CHAPTER 29
A Very Happy Occasion
Mr. Darcy knew, before he broke the seal, that Miss Bennet’s note was not business.
That knowledge was absurd. The paper was not perfumed.
The hand was not altered. The fold was proper, the direction correct, the servant who had delivered it had waited without expression, and nothing in the appearance of the thing would have justified a man of sense in feeling his pulse alter before he had read a word.
Nevertheless, he knew.
Business arrived in packets. Business had memoranda, enclosures, figures, copies, clauses to be improved, receipts to be disputed, and questions which could be brought under law, custom, reason, or Mrs. Albright’s displeasure.
Business came with Miss Bennet’s sharp, lucid notes in which no syllable was wasted and every courtesy appeared to have been examined for structural soundness before it was permitted to stand.
This was a single folded note.
Darcy set down his pen.
For half a minute he did not open it.
That was foolishness. He opened it.
Miss Bennet requests the pleasure of Mr. Darcy’s company at dinner in Portman Square on Thursday next at seven o’clock.
Beneath it, in her own hand, was written:
The room has been persuaded into hospitality. I hope you will approve its first public attempt.
E. Bennet
He read the note once.
Then again.
Then he laid it flat upon the desk, as if the paper had become evidence and must be considered from a proper distance.
Thursday.
Of course she had chosen Thursday. Perhaps it had been convenience. Perhaps another day had not suited the cook, the household, or one of the guests. Perhaps the dining room, having been so long oppressed, had expressed some preference of its own and been obeyed.
He knew better.
It did not mean what his blood had leapt to make of it. Miss Bennet had made no declaration. She had invited him to dinner, and very likely several others besides. It was civil. It was proper. It was, in every outward respect, exactly what it ought to be.
That was what made it impossible to dismiss.
She had not created anything by inviting him. She had formalized what had already come into being.
Until now, his place in Portman Square had been sheltered by usefulness.
He came because leases required attention, because Cotton Lane had produced another difficulty, because a report wanted correction, because samples must be compared, because Mrs. Albright had discovered some domestic impossibility and Miss Bennet had chosen, with alarming confidence, to make it his concern.
Every visit had possessed an explanation strong enough to stand before the world.
This invitation altered nothing.
That was the difficulty.
It made visible what had already been true.
He was her friend.
Darcy looked at the word in his mind as he might have looked at a clause whose apparent simplicity concealed several hazards.
Friend.
The word was smaller than what he wanted. It was also the only one he had any right to accept.
He rose, crossed to the window of his chambers, and stood there while the street below performed its ordinary business with offensive indifference.
A cart laboured through the damp. A messenger boy trotted past with his hat pulled low.
Two clerks came out of the building opposite, arguing with all the confidence of young men who had not yet learned the cost of being right too late.
He had first wanted Miss Bennet before he had approved the wanting. That had been bad enough.
Wanting, however, had proved the lesser trouble.
It had begun with her hand upon his sleeve, the warmth of Portman Square, the absurd little dog shivering against his coat, and her voice commanding him to come inside as if obedience were the only sensible course left to any gentleman in possession of wet gloves and human weakness.
Desire had followed with humiliating punctuality: in dreams, in memory, in the ridiculous attention he paid to the turn of her head, the loosened curl near her cheek, the exact pressure of her fingers when she placed a paper before him and leaned too near.
Desire, at least, had rules. A gentleman either obeyed them or ceased to deserve the name.
But esteem had come after it, steadier and more searching.
He had come to value the whole shape of her mind: her quickness with accounts, her impatience with nonsense, the way she separated mercy from indulgence and order from tyranny.
He valued how she looked at a room and saw not furniture, but a life either halted or allowed to move.
He valued her care for Jane, which she disguised as wit; her refusal to be claimed by Longbourn and yet not abandon it; her treatment of servants as part of the house’s intelligence rather than its machinery.
He valued the small tyrant in embroidered wrappers because she did, and because the creature’s existence had become part of the strange, warm argument of her household.
He valued that she had judged him by conduct.
The memory returned with such force that he turned from the window.
