Page 1 of He Insulted My Entire Family Before Proposing

CHAPTER 1

Elizabeth Bennet had made excellent use of Mr. Darcy's first insult.

This was not because the insult itself possessed any great merit. As insults went, it had been lazy, ungenerous, and delivered with the air of a man who believed his boredom should be entered into the parish record. But it had been public, and therefore useful. A private slight could only be nursed. A public one could be turned, sharpened, and passed round at dinner until it became less a wound than a household joke with protective edges.

"Only tolerable," Lydia would say whenever a ribbon failed to please her.

"Not handsome enough to tempt me," Kitty would add of a cold pudding.

Even Mr. Bennet had once looked over his spectacles at a tax notice and declared it barely tolerable and in no danger of tempting him.

The phrase had survived because Longbourn was the sort of house where a sentence, once useful, was never allowed to retire. Mrs. Bennet had applied it to a bonnet that sat too low on Kitty's brow. Mary had said it of a hymn tune with more solemnity than the hymn deserved. Lydia had tried to use it of a lieutenant and been corrected by everyone at once, since lieutenants, however tolerable, were not a subject on which she required encouragement.

By these methods Elizabeth had survived being dismissed at the Meryton assembly by the proudest man in the room. If Mr. Darcy had meant to diminish her, he had instead given Longbourn a phrase. She had laughed at it until it seemed impossible that it had ever hurt.

Months later, during her visit to Charlotte Collins at Hunsford, she discovered that a phrase could laugh and still keep its teeth.

Colonel Fitzwilliam had called in the late morning, bringing with him the easy manners of a man whose rank had not made him stiff and whose income had not made him secure. Charlotte was in the village. Mr. Collins had followed Lady Catherine's carriage as a lesser planet follows a sun. Maria Lucas had retreated to write a letter home full of shrubbery and terror. Elizabeth was left to entertain the colonel, which was no hardship. He had wit enough to know when he was being amusing, and sense enough not to be offended when she was.

"You are fortunate in your cousin," she said, after some minutes of talk that had wandered from Rosings to Kent roads to the strange ability of Lady Catherine to improve every subject by exhausting it.

"Darcy? Yes, in some respects. He is useful in a crisis."

"Is he often in one?"

"Not his own," said the colonel, smiling. "He is too orderly for that. But he has a decided talent for managing the crises of other people."

"That must be a comfort to the other people."

The colonel laughed. "It depends on whether they wished to be managed."

Elizabeth's needle paused. There was something in his tone: affectionate, amused, and entirely unguarded. "And do they?"

"Rarely, I imagine. But Darcy is not easily discouraged by lack of invitation. He congratulated himself only lately on saving a friend from a most imprudent attachment."

Elizabeth felt, rather than saw, the room alter around her. The window remained open. The little fire still burned too hot for the weather. The colonel still sat at his ease. But the word saving had placed its cold hand on her shoulder.

"A friend?" she repeated.

"Bingley. You know him, I believe?"

"Slightly."

It was the smallest lie that could be told without blushing. She knew Mr. Bingley's open countenance, his quick laugh, his eagerness to be pleased, and the way her sister Jane's face had softened whenever his name entered a room. She knew, too, the weeks after he left Netherfield, when Jane had called her disappointment reasonable while looking like a candle that had been quietly snuffed.

"Darcy thought the lady indifferent," Colonel Fitzwilliam said. "Or so he told me. There were family considerations too, I gather. Connections, expectations, all that old machinery."

"Family considerations," Elizabeth said.

The colonel, not yet aware of the trap his friendliness had opened beneath his feet, nodded. "I should not repeat private matters, except that Darcy made no secret of his satisfaction. He has very firm opinions on unsuitable connections."

The truth sharpened at once.

Not handsome enough to tempt me had grown legs. It had crossed rooms, entered private judgments, and learned to wear the respectable coat of prudence. Elizabeth saw, with a clarity that made her fingers cold, that Mr. Darcy's disdain had not ended in a ballroom. It had followed Jane into rooms where Jane could not answer it.

Her sister too serene to be believed. Her family connections too useful as an objection. Elizabeth herself tolerable enough to be watched, perhaps even admired, but never quite free of the inferiority he had first assigned her.

"How benevolent," she said.