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The second was that Mr Darcy regretted it. This version was more sympathetic to him and more damaging to her. Mr Darcy was an honourable man, which everyone agreed upon, and his honour had placed him in a situation he had not chosen. It was a very great pity, the whispers said. A man of his character and consequence deserved a match made in happier circumstances, and one could only hope that the engagement would prove, in time, a more suitable arrangement than it presently appeared.

Elizabeth turned this version of events over with the cold appreciation one extends to genuinely precise malice. She could not criticise it on the grounds of falsehood. Quite the opposite: she feared it was devastatingly true.

She did not know how much Mr Darcy had heard, or in what form. Elizabeth would not ask him directly, and she could not ask Caroline Bingley, who was the most likely source and was therefore the last person she would approach. She could only watch, and listen, and wait for the shape of things to become clear.

∞∞∞

The shape became clear only a few days later, at the Robinsons’ next card evening.

Mr Darcy was there, as were most of the Netherfield Party, excepting only Georgiana Darcy and her companion. After arriving a little late and greeting her hostess, Elizabeth stationed herself at the whist table, intending to play with careful, focused attention. She made a resolution to play cards and attend to nothing else.

Not twenty minutes later, Elizabeth concluded that keeping her resolution would be impossible. She left to fetch a glass of water, as the room was warm and the candles were many, and was returning through the narrow passage between the card room and the hall when she heard his voice. Not raised, but clear enough, in a quiet passage, when the card room noise briefly settled.

“— the situation as it stands.” Mr Darcy paused.

Mr Bingley’s voice, lower, asked something she could not make out.

“I am not blind to her reluctance. I have been watching it for a fortnight. The engagement was made in honour. I will not pretend it was made in anything else.”

Elizabeth froze. She knew she should move. Standing in a passage and listening to a private conversation was neither dignified nor fair, and she was aware of both these things. Still, she could not make herself step forward.

“The situation is impossible,” Mr Darcy said. The words were quiet and even, though uttered with a distinct heaviness. “I have done what I can to make this tolerable. But I do not know if I can bear a lifetime of an arrangement that is merely tolerable. Of seeing Miss Elizabeth live out a marriage that is merely tolerable.”

“You give yourself too little credit, I think,” Mr Bingley said earnestly. “Not to mention Miss Elizabeth. Surely it is not so hopeless as all that.”

“She deserves better than an engagement she regrets,” Mr Darcy said, and that was the last thing she heard clearly, because the card room noise rose again and covered whatever came after, and she made herself walk back to the whist table on legs that felt rather less reliable than usual.

Elizabeth sat down and picked up her hand. She looked at the cards and saw none of them.

She deserves better than an engagement she regrets.

She had heard it with the full, terrible clarity of a sentence that lodges itself before you have had time to prepare a response. Mr Darcy thought she regretted it. He thought she was unhappy. He had been watching her for a fortnight with that careful, unsatisfied attention, and what he had concluded from watching was that she was a woman enduring something she wished she could be free of; he had told Mr Bingley so with quiet honesty.

But Elizabeth was not a woman who regretted the engagement. She was a woman who had been careful not to burden him with feelings he had not asked for, in a situation neither of them had chosen. Too late, Elizabeth knew she had withheld too much. Mr Darcy had misread her, and was now sitting in another room telling his friend that she deserved to be released.

And it would be impossible to correct the misapprehension, because she could not say anything without saying too much.

Her turn arrived, and she played her hand carelessly. Elizabeth said something to her partner about the trump suit and got through the remainder of the evening on sheer determination.

∞∞∞

If Elizabeth had remained to hear a little more of a private conversation between two old friends, her perspective might have been considerably altered.

“But Darcy,” Bingley had said, with the patient directness of a man who has been waiting to say something for several weeks, “you are describing her unhappiness as though it is about the engagement itself. What if it is not? What if she is unhappy because she believes you find the arrangement repugnant, and she is trying not to burden you with her own feelings on the matter?” He paused, studying Darcy’s face. “It seems to me that two people can be perfectly miserable for entirely opposite reasons, and both of them be wrong.”

Darcy said nothing immediately, which was the response he gave to things that required him to revise his position while maintaining composure. “That is a generous reading.”

“It is an observant one,” Bingley countered. “I have eyes, you know. I have watched Miss Elizabeth, and I do not think I have seen a woman counting the days until she is free. There is something that you might not know.”

Darcy looked at his friend for a long moment, but did not answer. Answering meant that he needed to admit that he wanted Bingley to be right, and Darcy was very much afraid that he wanted it too desperately to be an entirely reliable judge.

On one point, Bingley was certainly correct, Darcy thought. There was a great deal that he did not know. He did not know why Elizabeth had retreated upstairs at the Longbourn supper. He did not think she had been suffering from a headache.

Significantly, he did not know why the investigation had stalled at precisely the moment he had felt them closest to its resolution. Nor could he understand what had shifted in her.

Frustrated, and wishing he knew a great deal more with any certainty, he returned to the card room.

∞∞∞