Chapter Thirty-One
One Good Sonnet
As easy might I from myself depart
As from my soul, which in thy breast doth lie:
That is my home of love
Sonnet 109
“What will happen now?” Elizabeth asked at last.
She could not be sure how long she and Mr Darcy had sat in silence.
He had taken her hand in his when he first took a seat beside her on the bench.
She had not protested, as propriety (and, indeed, self-protection) demanded she should, particularly since neither of them, scandalously, wore gloves.
Instead, she relished the feel of his warm palm pressed against hers, storing up the memory.
“He will go to India. Denny goes with him.”
“Jim Denny?” Why should she be surprised? A moment’s reflection would have told her that George had not acted entirely alone, if she had wrest her thoughts from selfishly dwelling on feeling betrayed. “Oh. Yes, of course. Was it Denny on Saturday?”
“Yes. They both may count themselves very lucky indeed he is a poor shot and I do not pursue them with the full force of the law. They will leave Pemberley before the week’s end, or I will quash what little merciful feeling I have and see them arraigned at the next Assizes.”
She winced, but nodded. Her eyes stung and watered, and she had to set her jaw hard to stop it trembling and to keep the sorrow, grief and betrayal from forcing their way out through a throat that already ached and throbbed.
It would be such a relief to scream, to sob and weep as she had not wept since Papa had died, but all she could do was let her head droop so Mr Darcy could not see her face.
She had hoped beyond all reason her suspicions had been nothing but the idle fancy of a mind half-addled with Dr Barrow’s powders.
Women were trained to display an elegant posture, to cultivate a spine so straight it never touched the chair back, to show off the soft allure of a graceful swan-like neck.
All those times she had been made to hold the backboard or scolded into straightening up, lifting her chin, bringing her shoulder blades together to hold herself erect and make it all look natural and effortless…
Sit up straight, Lizzy, do! Now every lesson was for naught.
Her shoulders curved down and inward, as though encasing her heart in an extra layer of sinew and bone would hold it safe.
“I know.” Mr Darcy’s voice was all gentleness and comfort, showing she had not hidden her hurts as well as she had hoped. “I know, Elizabeth. Do not hold back tears if they will help.”
“I dare not cry.” She pushed the words out. “Once I start, I will not be able to stop.”
After a moment that she used to force back the lump in her throat and bite her lips until they stopped their silly trembling, he spoke again.
“He admitted nothing, but that is only to be expected, I suppose. So, we will put about the story that he goes to India to repair his family’s fortunes after the loss of Waulkmill.
Under happier circumstances, if the story were true, we would farewell him properly, but as it is, he will merely leave quietly, unnoticed.
He wishes to see you before he goes. If you consent, I will permit him to come up to Pemberley. ”
A jab of something, as if she had swallowed glass. Was she one of the reasons for George’s actions? She supposed it must be so, given the proposal of sorts he had made the previous week.
After a long silence he prompted her with, “Elizabeth?”
“I… No. I do not want to see him. I will pray for him because I should, but what he did, what he plotted against you, and against Hugh… That is very hard to forgive.”
“It was clever. Diabolical, in truth. The whispering and pointing to Hugh could have grown into outright accusations, keeping George safe from the hangman’s noose while removing his rival. Pemberley would have fallen into his hands.”
“A betrayal I find so hard to forgive. I cannot fathom it. If I agreed to see George, what could I say? I could not, with my whole heart, tell him he is forgiven. I do not know if I can forgive him.” She swallowed hard.
“I will tell him he may not see you. I do not think it will surprise him.”
“How will I tell my family? George is a brother to them.”
“I will help. You will not have to stand alone and explain it.”
“Their hearts will be broken.” After another silence, she said, “Am I to blame, do you think?”
“Because he wanted Pemberley, in order to marry you?”
“Yes. Before we went to Buxton, he made an offer… or rather… oh!” She sighed.
