Page 62

“Perhaps I deserve the ruin of all my plans,” Miss Bingley said blankly. “I am glad, at least, that you are satisfied by the outcome of these events. I have never wished to be your enemy, Mr Darcy. Far from it. And perhaps this is better than I deserve. Miss Elizabeth would have been justified in publishing all my actions. I cannot claim otherwise.”

“Yes,” Darcy agreed. “She has chosen not justice, but mercy.”

Miss Bingley bowed her head. “And I — I am grateful for that mercy.”

Darcy thought about what Elizabeth had said: I do not think she is without feeling on the subject. He had not been entirely convinced that such generosity was warranted. Standing in the candlelit room watching Caroline Bingley sit with the full weight of what she had done and what she had been given in return, he thought Elizabeth had been more accurate than he had given her credit for.

But perhaps that was not surprising. Elizabeth was nothing if not perceptive.

“I will conduct myself accordingly,” Miss Bingley promised. “At the wedding, and in all necessary circumstances.” She said it without the graceful composure she brought to most things. Her words were heavy with defeat, which was its own kind of concession. “You have my word.”

He nodded

“I would ask that you tell her —” she stopped. Her face pinched with emotion. “No,” she said. “There is nothing to tell her. What she has done does not require an answer from me. It only requires that I understand it clearly.”

“I think that is a proper assessment,” Darcy said.

Miss Bingley accepted this with the slight inclination of her head that meant the conversation was over. He went to the door.

“Mr Darcy.”

He stopped.

Miss Bingley looked at him across the room, and there was no cunning or careful composure in her expression. Only honest disappointment. “I am sorry,” she said. “For what it is worth.”

“I know you are,” Darcy said. He meant it, which was not something he had expected to mean when he had walked through the door.

He went out and closed it quietly behind him, and walked back to his own rooms and sat for a while in the dark. He thought about Elizabeth choosing mercy for a woman who had given her none, and found that he was not done being astonished by her, and suspected he would not be for a very long time.

∞∞∞

Caroline sat at her writing desk until the candles had burned low.

She did not write the letter. For a long time, she sat with the unmarked paper, the dying candles, and the full knowledge of what she had done and what she had failed to achieve. And what had been given to her by Elizabeth Bennet, whom she would have given anything to defeat. She held all of it without trying to rearrange it into a more comfortable shape. Some things, she was finding, could not be rearranged.

Her ambitions were finished. Of that much, there could no longer admit of a doubt.

Not everything was ended. Not her reputation. Her position in society was intact, preserved by the same woman she had wronged, which was the part she found most difficult to comprehend. But the ambition that had sat at the centre of everything else, that had given the scheming its direction and the patience its object, that was done.

She knew it was done not because Mr Darcy had said so, but because she had watched his face as he spoke about Elizabeth Bennet, and she was not a stupid woman.

Caroline blew out the candles and went to bed. She did not sleep for a long time, and did not even wish things to be other than they were. To her own considerable surprise, she found she did not have the heart for it.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Bingley came down to the breakfast table rather earlier than was his custom; Darcy greeted him with a nod and a smile before returning to his boiled egg. Bingley returned it and sat. Somewhat unusually, they had the table to themselves. Some of the absences were expected: the Hursts typically remained abed until rather later. Caroline Bingley’s absence, however, was both unexplained and a relief to both gentlemen, though for different reasons.

Darcy poured his tea and sat, and Bingley looked at him expectantly across the table.

“You look different,” Bingley said.

“I am told I look terrible.”

“You looked terrible last week. This is not the same.” Bingley studied him. “You have been to Longbourn twice in the past two days.”

“I did.”

“And?”