TWENTY-SIX
Longbourn
Elizabeth
Elizabeth woke somewhat lightheaded. She lay still a moment, looking up at the ceiling, and attempted to determine whether the feeling arose more from the previous day’s outing or from the fact that she had lain awake far too long thinking of it.
She concluded it was both, in nearly equal measure, and that together they satisfactorily accounted for the particular warmth which had settled in her chest since approximately four o’clock the previous afternoon and showed no inclination of departing.
She thought at first not to examine it too closely. That resolution lasted approximately three minutes.
She examined it thoroughly before she had finished dressing.
The truth of it proved straightforward enough once she ceased resisting it.
Fitzwilliam Darcy had sat beside her upon a fallen log the previous afternoon and said things he had not quite said, and she had answered them without quite answering them.
The whole of it had settled somewhere in her chest and now produced a most absurd fluttering sensation whenever she allowed herself to think of it directly.
There was no denying it. She liked him. Had liked him for some time — longer, if she were honest. From the moment her father had first spoken of him with that particular dry curiosity he reserved for people who genuinely interested him, she had found herself curious too.
Then she had met him and discovered him considerably more interesting than a single assembly and a careless slight ought reasonably to have permitted.
For several weeks she had told herself it was nothing more than the natural pleasure of conversing with a man who made no effort to ingratiate himself — who held himself apart from people and scarcely troubled himself with civility.
A man who had stopped living in any real sense and yet, in her company, had occasionally forgotten to stop.
A man who, over the course of several weeks, appeared gradually to be forgiving himself for a crime Elizabeth did not believe he had committed, though one she suspected he carried with complete conviction that he had.
That explanation had served tolerably well until she found herself lying awake thinking about the way his expression altered when he laughed and was forced to acknowledge that the pleasure of honest intelligent conversation had never once before deprived her of sleep.
She thought about the common ground. That had been the first outing in which she understood — somewhere beneath the practical considerations of paths and accessibility and Sarah following at her discreet distance — that something between them had begun to alter.
Not dramatically. Not through any singular moment she could properly identify.
Merely the gradual accumulation of his attention, the particular quality of his listening, the way he spoke of Caesar and Pemberley and Bingley’s loyalty with an unguarded warmth so entirely at odds with the man Hertfordshire had constructed from the Meryton assembly that she had found herself revising nearly everything she once believed she understood about him.
Then the Mimram river. Then the old mill beside the bridge. Then the fallen log at the foot of Oakham Mount.
He had revealed more of himself in her presence than she suspected he had shown anyone in two years.
She had watched it happening — the careful reserve lowering fraction by fraction — and understood that it was no performance.
Merely a man who had spent long enough behind walls of his own making, discovering to his evident inconvenience that they did not entirely hold in her company.
As for his condition — she had considered the matter honestly, because honesty was the only method she had ever found worth employing with herself.
It would not be simple. There would be difficulties she could not yet fully anticipate.
Her mother would possess opinions, loudly expressed and at considerable length, and not all of them would prove entirely without foundation.
None of it altered anything.
She had known before Mr. Collins fully opened his mouth that she would refuse him. She had known it with razor-sharp certainty. She knew now, with that same certainty, that had Darcy asked her directly rather than merely asking her to consider the matter, her answer would already have been yes.
She knew it as clearly as she knew anything.
Elizabeth finished dressing, permitted her thoughts to settle somewhere reasonably safe, and went downstairs to breakfast.
She was not surprised to discover her father absent — he had ridden out early upon some estate business and was not expected home before the afternoon.
Elizabeth herself had seen him depart on horseback at approximately six o’clock.
Mrs. Bennet presided over the breakfast table with her customary energy, cautioning her daughters at length upon table manners and their importance in rendering young ladies properly marriageable.
Meanwhile Lydia and Kitty quarrelled over a ribbon.
Mary read. Jane sat beside Elizabeth with the particular look of composed happiness she had worn consistently since the Lucas Lodge ball.
