CHAPTER 45 #2
Mrs. Albright received him with her usual composed severity, but there was something in the angle of her glance that warned him before he reached the drawing room.
The house was not disturbed. Portman Square did not permit disturbance to appear in carpets, bells, or servants’ faces.
Yet Darcy had learned that this household could be very quiet when it was protecting something.
He was shown in.
Elizabeth sat near the fire with Mrs. Doddridge opposite her and Pom-Pom in a basket between them, wrapped in a small garment of sober blue that looked, to Darcy’s eye, both absurd and admirably fitted.
A book lay open on Elizabeth’s lap. She had not been reading it.
Her hand rested upon the page as if holding it in place had become a duty.
She looked up.
“Mr. Darcy.”
The words were proper. They had never sounded so much like strangers.
For one terrible moment, he thought the cause might be himself.
Then he saw no doubt in her face. Anger, fatigue, hurt pride perhaps; but not doubt. Whatever had injured her had not turned her from him. It had made her stand guard over something.
“Miss Bennet,” he said.
Mrs. Doddridge looked from one to the other with the grave absence of expression that, in her, amounted almost to speech.
Darcy took the chair Elizabeth indicated, though his attention remained upon her. She smiled half a moment too late. Her colour was not wrong enough for illness and not right enough for peace. Her fingers had curled slightly against the page, creasing the paper.
He had come with letters, with news, with Providence’s ill-chosen creditor. All of it seemed suddenly too loud.
“I hope I do not intrude.”
“You do not,” Elizabeth said. Then, after too small a pause, “You never do.”
That ought to have comforted him. Instead it made the room ache.
He glanced once toward Mrs. Doddridge.
It was not a request he had any right to make aloud. He hoped, nevertheless, that she understood it.
Mrs. Doddridge looked at him as she might have looked at a servant who had placed teaspoons in the wrong order: without surprise, without sentiment, and with every intention of correcting the matter.
“I believe,” she said, folding her work with care, “that Mrs. Albright wished for my opinion upon the linen list.”
Elizabeth’s hand tightened upon the book.
Darcy thought, for one dreadful instant, that she would ask Mrs. Doddridge to stay.
She did not.
“The linen list is fortunate,” Elizabeth said, with a faintness of humour that did not reach her eyes.
“It has often been so, miss.”
Mrs. Doddridge rose. Pom-Pom lifted his head, considered whether the removal of one adult from the room required protest, and decided the fire was too comfortable for politics.
At the door, Mrs. Doddridge paused. “I shall be within call.”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “Thank you.”
The door closed.
Darcy did not move at once. He could hear the fire, the far sound of a carriage passing the square, the slight breath Elizabeth took before mastering it.
“Tell me,” he said quietly, “whether I may help, or whether I must only sit here and be quiet.”
Elizabeth looked at him then, and the composure in her face wavered. Not enough to break. Enough to prove what it cost.
“You have come on a bad day.”
“Then I am glad I came.”
She looked down at the book, shut it with decision, and set it aside.
“My mother has been in London.”
Darcy understood very little and too much at once.
“At Gracechurch Street,” Elizabeth continued. “She came without notice. She had learned of the engagement from Papa, or enough of it to be angry at not being first in all its management.”
Darcy said nothing.
“I shall not repeat everything she said. It would not improve the matter, and I do not wish to make you hear what was only ugly.”
His hands, resting on his knees, closed once and opened again.
“Elizabeth.”
“No,” she said quickly, and then stopped herself. “Forgive me. I did not mean—”
“You need not protect me from every unpleasantness.”
“I am not protecting only you.”
He waited.
That seemed, somehow, to be the thing that undid the next layer of her defence. She stood, restless, crossed toward the mantel, then turned back before she reached it, as if even the room could not offer a place for what pressed against her.
“She did not make me unhappy in my choice,” she said. “I would have you know that first.”
“I did know it.”
She looked at him sharply.
“I feared it,” he admitted. “For a moment. Then I saw you.”
That softened her and seemed to hurt her more.
“She made the choice ugly,” Elizabeth said. “Only for an hour. Perhaps not even so long. But I resent that she could do it at all.”
He rose then, not to approach too near, but because remaining seated felt like indifference.
“She should not have made you defend your happiness.”
Elizabeth’s lips trembled once, though not with tears.
