Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
A MATTER OF MISJUDGMENT
Elizabeth
The note arrived while my knife was stuck in the marmalade pot.
The stationery was fine, written with a hand I did not recognize and addressed to Miss Bennet.
The maid set the salver beside Jane’s plate, and I watched her cheeks pink when she opened it.
Her placid eyes read the contents, her lips moving a fraction while her face did something I had been dreading for days.
It softened, and then she set the note on the table and looked at Mrs. Gardiner—not me, her favorite sister, who she suspected was frowning with disapproval.
“Mr. Darcy writes that he would be honored to escort me to see the Elgin Marbles at Burlington House this afternoon. He asks whether you would care to join the party, Aunt, and bring the children. Or, if that is not convenient, whether you might spare a companion for me.”
Spare a companion. Not Miss Elizabeth, not even your other niece. A companion. I was a chaperone to be spared, like a shawl or a spare umbrella, in case the weather turned. The acceptable Bennet sister had been invited. The other one could come along if convenient.
My knife remained stuck in the marmalade as I reached for a piece of toast, saying nothing.
“How thoughtful,” Mrs. Gardiner said, with a glance at me that held the particular gentleness I had been avoiding since Saturday.
“I should love to attend, but Thomas has been feverish since yesterday, and Rose began coughing at dawn. I cannot leave four children with only the nursemaid to manage, not with two of them unwell.”
“Then I shall decline,” Jane said quietly.
“You shall do nothing of the sort.” Mrs. Gardiner turned to me with an appeasing smile. “Elizabeth, if it would not be too much trouble, would you go?”
“Of course,” I replied, my voice nearly passing for my own.
“Lizzy.” She appealed again. “If you would rather not—”
“I said I would go, and I shall. I will remain five paces behind and well out of earshot, in case any stray insults come my way.”
“Lizzy…” Jane tried to sound exasperated but failed—her happiness too undiminished by me. “Are you certain? You seemed to have squeezed the life out of your toast.”
“It is only an effigy of a certain disagreeable gentleman.” I yanked the knife free and stabbed the toast with marmalade. “There, improved?”
“Lizzy.” She leaned forward, and her voice dropped.
“I know you are concerned about me, and I will not rehash the argument. You may keep Mr. Darcy as the villain of your own private novel if it suits you. I am going to Burlington House, and I should like you beside me, not because I need a chaperone but because I need my sister.”
A pang jabbed me between the ribs. Jane still needed me, and I could hardly let her brave such peril without my barbed wit at the ready.
“I shall be beside you,” I said. “And I shall be civil.”
“That is all I ask.”
“I reserve the right to be civil in my own particular fashion.”
“I would expect nothing less.” The ghost of a smile. The first real one I had seen from her in days, and it cost me, because Jane’s smiles had always been freely given and rarely directed at me with this tender, knowing quality, as though she were the elder sister and I the one who needed minding.
And no, I shall not revise this, as I stomped my way up the stairs to dress in my most matronly and unattractive day dress—a moss green.
Mr. Darcy’s carriage arrived at half past one, the sort that announced itself just by existing on Gracechurch Street. Dark, well-sprung, drawn by matched bays, crest on the door, coachmen in matching livery.
Jane wore her cream muslin and the blue spencer and looked, as Jane always looked, as though she had been painted by someone who understood that beauty need not announce itself. I wore the green for no other reason than to have clothes on my back.
Mr. Darcy waited by the carriage in a dark blue, perfectly tailored coat. He looked exactly as he always did: composed, reserved, and irritatingly tall. He bowed to Jane first, as was proper and entirely expected. Why question the order? I was merely the acceptable companion.
His hand was warm as he helped me into the carriage, his grip firm and as brief as propriety demanded. I settled in and absolutely did not think about his hand.
He took the backward-facing seat, as a gentleman should, while Jane and I sat side by side.
He avoided me, the nearly invisible accessory, and spoke to Jane about the collection, Lord Elgin’s years in Athens, his methods, and, of course, the controversy.
Courteous, attentive, entirely proper—and he did not look at me once, which should not have irritated me, but did.
