Darcy sighed, glancing over at his friend. “I am afraid the time has come for me to leave you,” he said in an undertone, not necessarily for everyone to hear. Bingley looked dismayed. But before he could say anything, Mrs Hurst burst into the conversation.
“Leave us? The very idea! Where will you go?” Mrs Hurst threw her cards onto the table, not caring that they had been revealed to her sister. “The weather cannot permit a long journey, I daresay.” She turned around to glance at her husband. “Tell him, Mr Hurst.”
“I will do nothing of the kind,” Mr Hurst said with a yawn. “Mr Darcy is a grown man and well able to ascertain whether the roads are passable for himself.”
“But it is Christmas week, sir! You cannot think of leaving at a time like this.”
“On the contrary, the weather will not detain me, and the date is all the more reason for me to go. I am to join Georgiana to celebrate the Christmas season with her, along with my aunt and the rest of the Fitzwilliam side of the family.” While willing to say all that was proper on going away, Darcy was, in fact, hardly sad to be leaving. Bingley was always pleasant company, and he would miss his friend, but he could not say the same of the hard-drinking Mr Hurst, his quarrelsome wife, or the too-persistent Miss Bingley.
Caroline turned to her brother, then to her sister. “Well, why do not we all go to London for Christmas? It is so quiet here, I am bored to distraction!” She cast a glance toward Darcy and raised her eyes to his. “Surely it would be more pleasant to travel in a group than alone?”
Bingley’s smile grew even broader. “I agree! It would be wonderful for us to all travel to London together. Then I need not worry that you have met some misfortune on the road. And we may be a merry party for Christmas, after all.”
Caroline rose from the card table, making her way over to the gentlemen at the hearth. She clasped her hands, beaming at them in her enthusiasm. “I must confess, I wish you had suggested our departure earlier, Mr Darcy,” she purred. “Do you not find this neighbourhood rather dull?”
“I agree,” Mrs Hurst said, and joined the others at the fire. “No doubt Mr Hurst would be content to sit here in the country and rot away with a glass of port. But I must have some kind of excitement in my life. Just think of the parties that we are missing at this very moment!” Mrs Hurst fanned herself and sneered at her husband.
The Hursts had no children. Darcy suspected there was little chance of them, given the contempt with which they seemed to view each other.
Bingley sighed, shifting his weight to his other foot. “I hear it was not always such a dull neighbourhood. Since Mr Bennet’s death, the neighbourhood has lost the society of his five daughters.”
“Five daughters? My heavens, did Mrs Bennet not produce any sons for the poor fellow?” Caroline Bingley looked aghast at the thought. As if the misfortune of not having sons was all the woman’s fault. She gave Darcy a significant smile, as though promising thatshewould not be so careless as to leave her husband without an heir. “The poor man! He must have been driven to distraction with so many daughters.”
Bingley went on without the slightest knowledge of his sister’s manoeuvring or concern for her sniping. “I’m told that four of the five sisters live in a cottage outside of Meryton with their mother. They never go out, thus depriving the neighbourhood of some very excellent company, as Sir William tells it. Lady Lucas was adamant in her agreement with her husband. As she would tell it, Miss Jane Bennet, the eldest, is very beautiful, even more so than her own daughter, Mrs Charlotte Collins.”
“She is not much prettier than Mrs Collins?” Caroline gave a derisive laugh. “Poor woman! To be handsomer than Mrs Collins would be to be hardly tolerable.”
“Do not say such things, Caroline,” Bingley reproved his sister. “She is a very agreeable woman, to be sure, and pleasant to converse with. When we attended the assembly, I had a most agreeable time with her.”
“And you would have been amenable to marrying a woman like her, I suppose?” Caroline said archly. “Men always say it is not about a woman’s looks, and yet they never do seem to choose plain girls — not those who have the power of choosing to please themselves, at any rate.”
Bingley looked distressed. “What can you mean, Caroline? Mrs Collins is a married woman. Of course, I did not consider marrying the young lady —”
“Young lady? She is seven and twenty, Charles. She is hardly young. And it shows,” Mrs Hurst chimed in. “If she had not married Mr Collins, she would have been a spinster well in the making.” She pinned her little brother with a piercing stare. “And see that you keep your distance from her parents, Charles. They are hardly fit company.”
“Sir William is a knight. I do not see what is so terrible about that,” Bingley argued, looking rather beleaguered. “He was very kind to come and welcome me to the community when I first arrived.”
“No doubt his wife had his eye on you the minute your carriage rolled up the drive here at Netherfield. Indeed, every matchmaking mother within twenty miles knew of your coming before you had walked through the door of your new home. Even this widow, Mrs Bennet.”
“You said four of the five Bennet daughters lived at the cottage? Where, then, is the fifth?” Mrs Hurst asked.
Bingley chose to overlook all that was supercilious in her tone and respond only to the words, which were reasonable enough. “Sir William says the second eldest daughter now lives in London with her aunt and uncle. A necessary economy, I would imagine. Her aunt and uncle, the Gardiners, have fouryoung children, and I suppose she acts as a sort of governess for them.”
Caroline scrunched up her nose, as if the very idea was disgusting to her. “Well, no person of quality would be interested in them now. I am glad that our father had the good sense to put a generous dowry aside for each of us, instead of leaving us ruined when he passed away.”
Very naturally, Bingley took offense at this. “It is true that Papa had a good business mind. But I am glad that we had him for as long as we did. Indeed, I would much rather have him back than have his money.”
Darcy’s heart went out to his young friend. Despite Bingley’s good sense and excellent character, he had often floundered in knowing how to proceed after his father’s untimely illness and demise. Darcy knew exactly how he felt, for his father had also died and left the inheritance and running of the Pemberley estate to him when he was a young man. Whatever small pieces of advice he had offered his friend, Bingley had been grateful for, likely in considerable excess of their merit.
There was, of course, another objection to Mis Bingley’s thoughtless remark. “Do you know, I rather suspect that Mr Bennet would have preferred to provide for his family as well, had he been able,” Darcy remarked dryly. A brief silence followed this reproof.
“Well, I, for one, will be glad to leave this dull countryside and have some activity to look forward to. What do you think, Charles? Shall we all go to London?” Caroline Bingley suggested.
Bingley heartily agreed, to the delight of all his relations. Mr and Mrs Hurst, who preferred to live at Bingley’s expensethan their own, and were therefore dependent on where he might choose to live, were particularly enthusiastic. Likely, they also welcomed the degree of separation that would be provided by a larger party. He suspected that having to endure each other’s company with no buffer would have been a punishment too terrible for either of them.
Bingley smiled and looked at Darcy. “It is settled then,” he said. “Would you be too inconvenienced if I were to ride with you in your carriage? It will give the ladies and Mr Hurst more room in my carriage for the journey.”
“Of course, it would be a pleasure,” Darcy said. The pleasant company would make the journey go by considerably more quickly.