“No. She should not.”
He remained where he was.
“I know all that may be said for her,” Elizabeth said.
“I have said most of it myself. She is foolish. She is frightened. She was never taught to manage anything except alarm. Jane would say she does not mean half what she says, and perhaps Jane is right. But there are injuries a person may do by accident every day until accident becomes very like intention.”
Darcy’s chest tightened.
“She looked at my marriage,” Elizabeth said, “and saw what it would cost her. Not whether I was happy. Not whether I was loved. Not whether I had chosen well. Only what part of me would no longer be available.”
The words struck harder because they were spoken without flourish.
He thought of George Darcy Senior, of Pemberley, of his father looking at evidence and seeing guilt because guilt better satisfied what had already hardened in him.
He thought of letters unanswered, of Georgiana held behind other people’s management, of the strange pain of becoming an object in the mind of one whose love should have known one first.
But this was not his pain to seize.
“She made you provision,” he said.
Elizabeth’s laugh was short and without mirth. “Yes. And not for the first time.”
Darcy said nothing, but his attention sharpened.
“Before I knew you,” Elizabeth said, “Mama pressed me to marry Mr. Collins, the heir of Longbourn.”
He waited.
“He was not a man I could respect. That is all I need say of him. Mama cared only that he would inherit Longbourn. When I refused, I was not respected. Not as a daughter. Not as a woman with judgment. Not even as a creature allowed dislike. So I left.”
Darcy’s expression altered.
“Today felt like the same claim turned inside out,” she said. “Mr. Collins was acceptable because he would keep me useful to Longbourn. You are alarming because you remove me from it.”
“She asked you to marry a man you could not respect,” Darcy said, “for the sake of an estate that was never yours to preserve.”
“Yes.”
“And when you refused, she made the refusal the offence.”
Elizabeth looked at him then.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “That is exactly what she did.”
For a moment neither of them spoke.
Then she drew a breath, and something of Portman Square’s mistress returned to her face—not the armour, precisely, but the judgment.
“And now there is my fortune. You know enough of it to understand that I could be generous, if I chose it. I could make all of them easier. I could satisfy Mama’s terrors for a month, perhaps two, before she discovered new ones.
But I have no wish to make my income the remedy for every want of sense at Longbourn. ”
Darcy remained silent, but his stillness was attentive rather than cold.
“I have provided where I thought provision would do good. I settled money for my sisters’ education.
If there is real need, I will not see them suffer.
But until there is need, I cannot see why I should expose myself to every expense Mama can call anxiety.
Need has a claim upon me. Lavishness does not. ”
“That is not ungenerous,” Darcy said. “It is the difference between assistance and surrender.”
“Mama would not see the difference.”
“Then she must not be permitted to define it.”
Elizabeth looked away, but not before he saw that the answer had reached her.
“I cannot bear it,” she said, and now there was anger in the words, not tears.
“I cannot bear that my own mother should look at me and see provision before daughter. I know resentment is not admirable. I know it is not generous. But I resent her. I do. And I am tired of pretending that understanding her fear makes the injuries smaller.”
“It does not.”
She looked at him.
“Understanding a wound does not close it,” he said. “It only tells one where the pain entered.”
Her face changed; he did not know whether he had comforted her or made comfort less avoidable.
“There is only so much injury one can pardon because the hand that gives it trembles,” she said. “She is advanced in years, if not in sense, and she does not see that she alienates everyone she means to hold.”
Darcy remained silent.
“When she is rebuked,” Elizabeth continued, “she becomes my mother in an instant. She remembers rank the moment she is denied obedience. But motherhood cannot be only a title taken up when it is useful. It must have duties in it, or it is merely rank.”
The words left her white with the force of having said them.
Darcy crossed the room then, slowly enough that she might refuse him. She did not. He stopped before her, close but not touching.
“No one can require you to treat her with a warmth she has not earned.”
Elizabeth’s eyes lifted to his.
“Not even if she is my mother?”
“A title may claim duty,” he said. “It cannot command affection.”
For a moment she seemed almost young. Not childish.
Never that. But younger than the mistress of Portman Square, younger than the woman who had sat before Hartwood and Beaker and made the arrangements of a marriage sound like household weather.
Younger because hurt had at last been allowed to stand without being converted into management.