I believe,” Elizabeth said carefully, “that Mr Darcy rarely says anything without meaning precisely what he intends it to accomplish.”
“That is not the same as believing him.”
“No,” Elizabeth agreed. “It is not.”
Knowing there might have been a reason for the words did not make them any easier to have heard.
She picked up the last pin and set it down again. The candle was burning low. Outside, Longbourn settled into its usual night sounds, familiar and unchanged, indifferent to balls and insults and men who said one thing where they could be heard and another in empty lanes.
“He is leaving the day after tomorrow,” Elizabeth said.
Jane looked at her.
“He told me so. During the second set.” Elizabeth looked at the glass. “Bingley has business in London. He goes with him.”
“And returns?”
Elizabeth’s mouth curved very slightly. “He did not say.”
Jane was quiet again.
“Lizzy,” she said. “Do you, that is…”
“Do not ask me that,” Elizabeth said. “Not tonight.”
Jane closed her mouth.
“Ask me in August,” Elizabeth said. “Perhaps I will have an answer by then.”
She blew out the candle.
She was out early the next morning before anyone else was down. The air was cold and still, the grass wet underfoot. Elizabeth walked without direction and found herself on the road towards the old lane.
The oak stood bare at the far end. There was no sound of hooves. No large black horse beneath it. No one at all.
She walked down the lane anyway. Beneath the oak, the ground still held the softened impression of hooves from the last time. She stood there briefly, then turned and walked home.
By the time she returned, breakfast was nearly over.
Mr Collins was seated beside Mary and listening to her remarks upon useful disappointment with an attention so grave that Elizabeth suspected he understood very little of them.
Kitty and Lydia were whispering at the other end of the table.
Jane looked up as Elizabeth entered, her concern immediate and quiet.
Mrs Bennet noticed her a moment later. “Lizzy, where have you been? Walking before breakfast, and after a ball too. I declare, you will ruin your complexion entirely.”
“Then it is fortunate,” Elizabeth said, taking her seat, “that no one of consequence is expected to notice it.”
Mrs Bennet stared at her. “No one of consequence? Lizzy, really, you speak as though Mr Darcy had carried you off to the ball and brought you back a spinster of forty. There are other gentlemen in the world.”
“Indeed,” Mr Collins said, brightening. “A most just observation, Mrs Bennet. A young lady should never allow disappointment in one quarter to lessen her gratitude for the opportunities Providence may yet provide in another.”
Mary looked at him with solemn approval. Elizabeth looked at her plate.
Jane, from across the table, said softly, “You need not answer him.”
“I had no intention of doing so,” Elizabeth said.
Mr Bennet, who had been turning the pages of a newspaper he had not been reading, lowered it by an inch.
“Mr Collins,” he said, “I believe Mary was about to explain how disappointment may improve the moral character. I should hate for the rest of us to be deprived of such instruction.”
Mary coloured with pleasure.
Mr Collins sat a little straighter. “Indeed, sir, your daughter’s reflections are most improving.”
“Then pray attend to them,” Mr Bennet said. “It would be a pity if they were wasted upon Lizzy, who is plainly beyond rescue this morning.”
Elizabeth looked at him. His newspaper rose again, but she saw the corner of his mouth move.
The day passed quietly, which was the best that could be said for it.
Mr Collins, having exhausted the moral improvement available at Longbourn’s breakfast table, announced after the meal that he intended to call at Lucas Lodge.
He said this with considerable significance, though nobody asked him to explain further and he appeared slightly disappointed by the lack of inquiry.
The morning stretched on. Elizabeth read without taking in a word. Jane sewed intently, though her thoughts were plainly elsewhere. Outside the window the garden was grey and still, the last of November pressing down on everything.
It was near four when Mr Collins returned. He came in with damp shoes, a flushed face, and an air of such solemn satisfaction that even Lydia stopped laughing long enough to stare at him.
Mrs Bennet looked up sharply. “Mr Collins?”
“Madam,” he said, placing one hand upon his breast, “I have been most graciously received at Lucas Lodge.”
“That is very kind of Sir William, I am sure.”
“Most kind,” Mr Collins agreed. “Most condescending. Most improving.”
Elizabeth looked at him then. Something had happened. She could see it now, though she had not watched for it.
