Why was I here?
Why had I followed Bingley and his sisters to their rented house in Hertfordshire and why had I come to this ball and why had I left my sister behind?
It was difficult to say, truly. It wasn’t even like me.
I was not the sort to do these things. I associated with the sorts of people I was expected to associate with, and I went to the city during the times of year when it was expected, and the country during the times of year that it was expected. I danced with the women that I was expected to dance with. I was supposed to marry my cousin Anne de Bourgh, and it had not quite ever occurred to me to question that idea.
And then.
Georgiana was trying to elope with Wickham of all people.
Nothing had been as expected since then.
I didn’t give any thought at all to Elizabeth Bennet after that dance. I did not even know her name, after all. I saw her on one other occasion, and it was at a dinner at the Lucas household.
I remember very little about it, only that I thought she looked prettier in that light than she had looked at the dance, though she still seemed to me an ordinary, average, plain sort of girl, and that I may have asked her to dance with me, but she said no.
Well, she didn’t really say no, she said that no one should have assumed she was looking for a dance partner, but that was only because it was impolite to actually say no to men when they asked for a dance.
But I don’t think that I quite made much of who she was at that gathering. If I knew her name, I forgot it. And I certainly gave her no mind over the coming weeks.
I do not think I even made any association with her when it was discussed by the Bingley sisters that they were inviting Jane Bennet to dine with them while Bingley, Mr. Hurst, and I were dining in town.
Mr. Hurst was the husband of one of Bingley’s sisters. He was an all right sort, I suppose, mostly quiet. He liked to play cards and he liked to shoot clay pigeons, but there wasn’t a lottothe man, in the end. He wasn’t much given to having conversations about poetry or philosophy. But, then again, neither was Bingley.
Why was I here? Why was I with these people?
It had been a number of weeks since the ball, and the Bingley sisters had apparently been calling upon the Bennet women and having tea and doing whatever it was that women did.
If this was seen as some kind of ritual to decide whether they would welcome this other woman into their family through marriage, I was utterly oblivious. I would never marry a woman from that dreadful dance, no matter how pretty, so clearly Bingley would never do so either, or so I thought at the time.
The dinner did not seem significant to me. The girl herself was only a vague memory of a pretty face, and the sister, the tolerable sister, the brown-curled sister with a pleasing figure, not handsome enough to tempt me to dance, that sister? I had no thought of her at all.
But when we returned home from that dinner, we were informed that Jane had been obliged to stay due to the rain and the lack of having a carriage.
In the morning, we were informed that now she had caught a cold and was in bed, not to be moved, until such time as she recovered. And not ten minutes after I heard such a thing did Elizabeth Bennet appear in our breakfast parlor, her skirts muddied, her eyes bright, her cheeks reddened, her brown curls tumbling out here and there around her face in a most fetching way.
How had she gotten the news of her sister so quickly?
How long had it taken her to walk here all the way from her family’s house?
When had she gotten so pretty?
She was with us in the parlor for barely any time at all, so anxious was she to go and see her sister, and then she quit the room, leaving me dry-mouthed and shaken, for I had been attracted to women before, but it had not quite felt that way, not ever.
Certainly, I had felt the sort of base attraction for women before, wherein I wished to take them into my bed, but I was fairly good at shoving that down, ignoring it, and rising above it.
This was overwhelming, unavoidable, intense in a way I had never encountered. I could not quite fathom what it was that I was feeling when I looked at her.
How that could be, I didn’t know.
I had barely spoken to her since she appeared in the breakfast parlor. All right, truthfully, I hadn’t spoken to her at all. She had spoken. I had gaped at her, open-mouthed, awed by her stunning presence.
However, firmly, I told myself to put it from my mind.
I had been out of proper company for too long, and I was being dazzled by girls in muddy skirts, that was all. It had beena moment. Perhaps she had looked so pretty because of the sun coming in from the windows. Perhaps she had looked so pretty because it was the morning after a heavy rain. Perhaps she had looked so pretty because I was not yet awake.
Whatever the case, I doubted she actuallywasthat pretty.
