Page 54

“I am going to ask you something,” Bingley said finally, “and I should like you to answer it honestly, rather than carefully.”

Darcy set the cue on the table. “Those are not always different things.”

“With you, they frequently are.”

This was accurate enough that Darcy did not contest it. He looked at his friend and knew that for once, Bingley could not be diverted.

“Ask,” Darcy said.

“Are you happy?”

The question arrived simply, without preamble or softening.

Darcy considered it with genuine reflection, examining his emotions plainly. “No,” he said. “Not presently.”

Bingley nodded, as though this confirmed something he already knew. “And do you intend to remain so?”

“I do not generally intend unhappiness.”

“Darcy.” The tone was patient and firm in equal measure. “That is exactly the sort of careful answer I asked you not to give me.”

Darcy looked at the fire. Outside, the night was absolute; the grounds consumed by impenetrable winter darkness.

“What is it that you actually want to ask?”

Bingley absentmindedly picked up his cue, set it back down again, and came around the table. He did not sit. He stood with his hands in his pockets and looked at Darcy with the directness that was perhaps his most underestimated quality. People saw Bingley’s warmth and assumed softness. They were wrong.

“Lady Catherine came to that assembly,” Bingley said, “and she stood in the middle of the room and she spoke to Elizabeth Bennet in a manner beyond insulting. And you—” he paused. “You moved to her immediately. You stood beside her and you answered your aunt in a way that I have never heard you speak to her before. Not to protect yourself. To protect Miss Elizabeth.” He regarded him steadily. “I know of no one else whom you would treat so protectively, save for your sister.”

Darcy said nothing.

“And then you took her to the anteroom. You were in there for ten minutes, which is longer than any formal apology requires. When you came back —” Bingley stopped, gathering his thoughts, working through how best to deliver his next words to Darcy. “When you came back, you looked like a man who had just been permitted ten minutes inside a place he has wanted to enter for a very long time and has been told he must leave.”

The fire settled. A log shifted and sent a brief column of sparks up the chimney.

“You are asking whether I care for her, are you not?” The words fell with a little bitterness.

“No,” Bingley replied. “I am asking why she does not know that you do.”

Darcy stopped short. Unaccountably, his heart was racing. “I have conducted myself with what I believed was appropriate restraint,” he protested. “Miss Elizabeth did not choose this engagement. I have tried not to impose on her a set of feelings she did not ask for and has given no indication of returning.”

“Yes,” Bingley said. “I know. I have watched you do it. Has it occurred to you that she might read your restraint as indifference?”

“Surely that is better than humiliating myself and discomfiting Miss Bennet with an unwanted display of passion,” Darcy protested. “Yes, I have concealed my desires; that was always my intention. Indeed, I thought I had concealed them better than this conversation would suggest.”

“From Miss Elizabeth, I believe you have,” Bingley said. “Only not from me.” He said it without heat or satisfaction, as a simple correction of an error. He leaned against the billiards table and looked at his friend mercilessly, though not unkindly. “Darcy. You silenced Mrs Pearce in a room full of people because she implied something unkind about the engagement. You stood beside Miss Elizabeth at the assembly and told your aunt, in front of forty witnesses, that she was your decision. These things are visible, at least to me. To Miss Bennet as well, I think. I am not certain they are visible to the person they are intended for.”

Darcy was quiet for a moment. He thought about how Elizabeth had acted in the sitting room at Netherfield. Her stalled wit, the careful pleasantness. He thought about what Bingley had said at the card evening and what he had done with it, which was to hold it alongside everything else and find the other evidence more compelling, because the other evidence required less of him.

He thought about Elizabeth in the entrance hall, her voice low and carrying further than she knew. I cannot bear that he should suffer. He had taken it as the language of compassion for a man she pitied. Darcy had been painfully certain of it. He examined the certainty now, with Bingley watching him, and found it rather less solid than it had once appeared.

“She believes I want to be released,” he said.

Bingley nodded gravely. “I think she does, for you have given her a considerable amount of material to support that belief. Darcy, what you have been calling consideration for her feelings has also had the effect of making her believe you are at best indifferent, and at worst reluctant.”

The accuracy of this was not comfortable. Darcy had spent much of the past several months being uncomfortable in ways he had at least been able to categorise. Unhappiness he understood; restraint he could manage. This was different. This was the discomfort of understanding that he had caused the very harm he had been working to prevent.

It was humbling indeed to take an honest look at oneself and conclude that one has acted wrongly at almost every turn. “I had believed that silence was the appropriate form of consideration,” Darcy said weakly,