Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
Elizabeth felt Darcy watching her after Colonel Fitzwilliam left, felt his eagerness to discuss going to town, but she admired the library.
It was a well-lit room, with chairs facing the windows and the bookshelves out of the direct sunlight.
It was an excellent collection, at least from its size, and she hoped she could discover for herself that its contents were equally fine.
“Do you like the library?” he asked as she walked along the shelves. “I will not bother to ask you what you think of Fitzwilliam. He is a chattering coxcomb, and it is best to disregard half of what he says.”
She smiled to herself. The men were close friends as well as cousins.
The colonel worried for Darcy’s happiness and had set out to determine what his new wife was like for himself.
When they got to town—for she realised Darcy saw a need—how many people would give her the same benefit?
Would she be found wanting by not being wealthy and not having any noble connexions?
They might assume she married him for his money, or assume that neither one of them would be faithful to the other.
That sort of judgment would be hard to bear.
“Elizabeth?”
“The library is delightful. I hope you will let me use it occasionally.”
“Occasionally?” he repeated, coming nearer. “Are you not a reader?”
“I am, but it was hard to read at Longbourn. My father does not share his library. He is always eager to have it alone, so I must go abroad for novels.”
A shadow crossed his eyes. “The books in circulating libraries are now principally novels, and a passion for that type of reading may be gratified for a trifling expense.”
It was not expensive, but it was more trifling for him than it had been for Elizabeth Bennet. “Is this where you tell me that novels are mischievous trash and its worst effects are on the female mind?”
“You ought not to assume the worst of me.”
“You ought not to make it so easy to tease you. We both need improvement.”
Darcy sighed, but he smiled as he did. “I meant I hoped it was easy for you to get books. I am critical about your father not sharing his library, not on novels. A book seldom escapes my presence unperused. Even novels,” he added.
She must have looked surprised because he said, “Did you expect me to say novels corrupt the mind?”
“No, I expected you to say something like with the increase of reading novels, there is an aversion to reading of a more improving nature.”
It was all over his face that he wanted to talk about going to town and there was tension in his shoulders, but he asked, “What think you of books? Do you suppose we ever read the same?”
“Let us put it to a test. I had wanted to read the novel Self Control, but I could not get it from the circulating library. If you have it here, I will take it as providential that you and I were supposed to marry.”
He gave her a wry look at her playfulness that she was becoming well acquainted with. “There is a copy in the house in town. I found it strained and with improbable incidents, although there were lively portraits of character.”
“Of course you would like nothing too fantastic.”
“And you do?” he asked sceptically.
Elizabeth tried to keep her expression natural and not give away that she did not. “Well, perhaps my problem is that I need more to read than whatever came my way through the circulating library in a small market town.”
His expression fell. “Your father should have noticed you more, and noticed your curiosity. What a selfish man to keep his books from his daughters for the sake of solitude.”
She should have refuted this criticism of her father; Darcy did not know him.
But who deserved her loyalty? She was a Darcy now, and he was not wrong about her father’s behaviour.
One man did as little for his family as possible, and the other stepped up to search for Lydia when he was completely unconnected to her.
“He should have let me into the library more often,” she agreed, walking away to look at another shelf. “And I am his favourite.”
“I wonder if that is more an indictment of his manner of parenting than you realise.”
Darcy’s skills of observation were both remarkable and a burden. She liked how perceptive he was, but to know how easily he could see how neglected she and her sisters were by both of their parents was mortifying.
“To welcome us into his domain would have welcomed our concerns.” Over her shoulder she added, “Would you do the same, and interest yourself in your wife’s and daughter’s concerns?”
Elizabeth’s voice caught on the word “daughter,” and she pushed away any thought of how that would come about. It would happen someday. Darcy needed an heir to Pemberley, after all. But all the correlating feelings and actions that would accompany it were too complex to think about.
Darcy came up behind her, and she turned around to look at him.