I stared out the window, relieved that for once, I was not under his scrutiny and found wanting. I was already below his notice, as a disposable companion should be. Perhaps I should have donned a grey governess dress. I doubt he would have noticed.
Burlington House was grand in the way that buildings constructed by people of considerable wealth tend to be: imposing without being warm. The Marbles had been arranged in a gallery on the ground floor, and when we entered, the scale of them stopped me mid-step.
I had read about the Parthenon friezes. I had seen engravings.
Nothing prepared me for the presence of them: the weight of stone carved two thousand years ago by hands that understood something about the human body that no one since had quite recaptured.
The horses were in motion. The riders leaned into the gallop with a freedom that seemed impossible for marble.
The drapery on the female figures fell in folds so fluid that I had to remind myself it was stone and not silk.
Jane stood before a panel of the processional frieze, her face soft with wonder.
Darcy stood beside her, and I watched him watch my sister, and what I saw on his face was not what I had been looking for.
It was almost like the look he gave Bingley when he fretted about Jane and her high fever, whether to call the doctor.
Something careful and restrained, like my sister was a piece of gossamer silk or a fragile, almost transparent teacup.
No, I should not stare and wonder if that was the face of a man in love, measuring every crease in his forehead, every cleared throat. Not because I was indifferent, but because his handsomeness was frankly an affront.
So I followed them from frieze to frieze, image to image, watching because it was my chaperone’s duty to catch every nuance.
At one point, he leaned his head too close to Jane’s, a hairbreadth away, and so I sidled up silently to forestall any impropriety, inadvertently catching his words.
“Miss Bennet, I hope you will forgive me for speaking directly. I mentioned to your uncle that I wished to discuss a matter relating to Mr. Bingley.”
My nerves iced over as I pressed behind a marble column and edged closer, unseen.
“Uncle mentioned it to me privately,” Jane admitted, to my chagrin. Why had she not reassured me Darcy’s purpose was Bingley? My fingers clenched my reticule as I held my breath for what came next.
“Bingley is in London. He has been at his club since the new year, and he has not been his usual self. He is not staying with his sisters, and I do not believe he is aware that you are in town.”
“He does not know?”
“His sisters have not seen fit to inform him.”
“And you?” Jane’s gasp echoed off the frieze beside her, depicting a procession of young women, their faces serene, their steps measured. “You are telling me this because you mean to tell him.”
“I believe you deserve to know. And yes, I mean to speak to him. This week, if possible, unless you would prefer otherwise.”
“I… thank you, Mr. Darcy. Do as you please,” Jane replied, causing me to roll my eyes and huff.
If she wished for Bingley to know, she must exert herself instead of hiding behind what was proper and correct.
Yes, a lady did not importune herself and urge a gentleman to speak on her behalf, but neither should she defer the decision to Darcy.
“Miss Bennet, I believe we are holding up the procession.” He darted his gaze in my direction, catching my exasperation before I pretended to fidget with my reticule, grumbling about a missing shilling.
Jane did not seem to notice, her attention on the gallery, her smile as serene as it was the day Bingley’s carriage departed from Netherfield.
I walked away from them. The Marbles drew me, and the conversation was too private for a chaperone who was coming apart at the seams. I drifted along the gallery, past the metopes with their tangled centaurs and Lapiths, past fragments of pediment sculpture, until I stopped before a piece set apart from the others: horse heads emerging from a broken base, their necks straining forward, their mouths open, their eyes wild with effort.
They were Selene’s horses, I knew from my reading, the team that had pulled the moon across the sky all night, and they were magnificent and exhausted and still, after two thousand years, in motion.
I felt for the horses—creatures used for our comfort, never free, driven to exhaustion. I stared at them, almost hearing their stuttered heartbeats and aching breaths, when my own heart jolted at a voice beside my ear.
“They have been pulling the moon across the sky since midnight. I think they have earned their fatigue.”
“I feel a certain kinship,” I mused, frozen in place. “Like I have been pulling an unforgivable weight.”
“I should have thought you were the sort of woman who sets down burdens rather than carrying them.”
“You should have thought wrong.” I did not turn. If I turned, he would be close, and I would have to look into his face, when I was not confident in my ability to do so. “Some burdens are not the kind one sets down, Mr. Darcy. They are the ones inherited.”