“Once I told George my life felt as little my own as if it were a kind of parish dole, dispensed to me in small portions. Perhaps I might have built a life with him away from that, even if all he had to offer me was Sparrowhill. Perhaps. The day he declared himself, he carefully delineated all the reasons why he could not yet offer a life better than the one we had. His own life was doled out as much as was mine, a life of duties and obligations to his father, to you Darcys, to Pemberley. It was quite hopeless, and the pity of it was, it did not break my heart the way he wished it to. I did not look on him as a lover, even a star-crossed one. I made it clear to him, that I was not affected in the same manner.” She squirmed in the seat with mortification.
“But the truth is, Mr Darcy, I knew. I knew he felt for me more than affection for a sister. I knew it, and, in essence, I refused him.”
“And for that you think the blame is yours? No. It is not. I do not doubt at all his affection for you is sincere, but you cannot be held accountable for what he did. The betrayal is on his head alone.”
Such betrayal. He was wound into her life, wound into Pemberley. There was hardly a room in the house his shade would not haunt, not a wood or hill he had not walked, not a farm or field he did not know better than he knew himself. And yet he had betrayed it all.
She could do nothing to prevent her tone sound so forlorn and aching with desolation. “I trusted him. We all trusted him.”
“As did I. I depended upon him. I came here plagued with doubt. I doubted I would make a good master when all my skills were aimed at conducting trade negotiations, or averting wars that might damage the king’s interest, not how to farm the land and nurture our tenants.
I doubted my welcome.” He smiled, though it did not look easy.
“I doubted my family, because we knew each other so little, met so seldom, and not at all these past five years while I was abroad. This was not truly home, and all my dependence then was on two people. John Reid, I knew to be a certainty. And George, the one I considered more of a brother than I did Hugh. I swallowed my reservations, the ones I carried from our time at Cambridge. He showed every sign of reformation and I took it on trust. All false. A facade. I am grieved, but a part of me is not surprised.”
“You have lost a friend.”
“I have Reid. Bingley. My cousin Edward Fitzwilliam, whom you will meet one day, and I am sure you and he will deal together famously. You share the same lightness of spirit. I have better, less resentful feelings towards my stepmother, and Hugh and I are committed to tolerating each other and that may come to more in the end… it is not all loss.” He paused, and turned in the seat to look at her more easily.
“Most of all, when I consider my friends, I hope I have you. Despite our unfortunate beginning and my churlish self-importance when I arrived, we have reached a good understanding of each other, I think. I by no means consider you the least of the reasons I look on Pemberley now with a kindlier eye. Quite the opposite.”
She stared, making a strangled, high-pitched noise that she would likely blush for whenever she remembered it.
“Once we talked about how Hugh loved Pemberley as his home, and I did not. When you are asked where is your home, what is your answer?”
“Longbourn,” she said at once. “Though it is lost to me, sometimes I long so hard for it, I do not think my heart will ever be quite whole.”
“Not Pemberley?”
Elizabeth winced, but he was so honest with her, so open, she should not be remiss in returning the compliment. “I have tried not to love Pemberley, but despite my efforts, I cannot help myself. I do love it, even though I am here as a dependent of your stepmother. I cannot expect permanency.”
He stopped short and stared at her. “Elizabeth!”
“It is the fate of women, Mr Darcy, never to own the place where they live. Some of us gain rights through marriage, which is why my poor mother is intent upon marrying off her daughters well, to try and ensure they are not deprived, as she was, of a home. I am very fond of Pemberley, but I dare not hope for more than I have.”
He twisted to angle himself towards her and held out a hand. She took it in her left.
“You are trembling.” His fingers tightened their grip on hers.
“I cannot stop it.” When he tugged on her hand, she raised her eyes to look at him.
“You once told me to tremble in my boots in trepidation because you are a troublesome creature to care for. If I tell you that it is not trepidation, but anticipation and delight, will you grant me the privilege of taking care of you and giving you every opportunity to be as troublesome as you wish, so long as it is here at Pemberley, and here with me?”