She then realised he was very near to her, and she had to tilt up her head to meet his eye.
His nearness made her heart beat a little fast. It struck her how deeply she wanted to know his answer.
How much care and concern would a man like him truly show the wife he did not choose—and daughters, if he had them?
“I can never care about muslin,” he said carefully, “but I would care about my family, and if that means sharing my library with curious little girls or listening to their youthful heartbreaks or matching their seriousness on whatever topic mattered to them even when I know it is nothing, then so be it.”
Now her heart beat wildly. Darcy then rested his fingers upon her forearm. “I hardly know how to be a husband or a father, but I intend to be an engaged one.”
After he stroked his fingertips against her sleeve three times, he recollected himself. He dropped his hand and moved away.
Whatever his gesture meant, she felt comfortable with him, which suddenly made her feel uncomfortable.
She liked Darcy, wanted to talk with him about anything and everything, but surely it was too soon to feel so at ease with him.
Was it because they were becoming friends, or because he was the only person she had spent any time with since she left her mother’s breakfast room in Ramsgate?
Perhaps it would be a good idea to go to town and widen their circle. If she grew to like Darcy more, it should be for his own sake and not because she had no other option.
“You think we should go to town, don’t you?” she said to him as he paced the centre of the library between one fireplace and the other. “You are too clever for me to have to tell you what could be said about me.”
He nodded, still pacing. “I know. Although my friends will support you, some will be unjust to you. But we cannot hide forever. And if Fitzwilliam and his father think I must put us on display lest I lose the influence of Pemberley House, then the town talk must be worse than I thought. Perhaps it is best to put ourselves on parade now and be done with it.”
“You cannot truly think we will be on parade?” she said, crossing her arms over her chest.
“I will have to answer curious questions, of course, but you will have no trouble being delightful and persuasive. Your powers of conversation will charm everyone.”
Did he have no anxiety about how she would be perceived?
“You will be quizzed about Georgiana, but it will be nothing to what I could endure.” This alliance had all the advantages, as far as the fashionable world was concerned, on her side.
She would be thought mercenary or with upstart pretensions.
“They could say I married you for your money.”
Darcy gave her a long look. “I know you did not set out to trap me, but some will say you did—likely my own family, I warn you. My aunt Lady Catherine wanted me to marry her daughter, and it will not be a pleasant reunion with her.”
“Regardless of her disappointment, I should prepare myself to be judged and found wanting by most of your circle?”
“Not most. Many friends will be happy so long as I appear to be so, regardless of how imprudent our marriage seems.”
“But all of this lives or dies on how well I am received, how I behave, how respectable I seem.” It was a distressing burden, but she saw in Darcy’s eyes he regretted the necessity of it.
“Truly, I do not think it will be difficult. I have complete faith in you.”
Her reputation and success in her husband’s world would in great measure depend on both how she behaved in town and how she was perceived. It filled her with no small amount of anxiety. “I will have every eye on me, Darcy.”
“The weight of public opinion will not entirely be on you. We will both be on display.” She wondered if he believed that or only said it to make her feel better.
Perhaps he had no idea how heavily the burden of reputation and public opinion fell on a woman.
“The appearance of our equal affections could be enough to sway people’s minds.
And when there is nothing scandalous to talk of about us, people’s attention will move on. ”
They would both have to pretend to be enthusiastic about the match.
Although they were reconciled and not bitter, that was not the same as pretending to have married for love rather than from a failed attempt to save Darcy’s sister.
Still, perhaps she could do this. Her stomach twisted at the fear of not being a credit to him, but she could act with good breeding and civility, and be charming to all manner of people.
Darcy watched her and she gave him a mostly confident smile.
“I can act with all the dignity I need to for the sake of your good name.”
“Our good name,” he corrected.
He was right, and that he saw it that way was a comfort. “And I suppose we ought to be seen as though we have nothing to be ashamed of. We can perpetuate the myth we fell in love and ran off together.”