Would she believe terrible things, if they were said of him? If papers seemed to prove them? If those speaking knew Derbyshire, Pemberley, his father, his mother’s old connections, the names and rooms and histories from which a falsehood might be given the manners of truth?
She had not promised blind faith.
That would have been easier to distrust.
She had said she would examine the matter more carefully because it concerned him. She had looked at him with her lively, unflinching eyes and told him she would judge for herself.
A man might build a great deal of hope upon so little, if he were not careful.
Darcy was no longer certain care would be sufficient.
He wanted to court her. The admission was not new.
It had only become too plain to evade. He wanted to be received in Portman Square not by usefulness, nor by Thursday, nor by the accident of leases and paper, but by right.
He wanted to ask for the life that already tormented him in fragments: her laughter in rooms he might enter without excuse; her quick step heard before she appeared; her hand in his, not for the length of a parting courtesy, but because it belonged there.
He wanted the privilege of caring for her openly, and the more impossible privilege of being cared for in return without either of them finding another name for it.
He would have married her long before now, had wanting and honour been permitted to produce the same conclusion.
They were not.
Had Pemberley alone been withheld from him, perhaps that loss might have been borne. A man could live without a house, if he had honour, work, and some future he could name without shame.
But Pemberley had not merely been withheld. It had been left active against him.
His father was alive and still master. Wickham Senior was alive and still steward.
Mrs. Wickham remained near enough to plead as kin and dependent enough to sound injured when refused.
George Wickham remained his father’s godson, received, excused, and supplied by the very house from which Darcy himself had been cast out in all but law.
The Matlocks had not stood with him. Lady Catherine had not stood with him. Richard had believed him, but Richard was a younger son. His father’s younger brother, the judge, had done what could be done; and what could be done had been enough to keep Darcy upright, not enough to restore him.
Nothing was settled while his father lived to believe the wrong men, and the wrong men remained in place to be believed.
And Miss Bennet was rich.
Not merely comfortable, whatever she chose to let the world see. Rich enough that any man in reduced circumstances must be read against her fortune before he was read against his own heart.
A fortune-hunter might be content to want money. Darcy wanted worse things to defend against: belief, welcome, and a place in a house where no one had been instructed to doubt him.
No honest man could pretend that was nothing.
He returned to the desk and drew a sheet of paper toward him.
The reply had to be simple.
Mr. Darcy presents his compliments to Miss Bennet and will have the honour of waiting upon her on Thursday next at seven o’clock.
He paused over honour.
The word was correct. It was conventional. It was used every day by men who felt nothing at all.
He left it.
A friend might serve without claiming. A friend might protect where a suitor would expose. A friend might sit at her table, answer her wit, honour her trust, and leave her name no worse for having admitted him.
A friend, if he kept himself honest, need not hurt her.
Darcy sanded the note, sealed it, and rang for Jenkins.
The clerk entered with his usual expression of careful neutrality, which had become, over time, a manner of saying a great deal by refusing to say anything.
“This is to be delivered to Portman Square.”
“Yes, sir.”
Jenkins took the note, glanced at the direction, and did not smile. His discipline did him credit.
“There is also a gentleman waiting below, sir. Colonel Fitzwilliam.”
“At chambers?”
“Yes, sir. He said he would wait, but not with patience.”
“That sounds like my cousin.”
Jenkins inclined his head, the smallest possible admission that family accuracy had been achieved, and withdrew.
Richard entered three minutes later, bringing with him cold air, military impatience, and the look of a man who had already found several things ridiculous before noon and expected the day to provide more.
“You are writing,” he said.
“I was.”
“Am I interrupting law, property, or Miss Bennet?”
Darcy folded the blotting paper with great precision. “You are interrupting your own business, if you have any.”
“That grave. Miss Bennet, then.”
Darcy gave him no answer.
Richard took the nearest chair without invitation. “I shall consider myself correct.”
“You generally do.”
“With reason. I have survived war, family dinners, and Lady Catherine’s opinions. A man develops confidence.”
Darcy sat. “Why are you here?”