Page 82 of When Elizabeth's Cat Chose Darcy
“Caroline has been maneuvering. There is a vast difference between willingness and strategy, and the fact that Bingley cannot see it does not mean it’s not her aim.”
“I know,” Jane said, so quietly that I stopped. “I am not blind. I saw how Caroline steered her away from Lydia, and how she arranged the set when Sir William requested Bingley to start the first set. I’m not excusing Darcy for his defensive words, but I believe he did it out of fear, or perhaps… You challenged him, and he did not know how to react. Maybe, his feelings for you are deeper than we suspect.”
“Feelings.” I nearly laughed. “Jane, the man has precisely as much feeling for me as one has for a reliable horse—appreciation for the service rendered, irritation when the animal has opinions aboutthe route, and the expectation that it will be standing in the stable when he next requires transport.”
Jane said nothing. But her look saw through me—that I was attempting to make a jest, pretending I didn’t hurt.
“Do not look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you can see through the walls I have spent the entire night constructing.”
“Lizzy.” Her voice was so gentle it hurt worse than anything Darcy had said in the entrance hall. “You did not build the walls on our way to the assembly. You were as excited as I was. I believe you hoped Mr. Darcy would request a set from you.”
“What is the use?” My voice cracked. The crack was small, and I closed it immediately, but Jane heard it, and the hearing changed her face. “What is the use of any of it? He called me the elder sister Georgiana never had, and I let those words mean something. He asked for a dance, secretly in the library at midnight, and I said yes, and I held it like a treasure, hidden in my heart. I am but a fool, a paid companion who believed a man of ten thousand a year, sojourning in our country town, would offer his regard to me. I have been making a story out of crumbs, and the baker has gone home.”
Jane’s eyes filled. She was crying, my composed, beautiful, unflappable sister was crying on my bed at dawn. It meant she believed me and my pain, which made it real, and it was the one thing I had not prepared a defense against.
“Oh, Lizzy.” She gathered me against her shoulder, and I let her. “You are not foolish. You are the cleverest woman I know, and if you believed those things meant something, then they meant something, because your judgment is better than anyone’s in this family, including Papa’s, and if Mr. Darcy cannot see that?—”
“He saw it. That is the worst part.” I pulled back, wiping my face with my sleeve because I had, despite every resolution, permitted exactly three tears. “He saw me clearly, Jane. In the kitchen, the library, and the walks. He saw me, and I saw him, and the seeing wasreal. But the assembly showed me that seeing only operates in rooms without witnesses. Put us in a public space with his sister and his friends and the neighborhood watching, and the seeing stops, and the programme resumes, and I become Miss Bennet, the companion, a nobody with a function.”
“Then he must learn to see you in every room, not only the private ones. And if he cannot learn that?—”
“Then he is not the man I—” I stopped. Swallowed. “Then he is not the man I hoped he might be. And the hoping was the mistake, and I intend to correct it.”
“What will you do?”
“I will end the arrangement. I will ask Mama to send for Uncle Philips.”
“Lizzy, do not do something rash because you are hurt.”
“It is not rash. It is overdue. I cannot go back to Netherfield and sit in that morning room and take Georgiana through her lessons and pretend that nothing lives inside those walls that I am not permitted to name. I cannot do it, Jane. The pretending would kill something in me that I am not willing to lose.”
Jane did not argue. She reached across the bed and took my hand, and we sat in the grey dawn light with our fingers laced and the silence between us carrying the ache of sisters who had arrived at the same grief from opposite directions—Jane holding new hope and watching me release it, I watching her hold it and unable to reach for my own.
Below us, Lydia crashed through the kitchen door, shouting about whether anybody had saved her any chocolate, and the ordinary noise of Longbourn rose around us like water, filling the cracks.
