CHAPTER 51 #2
It faced the back, where the light was steadier and less exposed than the front.
A writing table stood near the window, neither too grand nor too small.
Shelves had been fitted along one wall. Some already held the books that had been brought from his rooms: law reports, marked volumes, papers tied in bundles, familiar spines he had last seen against the narrow shelves of his bachelor lodgings.
There were drawers for correspondence, one shallow drawer for seals, wafers, and wax, another for folded paper.
The chair was firm. The inkstand was good.
A small coal scuttle stood near the hearth.
Beside the desk was room enough for a second chair, as if someone might sit with him, read a memorandum, contradict him, or ask whether a phrase was insufficiently clear.
“It has the best light in the morning,” Elizabeth said. “At least, the best light that does not require you to sit in the drawing room and be interrupted by everyone who believes a married man has nothing to do.”
“You have thought of everything.”
“No,” she said. “Only of what was likely.”
That was worse.
He moved to the shelves and touched one of the books. His own. Brought here. Placed without ceremony, as if it had always been intended to stand there.
“You had my rooms emptied?”
“Not emptied. Moved. Your man oversaw it. Nothing was taken without his judgment. Anything uncertain remains boxed.”
He looked back at her.
She seemed suddenly younger, though her chin had lifted in the way it did when she expected resistance and had prepared three good reasons against it.
“If you are to be at home here,” she said, “you should feel at home.”
There it was, plainly spoken and impossible to answer without exposing too much.
Darcy looked at the table, the shelves, the hooks by the door, the stand for his cane, the drawers ready to receive the small disorder of an ordinary life.
He had expected marriage to give him Elizabeth.
He had not understood that Elizabeth meant to give him somewhere to put his hat.
“I do not know how to thank you,” he said.
Her mouth softened, then twitched. “You might begin by not thanking me as if I had allowed you the use of a guest room.”
“I did not mean—”
“I know what you meant. But that is not what this is.”
“No.”
“You live here now.”
“Yes.”
The word entered the room and stayed there.
Elizabeth looked satisfied, though not smugly. “Good. Then you may object to the curtains later, when your judgment is less overwhelmed by hooks.”
He could not help it. He laughed.
The sound surprised him. It surprised her too, in the best way. Her smile came quickly, bright enough that March itself seemed to have entered the room on her face.
That evening, Portman Square reminded them that marriage inside a large household had rules different from a cottage in Surrey.
It possessed Mrs. Albright, Mrs. Doddridge, two footmen, Evans, his own man, and Lord Pomington, who had forgiven nobody.
“With chicken?” Darcy asked, looking down at him.
Pomington stared.
“Your terms are predictable.”
Elizabeth, already inside her sitting room, said, “That is no argument against meeting them.”
Darcy produced the offering. Pomington accepted it with the air of one receiving arrears.
Only then was Darcy permitted to enter.
The room was not The Laurels. It did not pretend to be.
It had too many remembered habits, too much old order, too many lamps lit by hands trained under Mrs. Marwood’s rule.
But Elizabeth sat by the fire in a pale evening gown, her hair restored to Evans’s authority, though not entirely subdued, and held out her hand to him as if all the servants in London could not alter what belonged to them now.
He went to her at once.
The next morning, breakfast confirmed the campaign.
Darcy did not understand it immediately.
He noticed the newspaper first, folded beside his plate, and two sheets laid ready for correspondence.
He wrote to Uncle Edward after coffee, thanking him for The Laurels, and then to Richard, thanking him for attending the wedding and adding, because restraint was still possible on paper, that the journey had been comfortable.
Elizabeth, reading the newspaper opposite him, looked up. “Comfortable?”
“It was.”
“That is a very judicial description of three days of marriage.”
“I was writing to Richard.”
“Then I withdraw the objection. He would only be encouraged.”
He dipped his pen again.
The coffee was exactly as he preferred it.
That was when he began to understand.
Eggs prepared as he took them in his own rooms. Coffee made to the strength his man knew to ask for. Toast, ham, butter, and no excessive display of sweet things, as if breakfast had been quietly informed by someone who had seen him before he was fit for company.
“You are looking at the ham,” Elizabeth said.
“I am not accustomed to being studied by ham.”
“Cook is observant.”
“Cook has never seen me at breakfast.”
“No. But your man has.”
“My man has betrayed me for ham?”
