CHAPTER TWELVE
Longbourn remained quiet, and I guiltily left Miss Elizabeth at the doorstep and slipped away. We should never have been given the liberty to walk alone for more than an hour and a half. As a friend of the family and after walking with them so often in pairs or even alone for short distances within sight of the house, I suppose my presence was no longer considered interesting or dangerous to the reputations of the Bennet ladies.
Netherfield Park was just coming to life when I arrived. I retreated to my room to change before breakfast, and when I went down, I met Bingley and his sister Louisa.
He was distracted with plans for his ball and in a tight conference with Mrs Hurst, who blinked and smiled at every idea he proposed. Miss Bingley may havebeen a pretentious baggage, but she would have been capable of putting on a proper ball. My friend was suggesting some outrageous decorations and a staggering number of dishes for his supper.
“How does Miss Bingley fare this morning?” I asked, hoping to interrupt my friend’s flow of creativity.
“She is still abed, Darcy. Is there aught you would like to do this morning? I have selected the twenty-sixth as the date for our ball, and I mean to visit a few of my friends to alert them that invitations will be forthcoming. Would you care to go with me?”
I hedged. “I have some letters to attend to, if you do not mind.”
“Of course, but would you visit Mr Bennet, and let him know I am hosting a ball? I do hope he and his daughters will come.”
Then and there, I should have invited him to go with me, but the devil within me rose up in a fiercely possessive flush of resistance. I simply did not want to share my friends with anyone, nor did I want Bingley, who fell victim to Cupid every other month, to plague the ladies of Longbourn with poetry.
“I shall call tomorrow.”
I spent the remainder of my morning in the library. I did not look at a single piece of correspondence, though there was plenty of it. I stared at the clouds that built up on the horizon and then pulled my chair to the window.With my old boots propped indecorously on the sill, I watched raindrops as they swelled on the glass before streaking down to their death on the ledge below.
I thought of the many revelations Miss Elizabeth had shared with me. Our young sisters had nearly identical histories! I could hardly reconcile the improbability of that coincidence.
Remarkable asthatwas, I also shared common ground with Miss Bennet’s early assumption of responsibilities she did not want, and I sincerely understood Mr Bennet’s melancholy. My father had suffered an irrational degree of guilt when my mother died, and he was never the same man as a result. In my own mother’s case, he had not been cruel, but he had not been present at the time of her accident.
Nothing anyone could have done would have rescued my mother. She died after having tripped and hit her head on the stair rail. The doctor said the glancing blow had caused a fatal bleeding in her brain, but my father, a man of great intelligence, was sadly convinced he could have somehow prevented the accident from ever happening in the first place. He regretted the shoes he had bought her, the carpet on the stairs, the fact that the family was at Pemberley, and many similarly irrational incidentals.
I suspected Mr Bennet rehearsed a similar litany of regrets in his mind. He was often far away, thoughpresent in the room, and he reminded me a great deal of my father when he fell silent.
Some slight noise in the adjacent parlour brought me back from these sombre recollections. My hostess must have come down. I thought with real remorse of Mrs Bennet’s nervous collapse and of how I was pushing Miss Bingley a little way down that same road. I left my solitude in an effort to make amends with my hostess.
Alas, I had burnt my bridge to ash.
“Mr Darcy,” she purred, “have you been out visiting this morning? How are your friends at Longbridge?”
“Longbourn. The weather is dreary this morning. Perhaps you would like to play cards?”
“No, no. Louisa and I are taken up with putting on a ball for our neighbours. How delightful it will be to play hostess to thecreamof Hertfordshire society.”
She was determined to be cattish, and I was determined to keep trying. “They are likely to be impressed by your efforts. It is not every day that a private ball is given here.”
She laughed—a false, unhappy sound. “Oh, but you know, Sir William Lucas has been toSaint James’s. I am sure that he and his wife are used to elegant parties every day of the week.” She turned her attention back to the list Mrs Hurst had made of Bingley’s ideas and said brightly, “But all is not lost. Charles would like us to drape the ballroom in gauze.”
“Surely you could talk him around.”
“But why should I? I would like to make a spectacle and, as you suggest, impress these people you have come to esteem so much. What say you to red?”
“You know already what I think of a ballroom shrouded in red gauze.”
“Oh yes! Indeed, I recall you made some sneering comment at Lady Caldwell’s affair last year. I shall see if I can find blue then.”
“Pray excuse me,” I said, having reached the tail end of my patience. The limitless correspondence required of a landed gentleman seemed preferable to spending another moment in Miss Bingley’s wounded aura. I retreated back to the library.
After I read and replied to six letters, I wrote a note to my sister. I told Georgiana of making the acquaintance of a country gentleman who was bookish and retiring. I mentioned his pleasant daughters and their unruly dog, and I even went much further than I normally would, describing a recent incident when Bandit arrived at the kitchen door with a limp cat hanging in his jaws.
Miss Bennet, who had gone down to talk to the housekeeper, released a rare, unladylike scream that startled Bandit into loosening his jaw, and the cat, who had only been playing dead, then ran away. Bandit gave chase, and he was only brought to ground an hour later and a mile away when I found him in the spinney,covered in mud, digging at a weasel’s hole. I wrote to my sister:
Apparently, he forgot all about the cat which must have been pretty tame when compared to a weasel. He returned home triumphant and properly pleased with his state of filth, only realising he might have offended when he was plunged into the trough by the backhouse boy and the groom. Miss Elizabeth remarked that he even sulked for once. This struck the family as an improvement in the animal’s mental function, since his usual reaction to a scolding is gratitude for the attention. The ladies then expressed a sincere hope he would suddenly become a smarter dog, and I went to Mr Bennet’s library lest I burst out laughing at the idea.
