Page 16 of Mr Darcy’s Inconvenient Wife

The visitor stood up as they came into the drawing room.

She was young, two or three-and-twenty perhaps, and very pretty. The hair under her velvet bonnet was fair, nearly the colour of Jane's own, and she held herself as gracefully as any lady at a London assembly. Had she stood beside Jane in church, a stranger might have taken them for cousins.

Elizabeth disliked her before she had said a single word. She was ashamed of that. It made no difference.

“Miss Bennet.” The young woman curtseyed, and her glance moved on. “And Miss Elizabeth, I think. I must beg your pardon for coming. My name is Nicola.”

They sat. Jane folded her hands in her lap.

“I am so sorry to call on you today, of all days,” Nicola said. “I turned back on the road three times. But I could not let another day go by. It is better to know such things before than after.”

“Then please tell us why you have come,” said Elizabeth.

Nicola looked down at the carpet. “It gives me no pleasure to say it. But the truth is that Mr Bingley is not a faithful man. He has been meeting me in secret for a long while now.”

For a moment nobody moved. Jane's colour did not even change.

“You are mistaken,” she said. “I do not know what you have been told, or who told it to you. But you are mistaken.”

“I thought you would say so. I should have said the same, in your place.” Nicola smoothed her gloves over her knee. “I met Mr Bingley more than a year ago, Miss Bennet, the autumn he first took Netherfield. I was staying in the neighbourhood then. We were acquainted a few weeks, no more, and it was all quite innocent. Then he went away to London, and I supposed I should never see him again.”

“He went away in November,” said Elizabeth.

“He did. And when he came back into Hertfordshire in the spring, he sought me out to renew the acquaintance. Since then, he has come to call on me whenever he is in Hertfordshire, and regularly since he settled at Netherfield for the long term.” Nicola raised her eyes to Jane's. “I do not believe he meant any harm by it. I want you to understand that. I do not think he ever set out to be unfaithful to you.”

“Then what did he set out to do?”

It was Jane who asked it. Her voice was very quiet.

“To talk, I think. He had dined somewhere that evening, and he had taken more wine than he was used to. He was not himself. He sat by my fire and told me things I am sure he had never said aloud to anybody.” Nicola hesitated. “He said he loved you. I will not pretend he did not say that. But he said that he was afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“Of marrying a whole family when he had only meant to marry one lady. Those were very nearly his words.” She spoke gently, as though every sentence hurt her too. “He said your father's estate is entailed away, and that when your father dies, your mother and your sisters will have nothing but what he gives them. He said there are four sisters still unmarried, and no money to settle on any of them. He said your mother already speaks of him as though his purse were the family's purse. He did not know whether his fortune could bear it. He was not sure his patience could, either.”

Jane had gone quite white. Elizabeth reached for her hand, but Jane did not seem to feel it.

“He said something more that night,” Nicola went on. “That your mother means to have him buy the heir out of the entail as soon as the register is signed. He had heard it spoken of. He said he felt as if he were being measured for a harness.”

Elizabeth sat very still.

Her mother had told that scheme to her alone, on a bench in Meryton, with nobody in the street but a boy with a barrow. Not even Hill had heard it. Jane had not heard it until this minute. And yet here it was, laid out in the Longbourn drawing room by a stranger in a velvet bonnet.

“After that night he came to me often,” Nicola said. “Then every day. Last week he told me he had thought of breaking the engagement. Of going away before the wedding and writing to explain. He said he could not find the courage to tell you to your face, because you are so good, and he could not bear to be the one to hurt you. So he let it go on, and on, and now it is the day before your wedding, and he still has not told you.”

“He would not,” Jane whispered. “Charles would never —”

But she did not finish. Elizabeth saw her sister's eyes move to the window and then to the door. She knew Jane was thinking of the long winter in London, of the calls that never came and the letters that said nothing. Jane had always believed, in her secret heart, that she had not been worth coming back for. Now she was being told she had been right.

“I wish with all my heart I were mistaken.” Nicola opened her reticule and took out a folded square of white cloth. She laid it on the table between them. “He left this with me. The last time. I think he forgot he had it with him.”

It was a gentleman's handkerchief. In one corner, stitched in blue silk, were the letters C and B, with a sprig of forget-me-nots twined around them.

Jane gasped. Elizabeth knew the stitches as well as she knew her own. She had sat beside her sister at this very fire and watched her work them, evening after evening, the week Mr Bingley came back to her. Jane had given it to him the day their engagement was settled.

Jane stood up without a word. She did not look at the handkerchief again, or at either of them. She went out and drew the door shut behind her so gently that it barely clicked.

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