The Nature of Trust
II
Elizabeth had known for the past quarter-mile that she was no longer alone.
She did not look back. She kept her pace and her eyes on the path ahead, gave him no encouragement whatsoever, which had not discouraged him at all the first time, and showed every sign of failing to discourage him again now.
The footsteps behind her were unhurried, deliberate, and closing.
His legs were considerably longer than hers, and he was not a man who could be outwalked.
She had risen early to avoid this very thing.
“Miss Bennet.”
She stopped. Turned. Arranged her face into something that would pass for pleasant.
He was perhaps twenty yards back, hat in hand, coat dark against the grey morning, and he looked — as he had the first time, a thing she had refused to own — as though the park suited him in a way that Rosings’ drawing room did not.
Less contained. Less careful. He covered the remaining distance with the ease of long habit — he had walked these paths since boyhood, she supposed — and came to a stop at a distance that was perfectly correct and somehow still closer than she would have chosen.
“Good morning, Mr Darcy,” she said.
“Good morning.” He fell into step beside her without being invited, which she was becoming accustomed to. “You are abroad early.”
“I generally walk in the mornings.” She had told him this.
On Tuesday. When he had appeared on this same path at this same hour, he walked with her for the better part of an hour.
She had supposed it to be an accident of timing, easily corrected by a subtle communication of her routine, but then it happened again on Wednesday and once more on Friday, and she had spent the subsequent afternoon trying to decide what to make of it.
She had not decided.
“The weather is better today,” he said.
“It is considerably better,” she agreed. “On Tuesday, I was fairly certain the clouds meant to come down and join us on the path. It would have made the conversation rather crowded.”
“Indeed,” he said, after a moment.
Above them, the oaks were just coming into leaf, thin and pale, the light through them the watery gold of early April that never quite committed to warmth.
A wood pigeon called from somewhere to the left and was answered from somewhere further away.
Elizabeth breathed the cold morning air and waited to see what he would do next.
He let the silence stand longer than she expected. He never had been skilled in the art of conversation.
“How does your friend find herself settled?” he asked at last. “The parsonage seems very much hers already, from what I could see when we called.”
Elizabeth suppressed a grimace. It was a rephrasing of the same question he had asked on Wednesday and again on Friday.
“Charlotte has always been capable. I do not think any house would resist her for long — they know when they have met their match. Mr Collins, of course, is a great asset to the parish.”
“He is very attentive to his duties,” Darcy said, each word chosen for what he could say with a straight face.
“Very attentive,” Elizabeth agreed, with equal care. “I do not think Lady Catherine need have any apprehensions on that front.”
“None whatsoever.”
They walked. The wood pigeon called again and was not answered this time, and Elizabeth thought about Mr Collins’ most recent address over breakfast, which had concerned the proper alignment of the salt cellars at Rosings and had lasted considerably longer than the subject warranted.
Much to her present despair, Darcy’s tone on the subject of Mr Collins’ attentiveness had been one of the more eloquent things she had heard all week.
“And Miss Darcy?” she asked, because it was the natural question, and she had not yet asked it this week. “I hope she is well.”
“She is. She is at Matlock for Easter, with my aunt and uncle.” He said it with a care she could not quite account for — not reluctance exactly. Something more guarded than that. “She would send her regards, I am certain, if she knew you were here.”
“I should be very glad of them.” She glanced at him. “Miss Bingley spoke of her accomplishments a great deal last autumn — her pianoforte especially. With considerable feeling.”
“Miss Bingley is generous in her praise of Georgiana.”
“She is generous in her praise of a great many things connected with Derbyshire,” Elizabeth said pleasantly, and left it there.
A motion passed at the corner of his mouth, gone before she could study it.
They walked. The park curved south, and the oaks gave way to open ground, the long slope of the lawn running down towards the ha-ha, where the manicured lawns yielded at last to open parkland. The whole of it was still damp from yesterday’s rain.
“My sister Jane was in London for some weeks this winter,” Elizabeth said.
She kept her voice easy, as one mentions an unremarkable fact.
“I wondered — did you happen to see her there? I know Miss Bingley and Mrs Hurst encountered her once or twice, though I believe the acquaintance was not much pursued on either side.”
His cheek seemed rather more rigid than it had a moment ago. “I did not. I have been much occupied with business for the early part of the winter.”
“Ah.” She nodded. “She is still in town, as it happens — we are to travel back to Longbourn together when Maria and I come away from Hunsford. My father writes that he is most eager for our return.”
A puddle lay across the path; Darcy’s hand came briefly to her elbow, turning her towards the drier side, and was gone. She took the gallantry and refused to be turned by it. She had a point to make, and he would hear it. “As I was saying, all the family are anxious to have us home again.”
It was a perfectly placed remark. Not an invitation, exactly — more in the nature of a door left slightly ajar, the kind that a well-bred man, finding himself standing before it in polite conversation, would feel some obligation to open.
She had placed it deliberately. From the very slight pause before he spoke, she was fairly certain he was aware of it too.
“I hope your family are all in good health,” he said.
“They are, I thank you. My mother’s nerves are perhaps not what one would wish, but they have been a faithful companion to her for many years, and I do not suppose they mean to desert her now.
” She kept her expression entirely guileless.