“Yes.” His voice shifted, dropped half a register into something less polished and more genuine. “I understand inherited weight rather well.”
I glanced at him then, because the honesty in his tone had ambushed me.
He was not looking at the horses. He was looking at the plinth beneath them, at the fractured stone, at the place where the sculpture had been broken from its original setting and carried across the sea to sit in an English gallery and be admired by people who had no part in making it.
“Do you think they belong here?” I asked.
“No.” He said it without hesitation. “They were carved to be seen against an open sky, a hundred feet above the ground, in Athenian light. What we are looking at is a magnificent theft.”
“And yet you brought us to see them.”
“I brought you to see something extraordinary, even if it is in the wrong place.” He paused. “Things taken from where they belong can still be beautiful. They simply carry the knowledge of displacement, and that knowledge changes the way one looks at them.”
I did not know if we were still discussing marble.
The gallery was quiet around us, the other visitors having moved to the processional frieze, and the horses strained against their broken plinth as though the next breath might free them.
Darcy stood beside me, his hands clasped behind his back, standing with me, looking at something that moved him.
No pretense, no performance. And the void left a place I had no defense against.
“I owe you an observation, Mr. Darcy.”
“That sounds perilous.” A corner of his mouth moved.
“I observed that you spoke to my sister about Mr. Bingley.”
“Yes, and?”
“Well, I might have misjudged you, and I suppose I must brush that particular speck from my pelisse.”
His lips moved into a grin. “Believe me, Miss Elizabeth, I have been keeping my valet busy.”
“And I commend you for seeing the goodness of my sister. How she did not deserve to be ignored and snubbed. You were there, weren’t you?”
He kept his hands behind his back as we moved to the next display—of what, I could not say, since my gaze was fixed on Darcy’s profile.
“I had the misfortune of witnessing it, but let us not discuss it for her sake.” He turned and looked directly at me, and whatever he saw—the uncertainty, the grudging acknowledgment, the complicated mess of feelings I was failing to hide—made him bold, perhaps.
“Miss Elizabeth. I should like to believe that your opinion of my motives has improved.”
“Marginally, and I shall have you know that I do not upgrade my opinions lightly.”
“Then you are more like me than you believe.” He offered his arm, and stupid me, I took it, feeling its solidity and strength.
“We should rejoin Jane,” I quipped. “What kind of chaperone am I to lose sight of my charge?”
“The best kind, no doubt.” His tone was all seriousness, but I couldn’t be sure if he was teasing me or dismissing me.
I fell into step beside him, and we walked toward the entrance where Jane waited, calm and luminous. I let go of Darcy as if his arm were molten iron. He then offered his arm to Jane, and we returned to our proper places, Jane glancing at me with her usual concern.
The carriage ride was pleasant, for Jane and Darcy, who conversed freely about Bingley—how he had spent his Yuletide and the miserable months where Miss Bingley and Mrs. Hurst pushed him to attend balls and parties while he did not appear his usual cheerful self, and how worried Darcy was for his friend.
It was thus settled that Bingley should request permission through Mr. Gardiner and that Darcy would step back.
I realized I had utterly misjudged him, blamed him for the separation, and it made my heart sick to think I had turned my pride into a campaign against the man who had bridged the gap between my sister and his friend.
He handed us down at Gracechurch Street with impeccable courtesy. He bowed to Jane and said, “I shall keep my word, Miss Bennet.” He bowed to me, and his hand held mine a breath longer than the descent required.
“I hope the horses were worth the visit, Miss Elizabeth.”
“They were extraordinary,” I said, and was appalled to hear the truth in my voice, bare and unprotected.
“I thought you would see it so,” he said, quietly enough that Jane, already at the door, could not have heard.
As I walked into the house, I thought of Selene’s horses—hauled from their own bright sky to strain forever against a broken stone in a borrowed gallery, beautiful and entirely out of place.
I had carried my certainty about Mr. Darcy a great distance, and somewhere on the road it had come loose from the setting that once gave it sense.
Whether it was the lovelier for the displacement or only the harder to look upon, I could not yet say.
Most inconvenient, to be moved by marble.