Mr Collins did not elaborate further that evening. He ate his dinner with quiet satisfaction, complimented Mrs Bennet on the ragout with more warmth than it deserved, and retired early, apparently entirely at peace with the world.
Mrs Bennet watched him across the table with narrowed eyes. “Something has happened,” she said, the moment he was out of earshot.
“He has had a pleasant afternoon,” Jane said carefully.
“Pleasant.” Mrs Bennet said the word as though testing it for hidden meaning. “He has been to Lucas Lodge and come back looking like a man who has had a very particular kind of pleasant afternoon.” She looked at Elizabeth. “Lizzy, what do you think?”
“I think,” Elizabeth said, “that Mr Collins’s afternoons are his own affair.”
“Not if they concern this family, they are not.”
Mr Bennet set down his fork. “My dear, if Mr Collins has done what I rather think he has done, then I believe you will find it concerns the Lucas family considerably more than ours.”
Mrs Bennet stared at him.
“Charlotte Lucas,” she said slowly.
Nobody confirmed it. Nobody denied it. The fire crackled in the grate. Mrs Bennet sat back in her chair.
“Well,” she said.
It was not a word so much as the beginning of several speeches, all of them struggling for precedence.
Jane looked down at her plate.
Mary, who had followed very little of the conversation until Charlotte’s name was spoken, lifted her head. “Miss Lucas is a very sensible young woman.”
“That is not the point, Mary.”
“It seems very much the point,” Mr Bennet said.
Mrs Bennet turned on him. “Oh, you may laugh, Mr Bennet, but if Charlotte Lucas is to be mistress of Longbourn one day, I should like to know whether I am expected to congratulate her.”
Thursday came in grey and cold. Elizabeth was at the window when she saw the carriages leave Netherfield.
She had not meant to watch. She had simply been standing there, and the road was visible from that window, and the carriages passed along it in the early morning light with the ordinary efficiency of a household in motion.
She counted them. Three. Then nothing. Just the empty road, the bare hedges, and the sense that something had gone out of the neighbourhood with them.
She turned away from the window before Jane could see her watching.
Charlotte came at eleven. She came alone, which was unusual, and with quiet purpose. Elizabeth saw her coming up the path and met her in the hall before anyone else could intercept her.
“Walk with me,” Charlotte said.
They went out into the garden, which was cold enough to keep anyone else indoors.
“I am engaged to Mr Collins,” Charlotte said.
Elizabeth had known, or nearly known, since last night. And yet hearing it said plainly, in Charlotte’s sensible voice, in the grey November garden, made it entirely real in a way that knowing had not.
“Are you happy?” she said.
“I am settled,” Charlotte said. “Which is what I needed to be.”
Elizabeth looked down at the winter grass. In another week, perhaps in another life, she might have argued. She might have spoken of affection, respect, the dangers of marrying where one could not esteem. She might have been clever and indignant and very sure of herself.
But the morning was grey, and Netherfield was empty, and Charlotte stood before her with her hands folded and her future chosen.
“Then I am glad you are settled,” Elizabeth said.
Charlotte’s face softened. “That is kinder than I expected.”
“I am not certain it is kindness. I am very tired of expecting the world to arrange itself sensibly.”
Charlotte smiled faintly. “Then you have had a disappointing week.”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “I have.”
They walked for a moment without speaking. The garden was bare, the paths wet, the sky the white of a December not yet arrived.
“He is a foolish man,” Charlotte said at last. “I am not unaware of it.”
“No,” Elizabeth said. “I did not think you were.”
“But he is not unkind. And Hunsford is a real house, with a real garden, and Lady Catherine’s attention will occupy him sufficiently that he will not have much time left over to occupy me.” Charlotte paused. “That is a calculation. I make no apology for it.”
“I did not ask you to.”
“You were thinking it.”
“I was thinking,” Elizabeth said carefully, “that I hope you are right.”
“About Mr Collins?”
“About all of it.” Elizabeth looked at the bare rose beds. “About calculations. About whether they are enough.”
“Are you making one?” Charlotte said.
Elizabeth considered this. “I do not know yet. I am still waiting to see what the numbers are.”
Charlotte looked at her for a long moment. “Then I hope you are given honest figures.”