I looked back to the loo table.
“As it happens,” said Elizabeth, “I must see to my sister.” She got up and left the room.
I felt as if the breath had been knocked out of me. I played a very stupid card, and I could see that I should soon lose the game if I didn’t find some way to fix things.
“Eliza Bennet,” said Caroline stoutly, “is the sort of woman who puts down all women in the hopes of making men feel flattered, I think. It is a paltry device, a very mean art, and I think it only succeeds with a certain type of man.”
“I don’t think so,” I said faintly.
She glared at me.
“Well, I don’t think she has any art of any kind,” I said, coughing. “Or that she is trying to flatter anybody.”Certainly not me.“But there is a meanness to such arts, of course, which ladies use to try to captivate men. Cunning is despicable, of course, as is manipulation.”
Caroline gave me an odd look, but I hadn’t actually meant it pointedly, I was only trying to get my bearings.
However, if I’d had any doubts now, they had quite been confirmed.
Caroline Bingley wanted me to marry her.
I paced about in my room that evening, wondering if she had gotten this idea on her own or if her brother had put it there.
It might make sense, I suppose, why he endured the combined punishment of myself and Caroline in conversation, especially when we took the side against him. He was always so agreeable about it, rather like a trusty hunting dog eager to take whatever scraps that will be thrown to him from the table, grinning no matter what.
Was this because it had been his plan all along?
Oh, yes, he would like it, would he not? Our families tied together by marriage?
And this was to say nothing of the fact that I had considered marrying Georgiana to him.
Georgiana’s past coming out was a bit of a potential problem, that was all. If a respectable man found out I had concealed what had passed between my sister and the son of our household’s steward, he’d be rightfully incensed. But if Bingley found out, well, it would be different. He’d still be grateful.
So, I’d considered it.
For her sake as well as everyone else’s, of course, because if a man found out he’d been lied to about the relative purity of his bride—and my sister, so she claimed, was still entirely intact, so it was no worry on that score, but even so, it was the appearance of such things—he would take his ire out on his bride. He would blame her. Perhaps he might also blame the man who made her impure, but he would have no access to that man.
Bingley would still be grateful. Even if he was angry, he would not harm my sister.
And he would not wish to anger me. He would still need me.
So, this was what I had become, I supposed, in the wake of that business this summer. I had become a schemer and a manipulator, a purveyor of those same mean arts I had just decried.
It was little wonder that I suspected everyone else around me of the same sort of behavior, I supposed. Little wonder indeed.
I had moments, really, moments wherein I thought that I was entirely wrong about Bingley. He was so guileless, such a grinning dog of a man, that I wondered if there was any element of social climbing to our friendship at all. Perhaps he was not trying to use me. Perhaps it wasn’t a transaction. Perhaps it was a transaction from my end only.
I was intending to use this man to deal with my sister’s indiscretions and he was simply being used. I was the despicable one.
But I did not like to think such things and I often convinced myself otherwise. Bingley might be guileless, but he was not an idiot. Of course he was aware of the advantages he got from association with me. He must be motivated by that to at least some degree.
Did I think he’d cultivated this friendship with me in order to convince me to marry Caroline, however?
Ultimately, no.
I did not.
I thought this was Caroline’s own idea, and that Bingley himself had not had a hand in the execution of the scheme, but I was beginning to see that I had encouraged her. Oh, how I had encouraged her!
I felt guilty, indeed. Caroline would have thought I was interested. Did I not faithfully join her side every time she censured her brother? Did I not laugh whenever she poked fun at anything she did not find up to the standards of proper society? Did I not add to what she said, bolstering her stance? It wasn’t about her, though, but she would have no reason to understand that.
