Page 47

I cannot bear that he should suffer this engagement when his every action shows he wishes to be released from it.

Elizabeth’s voice, low and steady and carrying further than she knew. The shape of Miss Bennet’s response, audible and inaudible in equal parts.

He had tried, over the hours of the night, to hold Bingley’s reading of it alongside what he had heard, and to determine which was more reliable. Bingley believed she cared, but Bingley was constitutionally disposed to believe people cared for each other: that was one of the things that made him Bingley. Against Bingley’s reading was her own voice, in her own words, in a private moment she had not known he was witnessing.

Was it a matter for hope or for deepest despair that she believed he wanted to be free of her? It was at least transparent where the belief had come from. He had stood at a library window and told Bingley the engagement was solely made out of honour. Elizabeth must have heard it, and she had been terribly composed. Darcy had watched the composure settle over her like something she had put on deliberately, and had known, in that moment, that the passage had not given her enough to understand him.

Only quite enough to misunderstand him entirely.

Ruefully, Darcy knew he had built the misunderstanding with his own hands. His reticence, his carefulness, his refusal to place his feelings in her way — each of these had been both well-intentioned and ultimately disastrous. He had tried to do right by her and had done something that looked, from her side of things, indistinguishable from wanting to escape.

It could not now be corrected without saying things that were not his to say. He could not tell her that what she had overheard was not what it had appeared to be without telling her what it actually was. Not without placing his feelings directly in her path, which he had resolved not to do.

Not without telling her directly: I do not want to be released. I have not wanted to be released since we walked together at Netherfield, and possibly before, and the engagement is the best thing that has happened to me in years. He could not say any of it, because she had stood in the entrance hall and told Jane she could not bear that he should suffer, which was the language of compassion and obligation, not attachment. One did not describe a man’s feelings as suffering one could not bear if one returned them.

He was the cause of her distress. Darcy had been, in one form or another, since the corridor and the servants’ faces and the first understanding of what the situation would cost her. He had tried to mitigate this, and had instead extended it, and every attempt he had made to do right by her had made matters worse.

Miss Bingley’s visit to the library had been the latest instance. He had declined the mechanism she offered. A dissolution conducted in such a manner, and without a way to salvage her reputation, would not have served Elizabeth. But his refusal had produced nothing except the continued arrangement, which was serving neither of them.

As the fire burned low, Darcy’s thoughts turned to marriage, and what it would mean for them both. He had made his peace with the public arrangement in the first days of the engagement; it was the private nature of their marriage-to-be that continued to haunt him. The daily proximity of a woman he had come to know and to value with a specificity that made the word, ‘value’, feel insufficient, who would be in his house and at his table and across from him in carriages for the rest of their lives. Who would be there under the terms of an engagement neither of them had chosen, and who would conduct it with the grace and the wit and the integrity he had come to expect from her, and who would find it a loveless arrangement and would not say so because she was not a woman who said such things.

This was survivable. He would have to believe so, because he was not in a position to believe otherwise.

What was available to him, honourable, and consistent with what he had promised her was to ensure that the marriage, if it became a marriage, was as easy for her as it could be made. He had said this to her in the parlour at Longbourn in the first days, in the formal language of a proposal that had not been made in happiness. Darcy had meant it then as duty, and he meant it now as something more.

He must not press her. He must not place his feelings in her way. He would conduct himself, for whatever remained of the engagement and beyond it, with honour. Whatever that might mean in a marriage where the man loved his wife, and the wife wished she were anywhere else.

Darcy would do this because it was right, and because the alternative was a dissolution that would take her out of his life entirely. At eleven o’clock in front of a dying fire, he was honest enough with himself to know that he was not prepared to forward that outcome without being asked directly.

He had not been asked. Until he was, he would stay.

He banked the fire and went to bed, and lay in the dark for a long time, and eventually arrived at something that was not peace but was at least exhaustion sufficient to permit sleep.

Chapter Nineteen

The end of the year was, if less cheery than in years past, at least quiet. Elizabeth was spared from having to wonder whether she ought to make a Christmas present for Mr Darcy by the news that he would spend the holiday in London with his sister.

As always, the Gardiners spent Christmas at Longbourn. Elizabeth had never been so glad of the joyful chaos provided by the four young Gardiner children, for their noisy games made it very easy to avoid being asked how she was and what she was feeling. Mrs Gardiner, who had always been very close to her two eldest nieces, did give her several narrow looks; but as Elizabeth could not have the relief of confiding in her, she was careful to avoid the quiet tête-à-têtes that would have required her to either say too much to her aunt, or to dissemble.

The new year arrived with a great deal of ceremony organised by Mrs Bennet and endured by everyone else. There was a supper, and festivities with the neighbours, and Lydia’s insistence on staying up until midnight, which inspired her young cousins to attempt the feat likewise.

Elizabeth welcomed the year 1812 from the window seat of the upstairs landing, wrapped in a shawl and listening to the distant sound of the village church bell. The echoes of it rang hollowly in her chest.

Afterwards, January settled in with grey determination, seeming heavy and dull after the festivity of the Christmas holiday and the joy of seeing her relations. Longbourn seemed very quiet when they returned to London, and Hertfordshire seemed less peaceful when, on almost the same day, Elizabeth heard the news that Mr Darcy had returned to Netherfield.

Their engagement continued. This was the word Elizabeth had settled on. It neatly implied momentum that required no additional force, a thing moving because it had been moving and had found no sufficient reason to stop.

Gradually, Elizabeth had been assembling a set of private terms for conducting the engagement. She would be pleasant. She would be warm to the extent that warmth could be offered without presumption, without reaching toward anything he had not indicated he wanted. She would not be a burden. Elizabeth would not let Mr Darcy see the paddock circles or the sleepless hours or the persistent ache of being in the same room as someone and understanding, each time, that the room was as close as she was going to get. She would endure it well, because endurance was what was available to her, and doing it well was the only form of dignity the situation left.

She was managing this adequately, she thought. It was the most exhausting thing she had ever done. Elizabeth moved through the days in a foggy haze, trying to think about anything but the state of her engagement with Mr Darcy and able to do little else. It was with some relief that she put on one of her better dresses and went to the first Meryton assembly of the year; whatever happened, the occasion would surely provide something else to think about.

Elizabeth saw Mr Darcy across the room almost from the first moment she entered it, a habit that had become automatic. Her eyes found him before she had decided to look, the way they always did now. He was talking to Colonel Forster and looked up when she came in, as if he could sense her presence like a magnet pulling toward its counterpart.

It sometimes seemed as though Mr Darcy had arranged to always be somewhere she could find him without having to look for him. As ever, there he was, visible from the door and positioned without appearing to be positioned, present without crowding. She did not know whether this was deliberate. She suspected it was, for most things that Mr Darcy did seemed to be deliberate, and she received it with the complicated gratitude of someone being given something they wanted in the wrong context.

Mr Darcy soon crossed the room to speak with her. “Miss Elizabeth.” He bowed. “I hope the carriage ride was not too cold.”

“Not at all. The roads are better than last week.” She attempted a smile. “Though my mother disagrees. She has opinions about January that I expect we shall be hearing until March.”