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His cheeks flushed. Plainly, the memory embarrassed him, even now. And how like the Miss Bingley I remembered, to detail her pecuniary requirements along with her illicit proposal!
“And how did she expect you to explain it all to her brother? Her sisters? Your family? Did she really think you would care so little for your reputation as she evidently did for hers?”
He sighed. “I told her it was out of the question. I told her that her brother would kill me, that our sisters would be humiliated and neither would recover from the mortification. She responded that I need not worry about a thing—that Krofford had proposed an elopement, and she would pretend to take him up on it, but would simply escape him at the first busy inn and send word to me where she waited. The world and her family would think her scandalously connected abroad, but she was ready to start afresh. For love only, without rules.”
“But with two homes, a carriage, servants, and jewels for comfort.”
He smiled sadly. “I did not think of that, so much. She was offering to give up a great deal. It would be stupid not to demand comfort.”
A silence stretched between us. I decided to ask what I wished to know. “Were you tempted?”
He looked at me fully, for the first time. “No. I was lonely, and I did wish for companionship, but she deluded herself in thinking that she would not be recognised ten miles from Pemberley, and gossiped over—as if the scandal would never escape her control—or even that she could be happy in such a situation. Besides myself, Mr and Mrs Bingley would be its victims, as well as the Hursts.”
For all her wealth and education, had Miss Bingley clung to the same silly imaginings and unrealistic dreams as Lydia? A man like Wickham would only have taken advantage of such naivety, but I supposed it was unlikely that she had appreciated Mr Darcy’s more honourable rejection.
He sighed again. “There were more tears, more pleas, more accusations against Anne, and more…offers. But I simply did not think of her as a lover and never would. It was a foolish dream, such as befitted a much younger, less intelligent, less well-bred female. In a word, it was stupid.”
I winced. “I suppose you told her that?”
“Should I have allowed her to keep her silly fantasy alive? Perhaps wait until she chose to compromise herself in a way worse than simply appearing in my library unaccompanied? I thought to nip it in the bud.”
I nodded, but it had been far too late for nipping—that bud had taken root over years and years and years.
