Page 29 of A Compromise By Design

Slowly, carefully, Elizabeth reconstructed the events as accurately as she could manage. She had entered the study alone, replaced the book, and turned to leave. Mr Darcy had appeared in the doorway. He had stepped inside. She had moved to pass him. The door had been standing open when he entered and was closed, somehow, before either of them had touched it. Then the mechanism was engaged from the outside, the handle would not move, and they heard Caroline Bingley’s voice, arriving surprisingly quickly.

As though she had already been on her way to the study; as though she had intended to go inside herself.

She stopped walking.

The conclusion that presented itself to her was one that Elizabeth very much did not wish to reach, but some conclusions were unavoidable. The door had not closed itself, which meant someone else had. Someone had locked it and then disappeared, as though their intervention was meant to remain a secret. And Caroline Bingley had arrived moments later, had been surprised that the door was locked, and yet there had been something odd in the quality of her surprise.

Elizabeth stood in the cold garden and looked at this arrangement of facts. For the first time, she allowed herself to look at it directly.

Caroline Bingley had been in the corridor on the other side of the locked door, arriving only moments later. Her voice had come too quickly for someone who had merely been walking past. There had been no sound of approaching footsteps, no pause of a person orienting themselves to an unexpected situation. She had simply been there, as though she had been waiting for something to happen.

Miss Bingley’s reaction was not the response of someone surprised by a locked door, but the response of someone who already understood the mechanics of the problem.

I shall go for the key directly, Mr Darcy. I shall have it resolved in a moment.

She had not sounded astonished, but annoyed. As one well might, if their plan had gone awry, but before they understood the true extent of the disaster. On that thought, Elizabeth turned at the bare rosebeds and started back along the path.

Miss Bingley had sounded entirely sincere in her intent to quickly fetch the key. Elizabeth did not doubt that she had meant to return at once. It could not benefit Miss Bingley to have Mr Darcy locked in a room by himself, or with Elizabeth.

It could have benefited her significantly if she had been locked into that study with Mr Darcy. Whereupon her reputation would have been damaged, as Elizabeth’s was now. Whereupon she would have become engaged to Mr Darcy, as Miss Bingley had left no doubt she very much wished to be.

The possibility had not occurred to Elizabeth at the time. There had been too many other things to think about. But standing in the dormant garden with weeks of distance between herself and that locked door, she thought about it now.

For the sake of fairness, Elizabeth reminded herself that she was not certain, could not be certain. A person could be in a corridor for any number of reasons. And the ugly suspicions now occupying her mind all relied on the idea that what had occurred was not what had been intended to occur at all. Surely that was foolish, was it not? To make her entire theory of the case based on the idea that what had happened had begun in conspiracy, but ended in accident?

She stopped walking again.

The retreating footsteps. The voice that arrived too quickly. The promise to resolve it in a moment, and then the arrival at the back of a crowd that had resolved it instead, as though it was crucial for no one to know how quickly Miss Bingley had been on the scene. Each element on its own was nothing. Together they formed a shape she could not look away from, a shape that pointed at a woman who wanted Mr Darcy, or at least his fortune, with something not far from desperation.

Elizabeth walked back inside, sat down in her father’s study, and stared at the fire.

What she did not have was proof. The scratch on the lock plate was consistent with deliberate interference but proved nothing about the person responsible. Miss Bingley’s tardiness with the key was suggestive but explainable. Her presence in the corridor was not, in itself, evidence of anything. Elizabeth could assemble these elements into a shape that pointed in one direction, but a shape was not a case, and she knew the difference.

She also knew what a case would cost.

That thought was painful but unavoidable. If she were right, and if she could prove it, the proof pointed directly at Charles Bingley’s sister. And whatever happened to Caroline Bingley as a result of that proof, something would also happen to Charles Bingley, who was entirely without fault in any of this. And if Charles Bingley were implicated, something would therefore happen to Jane, whose happiness was increasingly tied to his.

Elizabeth put her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands and sat like that for a long moment. Then, with a slight effort of will, she stood. She would return to the drawing room. She would find something useful to do.

After all, her father might come in at any moment, and she did not care to explain either the posture of hopelessness or the bitter thoughts which had led to it.

Chapter Twelve

Elizabeth next found herself in Mr Darcy’s company on a promenade which had been suggested by Mr Bingley, with all his customary uncomplicated enthusiasm. The morning was dry, if not precisely warm, and the grounds at Netherfield had a kind of spare, structural beauty even without the ornamentation of leaves and flowers which a more generous time of year would have provided.

Mr Bingley led with Jane, a circumstance which left Elizabeth smiling, if unsurprised. Miss Darcy remained inside with Mrs Annesley, pleading a need to practice the pianoforte when no one would be disturbed by long stretches of scales and arpeggios. Miss Bingley protested the need to walk out on so cold a day until, overruled by her brother’s enthusiasm, she could hardly have joined them, and the Hursts mutually declared their disinclination for exercise.

This left Elizabeth and Mr Darcy to fall into step at the rear of the small procession. With dull surprise, Elizabeth realised that walking with Mr Darcy had already become familiar to her. Once a stranger, and one whose manners she could not like, he had already become something else to her. Even as she could not quite define what that might be, she felt the difference.

For a time, they walked in comfortable silence. That, too, was a relatively recent development. Silence in Mr Darcy’s company had not always been comfortable. In the first, shocked days of their unwanted engagement, it had been the silence of two people managing their proximity with care, each conscious of the other and the watchful eyes of society. Now it was something else. Not intimacy, perhaps, but a quiet familiarity.

“It appears,” Elizabeth said at last, “that we have grown quite respectable in our habits.”

Darcy glanced at her. “Respectable?”

“Yes. Regular promenades. Civil conversation. An absence of scandalous disagreements. I begin to suspect we are becoming dull.”

He chuckled. “I should regret that exceedingly.”