To the decided satisfaction of the noted author Elizabeth Bennet, in the consequence of her developing an acquaintance with Mr. Darcy, she delighted at last in her sojourn in this calm and quiet countryside, unchanged in manner and mode of life since at least the early years of the reign of George III — no matter how bored Elizabeth became, she had sufficient sense of history and sufficient honesty to admit that the changes which trade and the progress of industry and science brought to the rest of England since the time of Elizabeth had touched Meryton.
The weeks following her meeting Mr. Darcy brought considerable progress upon her newest novel. Day by day new scenes were written, and then each evening, or sometimes in the morning, she copied the new scenes from pencil into ink, modifying and thinking carefully as she went.
Elizabeth always felt a strong glow of satisfaction when she was in this summer season of her vocational life, when the words flowed easy, when she woke up with the scenes playing in her mind, and when every walk she took ended with a desperate need to sit and scribble for two hours to get every thought she had found from her head onto the paper.
It was fun.
There were other seasons in the life of an authoress which provided less joy and more frustration. The spring, when she must plant seeds, and constantly work them, and manure them, and pull away the weeds to protect them from being choked out. That was less fun, until a crop of ideas at last burst forth, growing easily, choking any other growth in the happy field of her imagination. The autumn harvest was pleasant, but always a matter of nervousness, for just as locust or hail could descend to destroy the harvest, though it stood ripe in the fields, indifference and poor reviews could blight a new book.
Winter was when she had neither ideas, exhausted from the writing of the previous book, nor sales, having exhausted the market which wished to purchase her previous book.
To Elizabeth's great fortune, as more of her books existed, and as her reputation became solidified, there followed in general a trickle of sales from new editions being produced of older books. Most of Elizabeth's royalties were in any case placed into bank books, or the purchase of consols, so that they would provide her support when her father was dead and she could hope for no further allowance from him.
Elizabeth was modest in her desires. Such modesty was necessary for the independence she valued.
The past weeks' duration also saw the flowing of the acquaintance between her and Fitzwilliam Darcy, and after several more deep conversations she considered them boon companions, and dear friends.
One afternoon Elizabeth was compelled from her seat in her room by the presence of valued dinner guests. Thus she chose to depart her usual habit of writing mixed with walks when she had sat in one place for too long.
The Netherfield party had accepted a dinner invitation.
Mrs. Bennet displayed this night her expensive and sophisticated talents as a hostess, and Mr. Bingley had expressed himself with such eagerness when he accepted the invitation that Mrs. Bennet was sure he would admire and enjoy the fish. Unknown to Elizabeth, Mr. Bingley had formed much the same hopes regarding his dear — but at times a little lonely — friend and Elizabeth's relationship as Mrs. Bennet had.
Their growing friendship, though yet young, showed rather more intensity of interest than the slight attachments his friend had previously shown to a woman.
When the party of awaited guests arrived in the appropriate style, in a heavy well sprung chaise pulled by four horses, and surrounded by postillions and footmen, they were brought to the drawing room, and it so happened that after the first few minutes of pleasantries were completed, the conversation divided into Mr. Bingley and his sister in conversation with Mrs. Bennet, Mr. Hurst and Mr. Bennet in conversation together, as Mr. Bennet found Mr. Hurst to be entertainingly singular in his monomaniacal focus upon cards, wine, and food — spiced upon occasion with econiums upon the prettiness of the girls of Hertfordshire.
The final grouping of course was Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, standing slightly aside from the others, Elizabeth with coffee cradled in her hands, and Mr. Darcy with a cup of chocolate almost as rich as that fine gentleman.
"In town for seven years entire — never any long periods away?" Darcy asked.
"A month here; a month there, a seaside trip and a mountain trip with my uncle and aunt. Nothing so great — I came to love London. The cobblestoned streets, the squares with their inner gardens, the bustle of the major streets, the tea houses and the lectures. Vauxhall and the other places of recreation."
