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He nodded. I waited, tensely, for him to ask after my youngest sister, thinking it too much to hope that he would fail to remember her. I glanced sideways at him. But he said nothing, fortunately. Because, of course, I had no idea what to say.
I quickly thought of questions of my own, hoping they would forestall any I dreaded. “What do you hear from our old friends, Mr and Miss Bingley?”
He stiffened. I was not mistaken in it, for I watched him carefully. His answers, however, were smoothly enough given. “Miss Bingley eloped to the Continent eighteen months ago, and Mr Bingley does not hear from her often.”
This, I admit, surprised me mightily. Of all people I knew or had ever known, Caroline Bingley seemed the least likely to commit such an indiscretion.
“Mr Bingley is married to my sister, Georgiana,” he said, after a small hesitation. “They have been married two and a half years now. No children as yet.” He added nothing more, but seemed as though he could have.
He is waiting, I realised. Waiting for me to say something about…old times. Ancient history, really. Of Mr Bingley’s abrupt departure, with him, from our neighbourhood, just before the Christmas of 1811. Perhaps Mr Darcy had even known, as Miss Bingley had, that Jane had been in London after, and kept the knowledge from his friend. Regardless, we had never seen either of them again, and after my parents’ deaths in August of the following year, neither had I given them much thought. It all seemed so insignificant now.
“I wish them very happy,” I murmured perfunctorily. Truthfully, I did not much care whether any of them were happy or not, but I certainly wished none ill. I was sadly deceived—we all had been—in Lieutenant Wickham’s character, and had long ago decided that nothing the scoundrel had said against Mr Darcy could be trusted. The happiness or unhappiness of the Bingleys was irrelevant.
But now it seemed unmannerly not to offer my own condolences.
“I was very sorry to hear of your wife’s death, when the countess told me of it today,” I said dutifully.
He answered not another word. In fact, the remainder of the walk was accomplished in utter and complete silence.
