Page 40 of Homeless

“And Miss Bennet?”

There it was — the return of his serve, and a good deal harder than he knew.

She might have turned it. She had turned worse. But she thought of the lane at Netherfield, and Jane riding out in weather no sensible creature would face, and Bingley’s whole open face swinging round to her sister as though the sun had learnt to enter a room. Darcy had been Bingley’s friend. He had been forever at Bingley’s elbow. Let him carry it back.

“Jane is married.”

Something in his face eased. Relief, perhaps, at a life disposed of in three words. “My congratulations to her.”

“It was a gentleman near Meryton. Advanced in years, steady in his habits, possessed of a sound house, a good income, and the very proper wish to attach a wife who would be kind to his children and useful to her own people. My mother wanted keeping. Jane could supply it by marrying, so she did.”

The eased look went out. “She was compelled?”

“Compelled is an ugly word. Say rather that she was persuaded — by necessity, by duty, and by the excellent market price of female sweetness in a season when the family was short of everything but daughters.”

He looked as if the cream in his tea had gone sour. She found she could not stop, now that she had begun.

“She behaved beautifully, of course. Jane could make a martyrdom look like good breeding, given half an hour to arrange the cushions. She married him. She smiled where smiling was wanted. She consoled my mother for the loss of Longbourn far more tenderly than my mother ever consoled her for the loss of anything else. And on her wedding morning, she wept enough to satisfy any parish still of the opinion that brides ought to.”

The cart dropped into a rut and climbed out of it. Darcy’s head snapped back and forth, and if there was an instant’s dissatisfaction crossing his face, surely it was only the state of the road.

“She was… displeased with her mother?”

She looked at him directly. “No.”

His eyes came to hers and held, and there was a hollow quality to his voice. “At Mr Bingley?”

Elizabeth crossed her arms and lifted one brow.

In a less disciplined man, she would have called the thing that crossed his face guilt. As it was, it arrived, was arrested, and went down so fast that only a woman hunting for any sign would have trusted herself to name it.

“You knew him better than anyone. If chance, or friendship, or whatever gentlemen exchange in place of confidence should ever put him within your hearing again, you may tell him that Jane Bennet married respectably, keeps a handsome house, is all duty to her husband, and no doubt still weeps for him at the correct intervals.”

“Elizabeth, I —”

She very nearly laughed. “No. You shall not offer your regrets! I would rather you reproached me on the matter.”

“I was not going to reproach you, and I fear it is a vast deal too late to offer regrets.”

“What, then?”

“I was going to ask whether you were satisfied. You recited all that as though you have wished to for a very long time, and had no proper ear.”

She frowned. “You are unsettlingly persipacious. Jane loved Mr Bingley, and either he never returned her feelings or he was taught not to want her, so she married an old man to feed the rest of us. If I sounded eager to air my grievances, it might be said that they have been heard too little in other quarters.”

He looked out through the narrow gap of the cart rather than at her. The driver cursed a passing carter’s mother with real feeling, and the country went by.

After a while, he said, “I had not known.”

“No,” she said. “Hertfordshire was full of things gentlemen did not trouble to know until they were safely past undoing them.”

She watched him wince at that, despised herself a little for the pleasure of it, and took the pleasure regardless.

It did not keep. Such victories never did; they curdled almost in the winning. She turned her face to the road and wished, with a suddenness that unbalanced her, that Jane had never had to be made a weapon, least of all here, least of all in her hands, against a man who could not even defend himself without confessing his own part in it.

“One more question, and I hope you will do me the courtesy of an honest answer. Did she wish to refuse him?”

She shut her eyes. “Yes.”