Page 67 of A Compromise By Design

Elizabeth was not diminished now. She thought of November, the cold dread that had for long weeks infected every waking moment, and then she thought of the garden in January, and found that the distance between those two moments was both the longest and the shortest she had ever travelled.

Her father offered his arm. She took it. They walked to the front of the church.

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As Darcy stood at the front of the church and watched Jane Bennet becoming Mrs Bingley, he gave a small, private nod of satisfaction. It was well that things had resolved themselves correctly; he was confident that his friend’s happiness and respectability would only be promoted by the match, and indeed, the radiant smiles of the pair as they were being wed seemed to promise as much.

Then the first of the two ceremonies concluded, and Darcy had to laugh at himself for such a transparent attempt at cool, measured control. It was their turn, and he stopped thinking about Bingley entirely as Elizabeth came down the aisle on her father’s arm.

He had seen her in many states over the past several months. Flushed from a three-mile walk, her hair disordered, as she arrived at Netherfield with her boots splashed and her attention entirely on Jane. Across a supper table, her composure worn like a mask, giving him nothing. At the edge of a dance, managing the room with the focused effort of a woman who has decided to endure with grace. In the anteroom after Lady Catherine, composed and pale and telling him she would be all right in a tone that he did not entirely believe. In the January garden, bright-eyed and direct, saying yes without qualification in the thin winter light.

Darcy had seen her in all of these states and had assembled from them the true picture of a woman he had once been foolish enough to dismiss. He had revised the picture incrementally, then substantially, then entirely, until what he had now bore no resemblance to the first version — except that both involved the same person.

She looked, walking toward him, simply like herself. Not a ceremonial version, not a performed one. Simply Elizabeth, carrying the occasion without being diminished by it.

And looking entirely like herself, she was beautiful.

Her father placed her hand in his, which was the work of a moment. Then the old, familiar words of the vows, touching him to his core with the weight of what he vowed, and what Elizabeth vowed to him in return.

Throughout the ceremony, Darcy was aware of the neighbourhood arranged behind him and the accumulated attention of every person who had spent the winter constructing a version of this engagement that bore varying degrees of resemblance to its actual nature. Yet to his mild surprise, Darcy found he was entirely indifferent to it. He had been too long in the habit of thinking about how situations appeared from the outside, of managing the perception before attending to the substance. The substance was beside him, and the perception could arrange itself.

He had not expected to be happy in this way. He had expected, for most of his adult life, a version of happiness that was composed and considered and arrived at through the correct channels, and what he had received instead was something that had come through entirely the wrong channels: a locked door, a ruined reputation, a months-long education in the cost of his own careful silences. This was entirely different and entirely sufficient. More than sufficient.

Darcy looked at Elizabeth, and she looked at him. And in the one frozen moment before the witnesses and well-wishers ranged before them broke into cheers, Darcy knew boundless joy that she was his forever.

∞∞∞

Caroline stood in the third pew from the back, on the left side of the church. She had chosen the position deliberately. It was far enough from the front that nothing would be required of her expression at close range, yet near enough that retreat would not have been conspicuous, had it been required.

She had dressed carefully. That much could not be denied. Her gown was excellent. Her posture was irreproachable. Both of these things took considerably more effort than they had previously taken from her. She might have lost most of what she had striven for, but cost what it might, she intended to keep her dignity.

Caroline watched Jane Bennet become Mrs Bingley. She watched her brother’s face, which was the face she remembered from their childhood when he had wanted something very much and had not known how to want it quietly. She had not expected to feel something closer to relief than she was entirely comfortable with. Not for herself, but for him. Whatever her decisions had been, Charles was happy. She was not, she found, without feeling on the subject of her brother’s happiness. For that much, at least, she could be honestly happy.

Then she watched Elizabeth Bennet become Mrs Darcy.

She observed Mr Darcy say his vows and studied his expression as he said them. She had known him long enough to read that expression with accuracy. What it contained was everything Caroline had told herself over the course of their acquaintance might be hers.

Now she knew it never could have been. Not in this form, and not with this quality.

She had wanted him, or she had wanted what he represented and confused the two. The confusion had produced a locked door, a bribed maid, and ultimately Elizabeth Bennet standing at the front of a Hertfordshire church in March as Mr Darcy looked at her with an expression that was clearly nothing more or less than love.

All at once, Caroline understood she could never have received that look from Mr Darcy, could never have looked at him with an affection entirely free from triumph. The understanding was not pleasant. She received it in the third pew from the back and kept her expression composed and her posture irreproachable.

Yet a greater surprise was waiting for her when she looked at Elizabeth Darcy’s face. There was no triumph there, no performance, nothing borrowed or assumed. But she was indisputably happy. Elizabeth stood at the altar as a woman standing in her own life, in a moment she had neither asked for and nor flinched from.

A moment she had made, by the force of her own form of intelligence and generosity, into something worth standing in.

Caroline had arranged everything with the conviction that she was the right woman for the right man, and what her designs had produced was this. The person she had underestimated at every available opportunity was standing in the early spring light, being married to Fitzwilliam Darcy.

As Caroline Bingley looked at the church, at the faces that had become familiar over the past months of countryside residence and which she had once so easily dismissed as beneath her, thoughts of consequences were inescapable. Her position was intact, her prospects recoverable. She had not lost everything she had feared losing. She had only lost the thing she wanted most; but then, it had never really been hers.

She was painfully aware of what had been extended to her and by whom. Not forgiveness, which had not been offered, and which she had not sought. But Elizabeth Darcy had made the choice not to destroy her, and made her decision because she did not deserve to be reduced to the worst thing she had done.

Caroline had been sitting with this since Mr Darcy had brought it to her attention, and she had not found a comfortable position in which to hold it. She did not expect to find one today, but some things are impossible to set down, however much one might wish to forget.

The ceremony ended, the congregation rose, and the recessional began. She stood with everyone else and watched the two couples process down the aisle. As they passed by in their respective states of marital bliss, Caroline Bingley resolved not to do it again. Not the act in itself, but the thing beneath the act. The conviction that wanting something entitled her to engineer it, the willingness to use people as instruments, the certainty that she knew better than the situation what the situation required. She would not do that again. She was not certain she was a better person for the past several months, but she was, she thought, a more honest one, and honesty was somewhere to begin.

∞∞∞