"I applaud you — to survive so long in London without a desperate need to leave. Most who grow up in the countryside cannot. I certainly could not."
Elizabeth laughed. "Not even in your fine house, on one of the most fashionable squares — are you on Grosvenor?" She grinned at him. "My excessively rich friend."
"Berkeley Square — no city park, not even Hyde Park, is at all the same. You cannot canter for an hour through beck and glen. You cannot give a hound leave to run as he wishes. There are always so many people. And the smells — the smells follow you no matter where you go."
"The smells? Such as those of the peddlers cooking their meats on the streets, and the brewing of beer, and the markets stuffed with fish and vegetables?" Elizabeth grinned and licked her lips exaggeratedly. "I like those smells very much."
Darcy laughed. "Did you really like London so much?"
"Does it surprise you so very much?"
"You walk so very much, and with such apparent pleasure — I imagine you a woman who likes nature. And there is the way that Miss Cotton discourses upon the pleasure of a fine country ramble and the sublimity of nature, in Hartfield Wilderness."
"Ah, I think I understand your question now!"
"Do you, Miss Bennet?" He smiled satisfiedly. There was a delightful way his face glowed when he was pleased.
"Nature, beauty, the sublime sense you gain from a field waving heavy and ripe with wheat, that sense of spring hanging in the air, and every tree budding from green with leaf and flower?" Elizabeth laughed. "I once enjoyed them very much. Today, they are not necessary to my soul, while a certain quality of conversation is."
"So why then did you make the change — if you do not like the country?"
"I had forgotten what country society was like. The society is so constrained."
"Yes, but individuals who you meet can change so much. I do not think you would run out of variety so quickly."
"Mr. Darcy, I yet, honestly, I yet wonder why I have quit London, though such quitting seemed enough the thing to do at this time — there has since rattled in my mind Dr. Johnson's dictum that no man in the slightest intellectual way will willingly leave London. It has rattled since the carriage trundled past the last of the taller buildings of the city — nay, it has rattled in my head since full arrangement for my removal from town had been made. I wonder what mischance kept these grave doubtings from my mind before that date."
"It is to my advantage of course that you are here, Miss Bennet — for my part I see London as a place which one ought experience only in proper moderation."
"A month here, a month there — the whirl of the fashionable season. I read the gossip papers. I have a friend or two connected to the decadent and orgiastic pleasures of your class."
"Good God! I despise the season — there is nothing so much that I despise as a ball!" Darcy wrinkled his nose. "A ball, that is, during the season, when I must dance every dance, for I am there to meet and to assess those daughters of my peers who are at present tossed upon the so-called marriage mart, like so many sacks of tightly bound meat, and—"
"You should," Elizabeth said laughing, "have been a novelist. To compare the pretty diamonds and sapphires of society who even I have felt the occasional twinges of envy when I thought upon to so many sacks of meat. I do not think I have ever managed so repulsive an image myself."
Darcy grinned at her. "So I can entertain you? — 'tis no joke. I wish a wife — I am well into the age where it is seemly that a man marry, and I do not wish to hold myself aloof from women forever. Yet… it is difficult."
"Very difficult. For it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man of large fortune and good appearance cannot easily find a wife. So very few women could have any interest in you." Elizabeth eyed him boldly and freely, though she resisted the urge to lick her lips lustfully.
Mr. Darcy, in Elizabeth's unprejudiced opinion, cut a fine figure as a man.
"Not a question of finding a woman willing, but a woman exceptional, right for me — it is hard."
"Oh?"
"You can have no notion how hounded I have been — to know that every woman looks at me, as though I were myself a piece of meat. They all want me, merely because I am so eligible — it makes it difficult to assess the true character of a woman, for I know everything she says is like a fisherman's brightly flashing lure designed to encourage my bite — you see now why my mind naturally compares the debutantes to sacks of meat."
