Page 13

It was at Lucas Lodge, however, that Elizabeth first fully understood the extent of the alteration.

The supper had been long-planned. Mrs Bennet insisted on their attendance, declaring that nothing could be more proper than appearing in society at such a time. Though reluctant, Elizabeth could not refuse without exciting further speculation.

Elizabeth had attended many evenings at Lucas Lodge; indeed, so many that she could not have counted them had she tried. At first, the supper offered some comfort in its familiarity, with the same guests and the same menu as so many times before, as reliable as a calendar. Under ordinary circumstances, Elizabeth would have attended with moderate pleasure and come home with two or three observations worth keeping.

Under the present circumstances, she would have given a great deal to stay at Longbourn with a headache and a book.

They arrived at seven. The house was warm and well-lit and full of people Elizabeth had known all her life, which meant full of people who had known her all her life and were now looking at her with the bright, careful attention of those who believe they are about to witness something interesting.

Charlotte met her in the hallway and pressed her hand. She said nothing, but the pressure communicated more than words could have, and Elizabeth was grateful for it.

The whispers were not whispers, exactly. They were conversations that paused when she passed and resumed when she had moved far enough away. They were glances exchanged across the room with a speed that their owners clearly believed was discreet and was not. Lady Lucas greeted her with the elaborate warmth of a woman overcompensating for something. Mr Robinson, who had always been perfectly ordinary with her, now had a quality of heightened interest in his manner that she found intensely irritating. Even Maria Lucas, who was seventeen and no more complex than she needed to be, kept finding reasons to position herself near Elizabeth and then looking at her sideways.

Elizabeth bore it as best she could. She took a glass of wine she did not want and carried it through the room, speaking to the other guests as though nothing at all was the matter. It was essential to keep a small smile on her face, as though it were an evening like any other. As though she had not noticed that everything had changed. She looked tolerably composed, Elizabeth thought — provided no one looked at her too directly.

Then she saw Mr Darcy. He stood near the fireplace with Sir William, who was telling him something with his customary goodwill and enthusiasm. Mr Darcy listened with composure, but his eyes moved to her the moment she entered the room, and stayed there for some moments longer than courtesy required.

In those fleeting moments, Elizabeth saw in him something she had not expected: not embarrassment, but a kind of grave, direct acknowledgment. He knew exactly where they stood. He had, she thought, known it rather earlier than she had.

She looked away first.

The evening arranged itself around her, exhausting as any social occasion must be when one is at its centre without having chosen to be. She was not avoided, but by the end of the evening, Elizabeth thought grimly that she might have preferred it if she had been. To be — attended to, watched at every moment as though she might make the news of the week, was immeasurably worse. The room had assigned her a meaning she had not consented to, and was now reading her for confirmation of that meaning in everything she did; she was simultaneously too visible and entirely without recourse.

She had just concluded a conversation with the elder Miss Robinson, conducted on Miss Robinson’s side with the breathless attentiveness of someone extracting information under the pretence of sympathy, when she heard her mother’s voice from across the room, carrying over everything.

“—not in the least surprised, for I always said Mr Darcy admired Lizzy, though she would not hear it, and now I think we need not wonder at it any longer—”

The room did not go quiet. It might have been less dreadful if it had. Instead, conversations dropped half a register so that her mother’s voice sat above them with perfect, mortifying clarity.

“— a very fine match, and ten thousand a year at least, though some say more, and of course Pemberley, too. I have heard the park is five miles round! And now that it is all settled, we can look forward to it quite happily, though I must say it might have been done more becomingly —”

Elizabeth did not move. She stood where she was and held her wineglass and looked at a point just above the mantelpiece and breathed, her composure straining to its limits as her mama added mortification to an already delicate situation.

Several faces that had merely been interested were now openly gratified. To her credit, Lady Lucas’s expression strongly suggested that she wished to be somewhere else, or better still, that so unbecoming a scene were not occurring under her roof. Charlotte, across the room, was looking at Elizabeth with a steady compassion that was nearly unbearable.

Still Mrs Bennet sailed on, warming to her theme and entirely oblivious to the discomfort she was causing.

“— Jane nearly settled too, which I said would happen, though Mr Bennet would not believe me, and now I think we may all be very comfortable indeed, for it is not every family that can say two daughters —”

“Mama,” said Jane quietly at her mother’s elbow.

Jane was the only person alive capable of stopping their mother mid-sentence through the simple application of a calm word and a hand on her arm. Mrs Bennet looked at her eldest daughter, began a sentence, reconsidered it, and accepted the glass of wine that Jane pressed upon her. Mercifully, she was quiet.

The room breathed comfortably again.

Elizabeth set her own glass on the nearest surface lest her hands tremble so much she dropped it and looked up to find Mr Darcy watching her from the fireplace.

There was no privacy to be had in a room of thirty people, and she did not seek it. Elizabeth stood where she was, letting the room settle back into its ordinary noise around her and trying to think clearly.

That was difficult, for three things were happening inside her at once, and each alone would have been enough to occupy all her thoughts.

The first was humiliation, the kind that comes not from anything one has done but from being made a spectacle by the actions of others.

The second was fury, aimed at her mother, who had taken a difficult situation and made it a public declaration in front of thirty people; and underneath that, quieter and colder, at the locked door itself, and the unanswered question of how it had come to be locked at all.

The third was a creeping sense of cold fear. Mr Darcy was across the room looking at her with that grave, direct, acknowledging expression. He was a man of honour, and Elizabeth understood, with a horrible and sudden completeness, precisely what the situation now required.

Her mama had called the matter “settled”, but Elizabeth was determined it should not be so.