The Weight of What Is Known #2
He crossed to the narrow window and looked out at the headland and the sea beyond it, which was grey and indifferent as it always was, and thought about Georgiana at the pianoforte — not the Georgiana of Webb’s letter, the one who stopped and started and did not eat, but the real one, the one he actually knew, who had wept over Mozart at fifteen because she said the third movement understood something about longing that she could not put into words, and who had argued with him about Byron the previous autumn with a forensic intelligence that had made him want to write to her tutor and ask what on earth he had been doing, and who had sat in the music room at Pemberley two Christmases ago playing carols while the fire burned low because neither of them had wanted the evening to end.
He had weighed this choice against the alternative — her brother convicted of treason, the name stripped, Pemberley gone, the thing their father had built undone in a single proceeding — and he had made the calculation, and the calculation had been correct.
That did not change the fact that his sister at Matlock not eating and asking if there was any chance of a mistake before she permitted herself to grieve.
From somewhere below him, through the thick stone and carried up through an open window, he heard a door.
Not the great hall — the library corridor, if he had the acoustics right. A door, then footsteps, then a barking dog. A bark of greeting, as if the dog had just wedged himself through a door that was meant to be closed and was proud of the feat.
Then he heard her.
Not speaking. Not exactly. A checked uneven sound, small enough that another man might have missed it under the dog and the house and the sea. He did not miss it. Another sound followed, and another, and the meaning of it reached him whole.
She was crying.
He went still at the window.
It was not loud. That was what made it worse. No spectacle in it. No appeal. She was alone below him somewhere in the house, trying not to be heard, and the sea air had carried the sound up to him anyway.
He could do nothing about it. He could not go to her openly without turning one problem into six others.
He could not even call out or send Angus with wildflowers picked from the headland.
He could only stand there with Webb’s letter on the table behind him and listen while the woman he had brought to Aberdeenshire wept where he could not reach her.
Falstaff made one soft, anxious whine. Her voice came after that, low and blurred by stone, not words he could distinguish, only the cadence of someone trying to quiet herself. He braced one hand against the window embrasure as if the stone might hold him up, and found that it could not.
He had done this to her. Not by cruelty.
That had almost made it bearable, in prospect.
If he had been cruel, he could have hated himself cleanly and gone on.
Instead he had made a set of arrangements he could defend point by point, each one rational, each one necessary, and the whole of them had brought her to this — crying alone in his house in the middle of the day and then, come evening, sitting across from him in the dark and speaking with wit because she was too proud to beg comfort from the man who had caused the need of it.
He stood at the window and listened until the house swallowed the sound again, leaving only the sea and the dog and his own pulse beating in his throat.
Angus came up at the usual hour, as he did each morning — fresh water, the previous day’s linen, the report on whatever needed reporting.
Darcy had sorted the arrangement before Elizabeth arrived — Angus up at ten, Mrs MacLeod with meals at the times agreed, nothing that required him to be visible or account for himself to anyone.
He was going over the Aberdeen account when Angus knocked and let himself in. Darcy did not look up.
“The Inverurie timber came in,” Angus said. “Short by four boards. I’ve written tae the factor.”
“Good.”
“The east gate hinge wants replacing before the weather turns.”
“See to it.”
Angus set the water down, collected the linen, and did not move towards the door. This meant there was something else.
“Does the mistress seem settled? Content with the house?”
“Aye,” Angus said. “She went out onto the headland yesterday. Alone. Came back directly — she’d nae dressed for it. This morning she took the dog and went further. Watched her from the stable yard. She was nae troubled by the cliffs.”
Darcy smiled down at the ledgers. She had been in the house two days.
She had been out on the headland both of them.
She would have the whole of the coast road inside a week.
She had walked out on a rainy autumn morning in Hertfordshire three miles to a sick sister’s bedside, and the hem of her dress had been six inches deep in mud, and she had not been one bit the worse for it.
She would make Auchengray’s cliffs her own, and she would make them hers quickly.
“What does the dog look like?” he asked. “I have not seen it.”
“Grey. Lang legs. Muckle great paws on it.”
“I will watch for her to take him out on the headland so I might see him.”