Page 6 of Faceless

“She is. She is at Matlock for Easter, with my aunt and uncle.” He said it with a care she could not quite account for — not reluctance exactly. Something more guarded than that. “She would send her regards, I am certain, if she knew you were here.”

“I should be very glad of them.” She glanced at him. “Miss Bingley spoke of her accomplishments a great deal last autumn — her pianoforte especially. With considerable feeling.”

“Miss Bingley is generous in her praise of Georgiana.”

“She is generous in her praise of a great many things connected with Derbyshire,” Elizabeth said pleasantly, and left it there.

A motion passed at the corner of his mouth, gone before she could study it.

They walked. The park curved south, and the oaks gave way to open ground, the long slope of the lawn running down towards the ha-ha, where the manicured lawns yielded at last to open parkland. The whole of it was still damp from yesterday’s rain.

“My sister Jane was in London for some weeks this winter,” Elizabeth said. She kept her voice easy, as one mentions an unremarkable fact. “I wondered — did you happen to see her there? I know Miss Bingley and Mrs Hurst encountered her once or twice, though I believe the acquaintance was not much pursued on either side.”

His cheek seemed rather more rigid than it had a moment ago. “I did not. I have been much occupied with business for the early part of the winter.”

“Ah.” She nodded. “She is still in town, as it happens — we are to travel back to Longbourn together when Maria and I come away from Hunsford. My father writes that he is most eager for our return.”

A puddle lay across the path; Darcy’s hand came briefly to her elbow, turning her towards the drier side, and was gone. She took the gallantry and refused to be turned by it. She had a point to make, and he would hear it. “As I was saying, all the family are anxious to have us home again.”

It was a perfectly placed remark. Not an invitation, exactly — more in the nature of a door left slightly ajar, the kind that a well-bred man, finding himself standing before it in polite conversation, would feel some obligation to open. She had placed it deliberately. From the very slight pause before he spoke, she was fairly certain he was aware of it too.

“I hope your family are all in good health,” he said.

“They are, I thank you. My mother’s nerves are perhaps not what one would wish, but they have been a faithful companion to her for many years, and I do not suppose they mean to desert her now.” She kept her expression entirely guileless. “My father is very well. My younger sisters are in excellent spirits, as younger sisters generally are when there is nothing in particular to occupy them. Jane had a wretched cold through January — nothing serious, but she felt it considerably — and is only quite herself again now.”

“I am glad to hear she is well again. London in winter is not always kind.” He said it with the same careful neutrality he had applied to Mr Collins’ parochial attentiveness.

“It is not,” Elizabeth agreed. “Though Jane would never say so. She is remarkably resilient — one of her finer qualities.” She let a breath of silence do its work. “The neighbourhood will be very glad to have her home. She has been much missed.” She glanced at him sideways, entirely pleasantly.

“I imagine so.”

“As has Mr Bingley, I understand. There has been some hope that he might return to Netherfield for the summer.”

The path was straight ahead of them, and the morning was very quiet. He was several strides before answering.

“I do not think it likely,” Darcy said. “Bingley is fixed in London at present. There is a Miss Harrington — her father is in timber, very considerable fortune — he has been attending her all winter. He seems quite serious in the matter.”

Jane had spent two months in London. Had called on Miss Bingley twice. Had been received as a stranger might be received, politely, briefly, and not invited to return. Had written home about it in three lines, and then in the next letter three more lines that said even less, and Elizabeth had read both letters, knew exactly what they said, and had not spoken of it to anyone.

A timber merchant’s daughter.

She did not know if Darcy sounded pleased with himself or if she was only disposed to hear it that way. She suspected the latter and could not rule out the former. She could not rule out, either, that he was lying outright — that there was no Miss Harrington, that this was one more convenience arranged to serve his own ends, that he had never wanted his friend within ten miles of Jane Bennet and had found a tidy way to say so without saying so at all.

She had no proof of that. She had only the memory of Bingley’s face at the Netherfield ball and Jane’s face the morning Miss Bingley’s note arrived, and a cold, hardened certainty that what had happened between those two moments had not happened without assistance.

“I see,” she said.

“Bingley forms attachments readily.” She could not tell whether he was offering this as comfort or as information or only filling the silence he had made. “He is a man of warm feeling. He does not always—” he stopped.

“He does not always follow through,” Elizabeth said.

“That is not what I—”

“No.” She smiled at the path. “I am sure it is not.”

The wood pigeon called again from somewhere behind them now, and a robin answered it from the hedgerow to the right — that thin bright thread of sound that early April in Kent seemed to produce at every turning.

“I find,” she said, after a while, “that the most instructive thing about a person is not the company they keep but how they treat those the world values less than themselves. It tells one a great deal more than drawing rooms generally permit.”