“No, no,” Charles interrupted, “that will not do. I refuse to believe the location is sufficient indictment of the lovely people I met tonight to earn them my disdain. Come, Darcy, did you not see a single lady to catch your fancy?”
He slid a cautious look my way again, and I could almost see the scales in his mind upon which he was stacking his words. “I would not confess it if I had.”
Charles was shaking his head. “I wouldn’t be as fastidious as you for a kingdom. What about that girl you led out for the first set? Tell me she did not take your breath away, man!”
Fitzwilliam narrowed his eyes, probably trying to recall who it was. “Apparently not.”
“If you are struggling to make heads or tails of that string of mediocrity, perhaps I may be of some assistance,” Caroline offered. “I believe that was the lady I asked you about. Everyone was declaring her a beauty, but I saw nothing in it and sought a gentleman’s opinion. I distinctly recall what you said, for I thought it so clever!”
Fitzwilliam squirmed—do you see, I said before that was a habit of his. “There is no need to repeat—”
“Nay, let us hear it!” Charles cried.
“Yes, Mr. Darcy, do let it be heard, for it was most diverting. You said ‘She, a beauty? I should have as soon called her mother a wit!’”
Fitzwilliam cleared his throat and fidgeted with his cuff links. “It means nothing,” he mumbled, with a nervous glance my way. “As a matter of fact, I do not even recall whom it was that I supposedly insulted.”
Caroline snickered, and Charles looked worried. All eyes fell to me.
“Jane,” I whispered. “That was Jane you danced with first.”
No one spoke again.
I refused his hand out of the carriage that night. Just like I refused to let him take my wrap or see me upstairs. He must have known better than to request a chess rematch, though we both confessed later that it was many hours before we were calm enough to sleep, and the game would have done us good.
I shall save my descriptions of our reconciliations for another time because they were far too numerous and complex in those early days for me to begin on even one of them here. All I will say in this entry is that Fitzwilliam can be... very persuasive. When he wants to be.
And now I must put away my writing because I hear my husband walking this way. Not only am I suddenly in mind for a bit of his sort of “persuasion,” but I am still under the illusion that he does not know what I am doing in the hothouse. He claims no curiosity about what I am planning to write, but yesterday I caught him casually glancing in my escritoire. “For a penknife,” he said. “Mine is dull.”
I doubt he will ever suspect to look behind the palm bush. Just as he never thought I would look under the bed, but I maintain that mine is the more imaginative hiding place. He must have felt too exposed after this morning, however, and now I shall have to “not look” for his journal all over again.
Six
Perhaps at this point,something ought to be said of Elizabeth’s temper.
I have seldom met a woman more prepared to leap to the wrong conclusion and then to cling fast to it like a wildcat her prey. I confess, our first row was bitter and furious enough that I... oh, how this memory agonizes me to this day, for I think of how close I came to not knowing the happiness that has been mine half a lifetime now!
I left Netherfield.
In my defense, it began innocently enough. An ill-judged comment to the wrong person—Caroline Bingley, to name her—and Elizabeth came away absolutely assured that I despised her family, held her sister in contempt, and was, in general, a selfish churl who cared nothing for the feelings of others.
She was correct, sadly. But I did come to repent of it. The tale of how we arrived at that point is in some parts the stuff of family legend, and in others a matter of such treasured, private memories that I will not even share them here.
I would not have the reader conclude that my accidental insult of Elizabeth’s favorite sister was sufficient to cast me out of Netherfield. She is notquiteso hot-tempered and stubborn as that. It was the following day, when I tried to make amends without a proper apology, that I learned just how savage her devotion to her family was. And how acid her tongue could be, because no one had ever dared to call me arrogant, conceited, and the last man in the world she cared to listen to.
Young men, take note: it is not a wise tactic when trying to smooth the waters with your favored lady, to maintain yourself to be in the right, even as you declare your expectation that she should come to see the affair from your perspective. It will end sorely. To illustrate, I believe I said something about her mother’s lack of decorum, her father’s complete failure to govern his daughters, and her younger sisters’ indecent behavior concerning gentlemen.
It did not matter that I was right at each point. In fact, in later years, she came to agree with me in nearly every particular (though she has taught me to love them despite their flaws, as she does). What mattered was the harshness of my manner, my absolute inflexibility in declaring my opinion the superior one, and my failure to see both the tears starting in her eyes and her hand raising to slap me soundly.
I departed for London half an hour later.
I returned in less than a fortnight, hat in hand and my sister Georgiana in tow (I am not above employing whatever advantage I can when so much is at stake).
Before I describe my reception and subsequent (successful) apology, I ought to say something of Georgiana. She was left to my care upon our father’s death, when she was eleven, and I was the same age as Charles Bingley. My cousin Richard shared in her guardianship on paper, but in reality, he was most often with his regiment, so she was my concern almost exclusively.
Not that I did not adore her. I would have had it no other way, but I see now how ill-equipped I was to raise her. The mistakes I made were colossal and potentially devastating. I do not exaggerate when I state that I nearly lost her, and it was only Providence that intervened when I was too blind to see my errors.
When I fled Hertfordshire that October, still nursing my bruised pride, it was Georgiana’s dear face that greeted me again in London. Thus reminded of my own fallibility, it was mere days before I was resolved to right this second great wrong of mine before it, too, had the power to destroy my life.