Elizabeth ate her toast and permitted her mother’s voice to pass over her without much engagement.
"You are very far away this morning," Jane said quietly, after a stretch of silence between them.
Elizabeth looked up from her toast. "I am sitting directly beside you."
"Yes. And thinking about someone who is not in this room."
"You mean Papa?" Elizabeth looked back down at her plate. "He is in the fields somewhere, I imagine."
Jane smiled and dropped the subject.
Elizabeth continued her breakfast without further interruption.
She had no intention of discussing it, though Jane had been teasing her regarding Mr. Darcy for nearly three days now.
She spent the remainder of the morning in the parlour with Jane, half attending to her embroidery and half attending to thoughts considerably more absorbing, until the sound of wheels upon the gravel interrupted both.
Elizabeth set down her embroidery and rose from her seat. Could it be Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley again? Her heart leapt at the thought. The gentlemen had not said they would call that morning. Elizabeth crossed to the nearest window and looked out.
The coach upon the drive was not one she recognised.
Large, well-appointed, bearing upon its door a crest she could not clearly distinguish from that distance.
The grandeur of the whole was sufficient to bring Mrs. Bennet to the parlour doorway within approximately thirty seconds of the wheels coming to a halt.
“A most elegant coach,” Mrs. Bennet announced, appearing in the doorway. “It must belong to someone of very great consequence.” She adjusted her cap with considerable urgency. “Jane, sit properly. Lizzy, do something with your hair.”
Elizabeth did nothing with her hair.
By the time Elizabeth turned from her overbearing mother back toward the window, Hill had already received the visitor.
The guest was shown into the parlour a moment later.
She was a tall woman of commanding figure, past sixty, dressed for travelling with the particular authority of someone who had never required the approval of anyone else. Upon entering, she surveyed the room with evident dissatisfaction.
Her gaze passed briefly over Jane, over Mrs. Bennet, and settled upon Elizabeth with a directness that was not entirely comfortable.
“I am Lady Catherine de Bourgh,” said the visitor, her voice decisive and absolute.
The announcement produced precisely the effect one might expect upon Mrs. Bennet, who lost the power of speech for a moment — an occurrence so uncommon that Elizabeth noted it with genuine interest before returning her attention to the visitor.
Elizabeth's first thought was Mr. Collins.
Had something happened to him? She did not think so — surely Charlotte would have heard.
Then, with rather less logic, came the possibility that Lady Catherine was here regarding the rejected proposal.
It made very little sense. Mr. Collins had attached himself to Charlotte within days and the matter was entirely closed.
But it was the only connection Elizabeth could construct between Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Longbourn.
It was a poor explanation, but preferable to none at all.
Mrs. Bennet, recovering both her voice and her composure whilst remaining entirely unconscious of any discomfort in the room, immediately hurried forward.
"What an honour, ma'am — your ladyship, I should say. Pray do sit down. We are so very pleased to receive you. Mr Collins has spoken of you in the most — that is, we have heard so very much that is admirable —"
“Mr. Collins has informed me something of you, madam, and of your husband. I do not suppose he is at home.”
Mrs. Bennet replied in the negative.
Lady Catherine did not sit. Instead, she turned her head slowly from side to side, her eyes assessing every detail of the room.
“I was informed there were five daughters.”
"These are my two eldest. My three youngest left this morning to visit their aunt in town." Mrs. Bennet gestured toward Jane and Elizabeth.
The manner in which her mother visibly sought Lady Catherine’s approval left a bitter taste in Elizabeth’s mouth. First because her father would unquestionably have managed this interview better, and secondly because the woman had yet to explain why she was there at all.
"I shall have to speak to Mr Collins regarding his tendency toward exaggeration," Lady Catherine said, her eyes settling briefly on the unfinished embroidery on the side table. "The grounds might certainly benefit from greater attention and order."
Her father would have had something to say to that. Mrs Bennet, however, was already calling for Hill and refreshments. Lady Catherine declined before Hill had properly appeared.