“My father is very well. My younger sisters are in excellent spirits, as younger sisters generally are when there is nothing in particular to occupy them. Jane had a wretched cold through January — nothing serious, but she felt it considerably — and is only quite herself again now.”
“I am glad to hear she is well again. London in winter is not always kind.” He said it with the same careful neutrality he had applied to Mr Collins’ parochial attentiveness.
“It is not,” Elizabeth agreed. “Though Jane would never say so. She is remarkably resilient — one of her finer qualities.” She let a breath of silence do its work. “The neighbourhood will be very glad to have her home. She has been much missed.” She glanced at him sideways, entirely pleasantly.
“I imagine so.”
“As has Mr Bingley, I understand. There has been some hope that he might return to Netherfield for the summer.”
The path was straight ahead of them, and the morning was very quiet. He was several strides before answering.
“I do not think it likely,” Darcy said. “Bingley is fixed in London at present. There is a Miss Harrington — her father is in timber, very considerable fortune — he has been attending her all winter. He seems quite serious in the matter.”
Jane had spent two months in London. Had called on Miss Bingley twice.
Had been received as a stranger might be received, politely, briefly, and not invited to return.
Had written home about it in three lines, and then in the next letter three more lines that said even less, and Elizabeth had read both letters, knew exactly what they said, and had not spoken of it to anyone.
A timber merchant’s daughter.
She did not know if Darcy sounded pleased with himself or if she was only disposed to hear it that way.
She suspected the latter and could not rule out the former.
She could not rule out, either, that he was lying outright — that there was no Miss Harrington, that this was one more convenience arranged to serve his own ends, that he had never wanted his friend within ten miles of Jane Bennet and had found a tidy way to say so without saying so at all.
She had no proof of that. She had only the memory of Bingley’s face at the Netherfield ball and Jane’s face the morning Miss Bingley’s note arrived, and a cold, hardened certainty that what had happened between those two moments had not happened without assistance.
“I see,” she said.
“Bingley forms attachments readily.” She could not tell whether he was offering this as comfort or as information or only filling the silence he had made. “He is a man of warm feeling. He does not always—” he stopped.
“He does not always follow through,” Elizabeth said.
“That is not what I—”
“No.” She smiled at the path. “I am sure it is not.”
The wood pigeon called again from somewhere behind them now, and a robin answered it from the hedgerow to the right — that thin bright thread of sound that early April in Kent seemed to produce at every turning.
“I find,” she said, after a while, “that the most instructive thing about a person is not the company they keep but how they treat those the world values less than themselves. It tells one a great deal more than drawing rooms generally permit.”
His eye went to her. She felt the heat of it on her cheek, but kept her gaze on the path.
“An interesting principle,” he said.
“I have been thinking about it a good deal lately. I was thinking, as it happens, of Mr Wickham.”
“Were you?”
“I found him open, and frank, and—” she selected the word with care— “not at all what I might have expected, given what one hears of his history.”
“And what does one hear of his history?”
“That he was your father’s favourite. That he was disappointed of a living your father intended for him.” Her eye was on his face. “And I was present in Meryton when you met him on the street. I saw what passed between you.”
His jaw tightened. “Whatever you observed on that occasion—”
“I observed that the encounter was not pleasant. For either of you.” She waited. “He explained it afterward. You have not.”
“Wickham is not what he appears.” The name came out stripped of everything but the fact of it, and underneath the fact was something considerably hotter than she had expected. “I cannot say more than that.”
“Cannot, or will not?”
He turned a sharp look on her. “There are people who would suffer for my speaking plainly on this subject. Innocent people.” The words came as though pulled rather than offered. “There is a matter of decency — of protection — that I cannot set aside simply because you require me to.”
“I see.” She tilted her head. “So, I am to accept that you are protecting someone. I am to ask no questions about whom, or from what, or whether your account of the matter bears any resemblance to Mr Wickham’s.
I am simply to revise my opinion of a man I have spoken with at length, on the basis of your authority alone.
You will forgive me if I find that arrangement somewhat unequal. ”
“Miss Bennet—”
“No, no. You have decided what I can know and what I cannot. What I can bear and what I cannot.” There was considerably more she wanted to say — three or four observations forming themselves at the back of her teeth with considerable force. She drew breath to say the first of them—
And saw Colonel Fitzwilliam coming along the upper path, fifty yards away, raising a hand in greeting.
She looked back at Darcy. His jaw was set, his colour up, his eyes on her with an intensity she had no immediate use for.
“Mr Darcy.” She dropped her voice. “Colonel Fitzwilliam is a man of considerable perception. If he reaches us and finds us wearing such heroic expressions of injury, he will suppose a duel has already taken place. He will ask what it was, and then we will both have to pretend we were discussing the Hunsford road, and I have heard quite enough about that road to last me the remainder of the visit.”
He blinked.
“If you could manage to look as though you have been enjoying the morning rather than losing an argument, I think we should both find the next ten minutes considerably easier.”
The set of his jaw eased, his shoulders dropped. His eye held hers an instant with an expression she could not entirely read; then he turned towards Fitzwilliam and raised a hand in greeting.
She turned with him.
She was, she found, almost smiling herself, which was irritating, and she declined to examine why.
By the time Fitzwilliam reached them, the morning had righted itself entirely. The three of them walked back towards Rosings in perfectly good order; the conversation turned to the Hunsford road; and nothing that had just been said was said again.