Page 65 of The Matchmaker’s Mistake

“No. That is the very devil of it—I had not asked, but I think she knew that I eventually meant to.” Bingley went to the window and stood with his back to the room. “She asked me for a private word before her aunt came down. I thought—you may imagine what I thought ‘a private word’ meant. And then she was so kind, and so quiet, and about four sentences in I understood that she was sending me away.”

The fire shifted in the grate. Darcy said nothing. He was nearly as shocked by this news as Bingley himself. If he had counted on anyone making a match this season, it was Bingley and Miss Bennet. He finished pouring the wine and held out the glass to his friend, who took it and sipped.

“She said I had done nothing wrong,” Bingley told him, turning. “That I had been all openness and kindness from the first. But that she had taken the time in town to understand her own heart, and that it would not do. Those were her words. It would not do. And then she told me she hoped I should be very happy, and Darcy, she meant it. She wishes me to be happy, but not with her. That is the worst of it. If she had given me a reason, I might have argued. But one cannot argue with certainty alone.”

“No,” Darcy said, thinking that Miss Bennet must have thought a great deal about how to avoid such a scene. “I do not suppose one can.”

“I have gone over every evening since November—every call, every party—every word I can remember, and there is nothing I can recall that would account for this. Could it be something Caroline said?”

“I do not believe Miss Bennet is a woman who would take your sister’s words over your own.”

“No,” Bingley said. “I do not believe it either.” He sat down, finally, in the chair by the fire, put his head back, and looked at the ceiling. “She was very plainly distressed, but still so kind. She is an angel.” He buried his face in his hands. “She just will not be my angel.”

Darcy had no answer for that. “Stay to dinner,” he said instead.

“I could not eat.”

“Then stay while I do.”

He was not hungry either, but Bingley stayed while he called for a small meal and some coffee to be brought up. When it came, Darcy filled a plate and set it on the side table at his friend’s elbow, where it sat untouched while the coffee went cold beside it. Bingley pushed himself up and walked the room instead, from the window to the fire and back again, talking himself through the puzzle as he did.

“She was kind about it. I said that already. But kind—Darcy, you cannot know how disorienting it is to be refused kindly. It is a bit like experiencing a shipwreck when the sea is calm.”

Eventually, Bingley stopped pacing and sat again. “She never once flirted with me, do you know? All the others flirt. I never considered it until now. Perhaps I mistook her being pleased with everyone for her being pleased with me.”

“Bingley,” Darcy said, shaking his head. “You must know that is not true.”

His friend shook his head. “She thinks well of me, she is simply not in love with me. That is the whole of it, and there is nobody to be angry at.” He looked into his cold coffee. “I have been in her position, once or twice. It is nobody’s fault when it happens. Knowing that may be a comfort, by and by.”

It clearly was not offering any comfort as of yet.

“Ought a man to leave town, do you think? After a thing of this kind.”

Darcy drew breath.

“Because on the one hand,” Bingley went on without waiting for Darcy’s answer, “there is nothing so pitiable as a fellow who has been turned away. But if I go, everyone will say I ran. And I would be running.” He turned from the window. “You are quite right. I shall decide nothing today.”

Darcy had said nothing of the sort, but it was best to simply allow Bingley to continue.

“I shall have to tell Caroline. She will be pleased that Miss Bennet shall not be marrying me and yet insulted that Miss Bennet was the one to decide it. Should I go to Yorkshire, do you think?”

“Yorkshire is rather cold in February,” Darcy said. “But it might be warmer than London at present.”

“No one in the entire history of England has said that before.” Some colour had come back into Bingley’s face. He retied his cravat into a simple knot that was at least tidy, and when he rose to depart, he said, “You are better at this than a man would expect. You did not once tell me it was for the best.”

Darcy shook his head. “I do not know that it is.”

“No,” Bingley said. “That is exactly what I mean.”

And then he went away.

Darcy sat for some time over his letters. The steward’s question about the west drainage received a fuller answer than he had intended, with a diagram of the culverts. Darcy sealed it, set it aside, and reached for the next letter. But there was no next letter. The day’s business was done, and there was nowhere else for his thoughts to go.

So they went first to Bingley, white-faced in the chair by the fire, hearing Miss Bennet’s kind words over and over in his mind and attempting to understand them. He was sorrier for his friend than he knew how to say.

Then, arriving uninvited beneath the sorrow, came a meaner consideration. The Bennet sisters had come into his mother’s drawing rooms on the strength of Miss Bennet’s connection to Bingley. Miss Bennet had been the reason for every invitation; Miss Elizabeth had been the sister who came with her. There might not be anything now to bring her back.

He was ashamed of the thought, but he could not banish it.