Page 21 of The Matchmaker’s Mistake

He sat in the chair opposite and waited.

“George took tea with me on Saturday and spoke with me this morning.”

“So I have heard.” Richard had not mentioned the second meeting. Perhaps he did not yet know about it.

His mother lifted her brows in the same way Richard had. “Today you accompanied Mr. Bingley to see a Miss Bennet.”

The servants withheld nothing from his mother that she deigned to ask.

“I did.”

Her gaze did not waver. “George came first to me on Saturday. He was concerned about Emmeline, who had a cold. You know how carefully he watches her health.” She smiled. “Poor girl was tired of his fussing and sent him to me. So we talked.”

Darcy understood, without having yet been told, what was coming.

“I asked him, before he went home to his wife, whether he could tell me what was troubling you. You returned from Netherfield much shadowed, Fitzwilliam, and I could not allow it to continue.”

He said nothing.

“George spoke with Mr. Bingley when they met at the club that evening, and the substance is this. You spoke unkindly of a young woman, a Miss Elizabeth Bennet, at an assembly soon after your arrival in Hertfordshire. The remark was overheard. The lady laughed, by Mr. Bingley’s account, and you were—I infer—made considerably more uncomfortable by that.”

Darcy had not considered his response in those terms, but it was true, to an extent. It had been a dreadful evening, with Miss Bingley taking his arm, implying a closer connection than existed to everyone in Bingley’s new neighbourhood. What had vexed him was not the design itself, but the want of delicacy with which she had put those beliefs into action. Her determined possession of his arm, and, worse still, her evident wish that others should remark upon it, had put him thoroughly out of humour.

There were two reasons he had not set Miss Bingley down, either in public or private. The first was Darcy’s belief that his mother had carelessly encouraged Miss Bingley’s hopes. The second was Bingley’s friendship. Yet even those considerations had grown less persuasive each time the woman took his arm when it had not yet been offered.

“If I have lately appeared out of humour, Mother, you must attribute some part of it to yourself, for you encouraged a woman you ought not to have.”

“Fitzwilliam,” said his mother with a sigh. “I suggested Mr. Bingley invite you to Netherfield. I did not speak of a single expectation.”

Darcy thought this rather like claiming one had merely struck the flint and not started the fire. “You did so knowing that Bingley had already invited me.”

His mother ignored this. “At the time, Miss Bingley appeared modest enough, and I believed the connection to her brother might suit you tolerably well. I did not foresee that she would mistake a suggestion for certainty.”

“She did not mistake a suggestion for certainty,” said Darcy. “Do not pretend that you were idle in all of this. You were quite attentive in the month before we removed from town. If she mistook your invitation to dinner or your calling her ‘dear Caroline,’ I do not think we can much blame her.”

His mother frowned slightly. “I call many people dear.”

“Not with that tone.”

“What tone?”

“The tone that informs the person to whom you are speaking that you have already selected a permanent place for them at the family table.”

To Darcy’s further irritation, his mother laughed. “That is an abominable exaggeration.”

“Is it? By the end of the second night at Netherfield, Bingley informed us we were to attend an assembly. At that assembly, Miss Bingley attached herself to my arm as though we were already six months married. And I should add that I had not offered it.”

His mother just shook her head at him. “Then you ought to have detached her.”

“In the midst of all her future neighbours?”

“Certainly not. You are too tall for such a scene. But afterward, perhaps.”

“And say what? ‘Miss Bingley, though my mother has behaved for the last month as if negotiating a treaty between our houses, you will never be my wife?’”

His mother pressed her lips together, which meant she was attempting not to smile. “I am certain you could have managed something more polite than that.”

“I was too occupied attempting not to insult Bingley’s sister in public.”