“Oh!” said Elizabeth, with a distressing lack of fluency.
For the life of her, she could not breath properly, or think properly, or do anything other than feel her heart hammering under her ribs and stare at him with her mouth open, like the veriest ninnyhammer.
Her ears buzzed. “I am… I do not know… I am not at all the kind of lady I thought you would marry one day. I am not some accomplished, polished society lady. I am poor, and have no connections… I am not beautiful and highborn and educated… I have nothing to offer you.”
“You have everything I want. You are beautiful. More, you are honest, worthy and principled. I do not need more riches, and I have connections enough of my own. Besides, we are connected already. You are cousin to several Darcys, and while I grant you that Hugh can be a trial, my stepmother and Georgiana are unexceptional.”
“And I also bring Lydia and Kitty.”
“What you mean to say is that you bring me four more sisters, and it will be my privilege and honour to count them as my own. Will that help you decide, Elizabeth? Your mother and sisters will always have a home, and your mother may be secure and happy. We can give your sisters much. We will bring them out with Georgiana, and your mother will cease to be anxious—”
“I would not marry you for such considerations!”
“I merely try to make my suit more acceptable.” He pressed her hand.
“Will you at least consider marrying me for other reasons, then? I have come to know myself, you see. Principally, I have come to know that I love you so very dearly. I cannot now imagine Pemberley without you. I cannot imagine walking these grounds without you here to argue with me over Shakespeare or poetry or whatever else you please to oppose me over, just for the joy of debate. Or sitting in my mother’s Gothick folly and admiring the view without you here to admire it with me.
Or visiting tenants without you here to steer me away from causing offence—although, not, I beg you, each visit ending with us the target of a madman on the upper road.
” He paused while she smiled at him, and smiled back.
“I do not need some paragon of society, because most of all, my dearest girl, I cannot imagine any woman other than you seated here in the garden… right here, on this bench with Pemberley behind you, looking at me with those glorious eyes of yours.”
“Oh,” said Elizabeth, again. But this time the warmth in her chest blazed away the buzzing and breathlessness, and if her heart continued to hammer, she at last understood why.
He loved her.
He loved her.
He raised her hand to his lips. “Today, I walked into this garden to find you, and here you are, wrapped in this cloak”—his free hand tugged gently at the edge of the cloak in question—“sitting in front of the house I had inherited and thought of as a millstone, dragging me down… oh, a fine place, as all the guidebooks say, but not my place. My place had been the Canadian woods or the courtyard in Calcutta that was hotter than a blacksmith’s forge before midday.
Not here. Not Pemberley.” He gestured to the house.
“But now I know, seeing you here, that you are the only one who can make Pemberley truly mine at last.”
“We have not known each other so very long…” Her face burned, and she looked away quickly.
“Two and a half months.” His mouth twitched. “I am quite astonished at my own precipitancy. I feel almost reckless.”
Elizabeth could only laugh. She dearly loved to laugh, but for such a long time it had come with more difficulty, requiring more effort. Now it felt free. She twisted in the seat to look him full in the face, relishing how handsome a man he was, how good a man. And hers, if she wanted him.
He raised his eyebrows at her, waiting. And in the end, she nodded and smiled, and everything in her warmed to his look, to the touch of her hand in his, to the tenderness in his eyes.
She moistened her lips, and found the words to tell him she returned his affection. Oh, she most certainly returned it!
“Well, then, Mr Darcy. It appears we are to be reckless in unison.”
For an instant she gloried in how that made him smile, marvelling how well the expression of heartfelt delight suited him, how the look of happiness and peace became him.
He sighed then, as a man might sigh who had been long adrift, and had reached his haven at last. She knew that feeling.
Knew it well. And when he lowered his head and kissed her, the answering warmth inside her burst forth brighter than the sun in splendour.