“I believe he considered it household coordination.”
Darcy looked toward the door, behind which an entire world of servants had evidently decided that marriage suspended all former loyalties.
Elizabeth did not try very hard not to laugh.
“Do you object?”
“No.”
“Good. Objection before breakfast is very poor manners.”
He should have said something. He had no notion what. Gratitude was too large for ham and too small for the fact that his private habits had entered the room ahead of him, been received, sorted, and made ordinary.
Instead he buttered his toast.
Elizabeth looked pleased.
That should have warned him.
At chambers, life attempted to resume its former shape.
The attempt failed before two o’clock.
Darcy had gone in after breakfast, not because he wished to leave Portman Square, but because work existed and must be done.
Jenkins received his return with the sober relief of a man who feared marriage might have permanent effects upon signatures.
Papers had accumulated. A client had misunderstood a clause with confidence.
Two letters required answers. A draft agreement had acquired, in his absence, three errors and one phrase of such confident ambiguity that Darcy wrote a note in the margin with more force than charity.
For three hours he worked as he had always worked.
Then luncheon arrived.
Not a basket such as Miss Bennet had once sent after the rescue, when gratitude, propriety, and interest had all been tied up in bread, meat, and absurd instructions.
This was a proper covered luncheon, carried by a Portman Square footman with no sense of intrusion and set down in Darcy’s room as if chambers had always expected household food.
Jenkins looked at the covered dishes, then at Darcy, and acquired the expression of a man who had discovered matrimony could deliver luncheon into chambers.
“There is a note, sir,” said the footman.
Of course there was.
Darcy opened it.
Cook has opinions. I have been advised not to oppose them. A married man may be permitted ambition, but not starvation.
E.D.
He read it twice.
The footman, trained beyond curiosity, stood with the covered dishes.
“Thank you,” Darcy said.
“Shall I return the dishes later, sir?”
“Yes.”
The footman bowed and withdrew.
Jenkins remained at the outer desk in a condition of intense industry.
Darcy lifted the cover.
Cold chicken. Bread. Cheese. A little ham. Apples. Ginger snaps. A small jar of mustard. No potatoes, which he considered mercy.
He sat down slowly.
There had been years when food had been a private matter of cost, schedule, convenience, and discipline.
He had never starved. He disliked exaggeration too much to indulge it.
He had eaten well enough, paid properly enough, maintained appearances with care.
But he had also learned which economies did not show.
A gentleman might reduce fires if he was out.
He might stretch linen by habit. He might make coffee stand for luncheon if a brief was urgent and pride more urgent still.
He might teach himself not to expect anyone to notice.
Portman Square had noticed before he had failed.
Darcy ate the chicken.
When the footman returned for the dishes, Jenkins’s face betrayed nothing except the profound knowledge that Mr. Darcy’s marriage had become an administrative fact.
By the second day, the house had reached his dressing room.
He discovered the first shirts in the evening.
At first he thought his man had merely rearranged the press. Then he saw the folds. New linen had a particular look: too smooth, too cleanly creased, not yet softened by use. Beside the shirts lay fresh neckcloths, stockings, gloves still wrapped, and two waistcoats he did not remember ordering.
Darcy stood before the open press.
His man, who had been laying out evening things with the composure of one who had survived Mrs. Albright and found life possible, did not look uneasy enough.
“What are these?”
“Shirts, sir.”
“I can see that.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I did not order them.”
“No, sir.”
A pause.
His man adjusted the sleeve of a coat with insulting care.
Darcy turned. “Explain.”
“Mrs. Albright asked whether anything was wanting, sir. I inspected the linen. Some articles required mending. Some replacing. Your tailor had the measurements from existing garments.”
“My tailor.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you ordered them.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Upon Mrs. Albright’s instruction?”
“Mrs. Albright said Mrs. Darcy wished you to have what was proper for comfort and appearance, sir.”
There it was. Comfort and appearance.
Darcy looked again at the shirts.
“You might have consulted me.”
His man’s expression did not change, which was as near as he came to insubordination.
“Yes, sir.”
Darcy knew defeat when he heard it.
“Very well.”
“Will you wear the grey waistcoat this evening, sir?”
Darcy looked at the waistcoat. It was, infuriatingly, exactly the sort he would have chosen had he chosen one.
“Yes.”
“Very good, sir.”