"Amply clear." Elizabeth nodded straight faced though highly amused.
"It is different for you—" Darcy said almost complainingly. "Any man who sought you can only be driven by your own virtues."
"Oh, I have no idea in the slightest what it is like for gentlemen to stare at me, desiringly, simply because they like the look of me."
Darcy frowned.
"It is true. Some gentlemen like the look of me, and are not reticent in saying so, especially as — once a woman has lost a reputation as solid as that of the Bank of England, gentlemen will make the oddest offers without the slightest encouragement. A little flattering, but chiefly annoying and unpleasant."
"I only mean to say," Darcy said, "there can be no great surplus of respectable gentlemen seeking your hand in marriage."
Elizabeth stared at him, raising one eyebrow.
Darcy winced. "I did it again, didn't I?"
"Like when you mentioned my age. It is all right, I know your virtues, so I can accept your flaws."
Darcy shook his head ruefully. "I apologize, Miss Bennet — I truly did not mean to offend. That was… I should not have said that in that way."
Elizabeth laughed. "You have the oddest combination of trained manners and no sense at all when something simply ought not be said."
"I merely try to speak honestly, and then go amiss — I mean you have no great fortune to inherit, no grand connections, and that was before you… your…"
"Before it came to be generally believed that I threw myself into sinful relations with a penniless officer of the militia?" Elizabeth did feel a twinge of hurt at Mr. Darcy's assumption of her undesirability to other gentlemen, and his continued assumption that she had allowed Mr. Wickham to have his way with her. She smiled brilliantly to hide her annoyance. "I am not hurt at all. I have heard it all — you can speak it plainly to me."
As she did so Elizabeth twisted her cup of coffee around and around, until a little spilled, even though the cup was more than half empty.
Mr. Darcy had finished his chocolate, and he put the cup and saucer down on the windowsill. "Miss Bennet, I am chagrined by my own thoughtlessness. I claim to be your friend. I wish to be your friend. Yet I speak thoughtlessly and rudely… I can see in your eye." He briefly, almost accidentally touched her on the arm, the way a flirtatious gentleman might, but Elizabeth found it comforting. "You were hurt. And I did that. I promise to not do so again. Honesty is no excuse for speaking unkindly."
"Ah." She felt almost teary suddenly. It was odd how Mr. Darcy could toss her emotions from side to side so easily. "No, but — honesty is an excuse for something. I do not wish you to pretend you see me as… as…" Elizabeth thoughtfully chewed on her lower lip.
"As though you were a woman of great fortune with the general reputation of Caesar's wife?"
Elizabeth laughed.
"It is strange. How these manners and conversations progress — I confess I do find it hard… there is a shade in my character which thinks that if something is true, that is alone enough for it to be right to say so. But I… I also know that is wrong. Why though?"
"Because I already know." Elizabeth shrugged. "True things can be painful. Perhaps if you were to tell me something I did not know, then the pain imposed by bringing an unpleasant matter to mind could be of value, for then you should have done me a favor. But to simply say what we both know…"
"Ah! I think I understand now."
"Also, you reveal something of yourself. That you assume my fortune is tiny, my connections contemptible, that shows you see yourself above me, and that you are quite aware of it — Mr. Bingley, he knows his station and his connections are good, but he gives the impression of caring nothing for it."
"And I must appear quite aware of mine in comparison." Darcy sighed. "In truth Bingley does not care much."
"And you give the impression of caring very much. That is not a way to engender good feelings in those who are below you."
"Ah — but friendship has no requirement of equality, merely independence."
"So as I do not depend in any way upon you, we can be friends, while you could not be friends with your valet."
"Not in the way we can be friends. He must keep me pleased with him for his own sake. You depend on the reading public at large, which cares little for my opinion of you — which opinion is that I can say honestly that your novels ought be read more widely. I have liked enormously the recommendation given to me that I purchase all of the novels."
