Chapter 28: The Neighbourhood Arrives at Its Own Conclusions

By Thursday morning, Meryton had reached its conclusions.

It had done so, as it always did, with impressive collective efficiency and almost complete indifference to the available facts. The neighbourhood's interpretive machinery was of the finest social manufacture — it required only the roughest materials to produce the most satisfyingly detailed product — and the winter's events had supplied it with rather more than the minimum. There had been the Abbey gathering, and the card party, and the assembly, and the particular quality of Count Vordescu's attention at each, which three separate women had catalogued independently and found to be significant in broadly compatible directions. There had been Cecilia Hartwell's uncharacteristic composure when the Count's name arose in conversation — she had not contradicted anyone once, which was, for Cecilia, a near-diagnostic indicator of internal preoccupation. And there had been the unfortunate incident with the militia, which had moved through the neighbourhood's information network in approximately four distorted forms, none of them accurate, all of them romantic.

The version Mrs. Long held, by Thursday morning, was that Cecilia had been found at Thornfield Abbey in the company of the Count at an unconventional hour, with only her sister's prior knowledge as chaperonage, and that the situation had been witnessed by Lieutenant Ashford, whose subsequent tight-lipped discretion was a confirmed indication of personal delicacy regarding a matter already well advanced. Mrs. Long considered this intelligence not scandalous but efficient: Cecilia Hartwell had always been the sort of young woman who would accomplish things by the most direct available route, and if the direct route involved midnight and a Transylvanian count, that was perfectly consistent with her character.