Page 41

They parted. Elizabeth crossed the room to Charlotte and accepted a cup of tea. They talked about the lending library, about the next party, and when Lady Lucas intended to visit London. Elizabeth said nothing about the conversation to anyone.

∞∞∞

But though she did not speak of it aloud, Elizabeth thought of it almost without ceasing. She thought about it through the lending library discussion, through an exchange with Sir William about the weather, and through the half an hour of her mother talking to Lady Lucas about the respective merits of the two dressmakers to be had in Meryton. She thought about it with the focused, restless energy of someone who has heard something they did not want to hear and cannot determine how much of it to believe.

Caroline Bingley’s performance had been transparent. She had seen through it from the first sentence. Perhaps Miss Bingley had not intended otherwise. The conversation might have been designed not to deceive her, but to unsettle her, to place a set of ideas in her mind and leave them there to do their work.

And if so, it had succeeded.

Mr Darcy had spoken of the engagement as an obligation and had implied distress. Miss Bingley had framed this as concern for Elizabeth, though it was not. She had offered a path to dissolution, which she had dressed as kindness, and was not that either. The offer had been for herself. Elizabeth understood that much without effort.

Caroline Bingley wanted Mr Darcy. She had always wanted him, or at least wanted his name and fortune, his connections and his grand estate. She had locked a study door and ruined two people’s ordinary lives in pursuit of that name and fortune, and was now sitting in Lady Lucas’s drawing room suggesting dissolution with the elegant patience of a woman who believed she was three moves from checkmate.

That much was all transparent. But one thing was not transparent, and could not be attributed entirely to Miss Bingley’s design: it was not all invented.

Mr Darcy had said something. In that private conversation at Netherfield, he had said something about obligation and distress. Yes, Miss Bingley had distorted it and embellished it and served it with a sprig of false sympathy, but the original had existed. Elizabeth knew it had existed because she had heard him herself, through a card room passage, saying words that Caroline Bingley had not needed to invent.

The engagement was made in honour. I will not pretend it was made in anything else.

She had heard that. And Miss Bingley had heard something also, something real, something that required little enough embellishment. Elizabeth feared very much that the two things fit together into a conclusion that she did not want to know, but could not help knowing.

Mr Darcy wanted to be released. He was too honourable to say so, and too considerate to press it, and he was sitting in a library discussing paths forward with Caroline Bingley because he was looking for one.

She knew him too well to think that he would look for a solution for himself only. Honesty and honour were too much a part of his character for that. If Mr Darcy cared only for himself, he would not have offered the engagement in the first point. He might have gone on his way without troubling himself about what happened to her and to his sisters, and if society had judged him for it for a time, they would have forgiven the rich and influential master of Pemberley, nephew to the Earl of Matlock, soon enough. No, Mr Darcy was looking for something else, a way out for both of them, in honour. He would look for some means to save her reputation, some plan that would see them both released from their obligations without injury.

Only none of it would work, because Elizabeth knew with sudden, painful clarity that she did not want to be released.

She stood at the window and let herself know it plainly, without management or cavil. She did not want to dissolve the engagement; she did not want the investigation to produce its logical conclusion. What she wanted, with a specificity she found both clarifying and mortifying, was for the engagement to become real and one both of them chose with all their hearts.

Elizabeth closed her eyes, ashamed of what she wanted and how much she wanted it. She was ashamed of how long it had taken her to be honest about it, and ashamed of the relief she felt even at the bare acknowledgment of it, as though wanting something clearly were itself a comfort regardless of whether the wanting could be satisfied.

It could not be satisfied. That was the other thing she was holding. He wanted release, and she wanted the opposite, and the two of them were performing a mutual consideration that was going to result in disaster.

She went to find her sister, locating her after searching through the over-full room for a handful of minutes. Jane was near the fireplace, talking to Mrs Long with the warmth she brought to all conversations, regardless of their interest to her. Elizabeth found a position from which she could see both Jane and, across the room, Charles Bingley.

She watched him for ten minutes. Elizabeth did not need ten minutes, as she had the answer in the first two, but she gave herself the full ten. She needed to be certain, for the answer was going to cost her something, and she did not intend to pay in vain.

Mr Bingley was not avoiding Jane outright or treating her coldly. That was the first thing, and it was important. He was still the warm and easy man he had always been. But there was a quality to his movements through the room that had not been present at the previous gatherings. Mr Bingley circulated and talked to Sir William, to Mrs Long, and to two of the younger Lucas girls. Mr Bingley laughed at something Mr Robinson said. Without flaw or reservation, he was an excellent guest.

He did not cross the room to Jane.

But he did look at her. Elizabeth caught him twice. The quick, suppressed look that suggested he was overriding an instinct, and both times he redirected his attention quickly, hurriedly. Jane, for her part, talked to Mrs Long with composed, too-effortful brightness. She did not look toward Mr Bingley more than twice, and both times looked away before he could catch her at it.

Elizabeth watched this and felt something cold settle in her chest.

She knew the mechanism. She had assembled it alongside everything else she had assembled over the past weeks. Caroline Bingley had been working on him as on the neighbourhood, the same patient pressure applied to her brother rather than to a drawing room, and in much the same way. The same rearrangement of facts. A Bennet connection, complicated. A sister whose situation reflected on the family. An attachment formed quickly and under circumstances that certain people considered worth examining. Mr Bingley was not a man who would be moved by malice, but he was a man who loved his sister and trusted her judgment. A misuse of that trust in her judgement, applied consistently and indirectly over several weeks, could move even the most firmly inclined.

That was what Miss Bingley had intended, and it was working.

Jane caught her eye across the room and gave her a smile that was nearly convincing and entirely devastating, and Elizabeth smiled back and felt the cold thing in her chest become something sharper.

Elizabeth had the housemaid. This was the thought that arrived, unbidden and with painful clarity. She had the testimony. She had the means to end Caroline Bingley’s position in one conversation, to dissolve the mechanism that was operating on Mr Bingley and Jane, on the neighbourhood, and on Mr Darcy himself, to produce the documented proof that would allow the whole apparatus of Miss Bingley’s schemes to be dismantled and examined in the light.

Elizabeth could do it today. She could walk across the room and request five minutes with Mr Darcy and tell him about Meryton and the housemaid and the key. If she did so, the engagement could be dissolved, and Jane’s situation could have hope again, and Caroline Bingley would be finished forever. She held this thought and turned it over and examined it from all the angles she had examined before, as though there might be something new to be discovered.

And then, when Elizabeth had completed her examination and found it unchanged from every previous examination, she set it down.

She set it down for Jane, and for Mr Bingley, who had done nothing wrong and deserved none of the consequences. She set it down because Caroline Bingley, despite everything she had done, did not deserve to be destroyed beyond hope of recovery, finished entirely at Elizabeth’s hand.