"Incorrigible! I shall not forgive you so easily, simply because you flatter my work."
"Praise it. For it deserves my high praise — I shall try, I promise, I shall try to be more cognizant of the feelings of those whose station is beneath mine. I have always sought to do that with my own employees, but you are right, it is a matter I ought consider when with acquaintances and friends."
"Ah. Then I cannot forgive you now, for it is your future which shall determine whether you are worthy of the forgiveness. We must remain friends then for many years, to provide me opportunity enough to judge rationally whether you deserve the forgiveness I expect you to prove worthy of — enough of that. Tell me a tale of your epic quest, like that of Odysseus seeking home, to find a woman worthy to be taken as wife by Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley."
"You do laugh at me." Mr. Darcy grinned back at her, looking not at all displeased by that fact.
Elizabeth smiled at him and she waved her finger in her face. "You are the subject now."
"I have done as normal when a man wishes a wife. Balls and parties, and acquaintances. For three years in a sequence, and not a single girl has yet matched everything upon my list. There have been some who came close, yet… they lacked something. Something I cannot describe. Each such woman felt not… right. And so I am here, when I expected to be married these two years and with a child already. This has become tiresome. Dreadful, dreary, tiresome."
"Have you considered the possibility that you have too many particulars on your list?"
"Yes, but… it cannot be impossible."
"You think London must be faced in moderation not on account of any deficiency in London — a perfect place — but because the herculean task exhausts you, that task of finding the single perfect woman who must exist, for after all the single perfect man exists, and God would not have failed to create his—"
Darcy laughed, and he caught Elizabeth's eye, which made something flutter in her stomach. "You have painted a pretty, pretty picture of me, as the most pompous and arrogant man imaginable."
"You are 'the single perfect man'. And were I Socrates wishing to dialogue with you, we would quickly establish that perfection must include perfection in arrogance."
"You need make no pretense to be an elderly man, with a flowing white beard, and a tendency to corrupt the youth—"
"Scurrilous lies. The youth corrupted me!"
"I admit it without argument: I am proud."
Elizabeth smiled at him. He had the closest to a defensive look on his face that Elizabeth had yet seen in the course of their delightful acquaintance. There was a wrinkling in his usually smooth brow as he looked back at her, to assess how she considered him.
For a moment there was a loss of voice and time. They both looked into each other's eyes.
Elizabeth just smiled, curious to see if Mr. Darcy would be able to speak whilst he looked at her. She rather wondered if he knew that they were flirting more shamelessly than the most accomplished flirt — for example a Lydia or a Mr. Wickham — could.
She rather thought he had no idea.
"You do not wish to crow at my admitting such?" Darcy looked to the side at last, his face a little flushed. It was a good look on his skin.
"Mr. Darcy, my dear friend — we all know you are arrogant. That was established within ten minutes of your entrance into the room."
"Proud, not arrogant — arrogance implies a vanity, an emptiness to the claim of superiority. I cannot stand anything with that emptiness. I am not vain. And I am not proud to an excess. Where there is a real superiority of mind and character, pride will always remain under good regulation."
"Of a certainty. Your pride is better regulated than that of any other man with so much pride that I have ever met."
Darcy tilted his head and looked hard at her. "I cannot determine if you merely tease me, or if you think me absurd."
"What a question!" Elizabeth grinned, and drank the last swallow of her coffee. She set the cup and saucer on the windowsill on top of Darcy's. "I confess, I do not know. Both. Yes, both. I like you, for all your pride and what absurdity you do have."
He grinned again, showing off his gleaming white teeth, and that he was really, beneath it all, quite good natured and a good sport.
After this the conversation became general again, and soon dinner was called.
But Elizabeth could not help feeling a glow in her heart, and a slight jump every time she looked at Mr. Darcy. She was falling into a dangerous infatuation. She knew that Mr. Darcy would never marry her — and she would never marry him.
