Page 35 of The Marriage Articles

The gentlemen came in after their hour of port. The conversation did not stop when they sat down, and she made her share of it, and made it well. Her attention, however, remained fixed upon the far side of the room, where her husband stood. He said little, as was his habit in company, but when his gaze chanced to find hers, the smallest inclination of his head conveyed more than any speech could have done. Elizabeth answered with the faintest smile, and turned again to her tea, composed.

Chapter Twenty

Elizabeth set the third cup of the afternoon on its saucer and gave the drawing room up. She had married Mr Darcy of Pemberley in a cloud of scandal, and society, having digested the news, had now come to look at the bride. That was what this afternoon was. A Thursday fixed as her at-home, the door open to whoever chose to climb the steps in Grosvenor Square, and she sitting very straight in a gown of pale muslin, ready to be inspected for a quarter of an hour at a time.

The inspection had begun promptly. Lady Aldborough had come first, with a daughter who stared and a curiosity thinly dressed as concern. She had asked after Elizabeth’s health, her eyes dropping, ever so briefly, to Elizabeth’s middle before returning to her face. Elizabeth had replied that she was in excellent spirits, which was true, and that her family bore the news with fortitude, which was also true, and had let Lady Aldborough make what she liked of the pause between the two facts and the glance that had accompanied them.

Tea had come round with each fresh arrival, tea and the small cakes the French chef produced by the dozen, and nothing more substantial, since a caller who stayed past twenty minutes was a caller who had misunderstood the convention. By two o’clock the salver in the hall held a respectable row of cards from those she had been unable to receive. The drawing room held a shifting company of eight or nine, all of them asking polite questions with an edge to them. Elizabeth answered every one with perfect composure.

Mr Darcy stood near the window with Lord Kestrel, close enough to be present, far enough to leave her the centre of the room. She had not asked him to stay, but was glad he had.

The Bingley party arrived together, as Elizabeth had known they would, announced in a cluster that filled the doorway. Mr Bingley came first through it, warm as ever, his hand out before he was properly across the threshold, his smile as easy as it had ever been at Netherfield.

“Mrs Darcy,” he said, taking her hand. “What a pleasure. You look prodigiously well. Town agrees with you, I can see that.”

“You are very good, Mr Bingley.”

“And how is everyone?” he asked. “Your sisters are all well, I hope? And your father, and Mrs Bennet, and everyone at Longbourn?”

“Very well, thank you. They are all in excellent health.”

He asked whether she found the house comfortable, whether she had been to the theatre, whether she had ridden in the park. She asked, in her turn, whether he intended to return to Netherfield.

He hesitated. It was the smallest hesitation, a man pausing to choose a word, and she would have missed it had she not been listening for exactly that. “London is very entertaining during the Season,” he said. “One cannot find the same company in Hertfordshire, you know. The balls, the dinners, there is always something. I daresay we shall see how the summer goes.”

Elizabeth received the answer with a smile that cost her something, though nobody watching would have known it.

“My dear Miss Eliza!” Miss Bingley said. “How well London becomes you. I vow I should scarcely have known you for the same creature.”

“You are too kind, Miss Bingley,” she said. “I own I did not think myself still young enough to answer to a schoolroom name, and I am excessively flattered that you should think it.”

The room gave a general laugh, easy and well-bred, and Miss Bingley’s smile held its position a moment longer than the laugh itself, as if she had prepared it in advance and found it no longer fitted. Mrs Hurst glanced at her sister and murmured something low that nobody caught. Then Miss Bingley inclined her head. “You were always quick, Mrs Darcy. I had forgotten how quick.”

Mr Hurst had accepted tea, eaten two of the small cakes with an air of careful duty, and contributed nothing whatsoever.

Miss Bingley tried once more. “How many new faces you must have to learn, Mrs Darcy,” she said. “In Meryton, I imagine the selection was rather more limited.”

“Oh, a great many,” Elizabeth said. “But I have discovered a most useful principle, which is that the faces worth learning make themselves known very quickly, and the rest are kind enough to repeat themselves until one cannot help but remember them.”

The laugh that followed was sharper than the first, and Elizabeth felt its edge as clearly as she had felt Miss Bingley’s intent. Miss Bingley’s colour rose by a shade, and she reached for her teacup with a deliberateness that was its own admission. Mrs Hurst stirred her tea and looked at nothing. Even Mr Hurst, engaged with his third cake, appeared to sense that the balance of the room had shifted and glanced up briefly, as a man does when the temperature of a room changes.

Across the room, Mr Darcy had stopped attending to Mr Bingley. Elizabeth caught his eye, and in it there was a coldness that had nothing to do with her, mastered as she watched, folded away behind the stillness he wore in company. It was not directed at her. He was as provoked by Miss Bingley as she was, and the understanding passed between them in a single look, without a word or a movement, before he turned back to his conversation.

The callers departed in twos and threes through the afternoon, curiosity satisfied for the day. None of it had softened any sharp edges. It had only proved that the edges were there, and that Elizabeth could hold her own against them, which was perhaps all that an at-home in the first week of the Season could be expected to accomplish. Mr Bingley left last of his party, turning at the drawing room door with his hand on the frame.

“I hope we shall see you and Darcy soon,” he said, “you must both come to dine with us before the month is out. I shall not take a refusal.”

His warmth was real. Elizabeth had never doubted it, and she did not doubt it now.

The last callers withdrew as the clock came up to four, and Elizabeth closed the drawing room door behind them and permitted herself one exhale, now that there was nobody to see it. Quiet came back to the room. The cups stood cold in their saucers, the plate of small cakes reduced to crumbs and two survivors, the afternoon lying behind her in pieces.

Mr Darcy came to stand by the window, looking out at the square. “I have never had patience for Miss Bingley,” he said at last, without turning.

“Then why do you tolerate her?”

“For Bingley. And because cutting her off would cause a great deal more trouble than bearing her does.”

“I had thought you admired her.”