To depend upon any man, even a man she liked so much as Mr. Darcy, was an anathema to Elizabeth's soul.
Mrs. Bennet through stratagem placed Elizabeth between Mr. Bingley and Mr. Darcy. While she thought that Mr. Darcy was a more likely conquest for Elizabeth from the way they spoke, she also knew that he was a very great man, and she should not count on such a hope.
Elizabeth did seem to enjoy speaking to Mr. Bingley.
Besides a little jealousy between the two friends, a little competition could only be good for Elizabeth's appeal to the both of them.
The party at the table was small enough that the conversation remained general, and much of it consisted of Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bennet arguing over a point of philosophy and the best means of translating certain texts from Greek or Latin into the vernacular.
Elizabeth was not at all surprised to find that in addition to his other, ample, virtues, Mr. Darcy had a scholarly bent.
Following dinner the women returned to the drawing room.
Mrs. Hurst clearly liked neither Mrs. Bennet nor Elizabeth, but she was polite, and the three engaged in a conversation upon the fashions in London that entirely lacked animation, and included, on occasion, what Elizabeth believed to be sly references to how unfashionable Elizabeth's dresses were.
Elizabeth had long since decided she would not throw away her slender resources on clothes, and instead only replaced her garments when they grew old and worn.
Fortuitously Mr. Bennet did not keep the gentlemen seated around the dining table with their cigars and port for any great length of time. Instead they rejoined the women, and the group played a game of speculation, followed by a call for music which Elizabeth and Louisa Hurst both indulged.
Elizabeth had never been a great musician, and she had practiced seldom while in London. However she did enjoy singing, and despite the ample deficiencies of her performance, it was clear that Darcy was decidedly taken by her song. She smiled at him after she finished her performance, and he smiled back at her.
Soon the time would come for the party to break up.
Elizabeth looked at Mr. Darcy's shining face, and she could not recall an evening that she had enjoyed more, not even in London. And she was quite too pleased with the time she had spent tonight to worry as to the cause of her joy.
However then it chanced that a rough knocking on the door of Longbourn shattered the tranquility of the quiet night and brought this fine evening of conversation, cards, company and song to an untimely and unpleasant end.
An end that would leave the memory of the night stained black in our heroine's mind, for that was the color of the envelope that arrived.
Mr. Bennet started from his reclined seat when the first pounding shook the front door. "Who could make such a racket at this hour. Overly polite thieves?"
"Perhaps news for one of you that could not await your return to Netherfield?" Mrs. Bennet said worriedly to Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley.
That thought brought a cold presentiment to Elizabeth, though Mrs. Bennet's particular notion was highly unlikely.
A pale Mrs. Hill brought a sweaty rider into the drawing room from the door. The man pulled his wet oilskin cap from his head, and pulled politely at his forelock. "Which of you gentle sirs is being Mr. Bennet?"
"I am." Papa came towards him, with a stride firmer than his voice.
"Express message! An express sent direct from Downling Parsonage, sir. Not a good message, I fear me. Not one pleasant at all." He pulled from his pouch the fateful message in its fateful black envelope.
Jane!
Elizabeth's heart seized as though an icy fist clenched her chest.
Was it Jane? Had Jane died?
Would she never see Jane alive, smiling serenely again? Would she never be able to accuse Jane angrily for her abandonment, and then forgive her for it afterwards?
Had one of the nieces Elizabeth had never met passed? But the death of a child would be no reason to send a letter by express. That happened too often.
Her father worried the envelope open. His face was pale, sweaty, old.
He pulled the letter with a spidery scrawl on it, in a weak feminine hand, from the black envelope. Mr. Bennet stared, barely breathing, at the words. The white of the paper, and the dyed black of the envelope made a striking contrast, like a skull gleaming empty socketed in the darkness.
At last he let out a long sigh. "Mr. Hawdry, Jane's husband, has died. Jane and her children will return to us once the new vicar has been chosen."