XXXVII Three Good Reasons
XXXVII
Three Good Reasons
She walked when she could not read, and today she could not read, so she walked.
The headland in November was a different country from the headland in July.
July had been enormous and pale, the sea almost gentle.
November was grey all the way down — grey sky meeting grey water with no discernible horizon between them.
The wind off the water cut through everything she was wearing without asking permission.
Falstaff ran ahead on the cliff path, large and ridiculous and entirely happy.
She watched him and was glad of him and thought about money.
Five thousand pounds for Mary, Kitty, Lydia. Ten thousand for Jane, and another ten settled on her. Plus whatever had been paid to release her uncle from the bonds.
She had known about the settlements since before the wedding — part of the arrangement, the provision that made it possible for her to accept the proxy offer with something other than desperation.
She had not thought carefully about the sum at the time.
She had been thinking about Thomas Sibley and whether a blind marriage to an anonymous Scottish baron constituted a better option.
The answer had been yes. She had signed.
Twenty-five thousand pounds was not a modest sum.
It was not an extraordinary one, for a man of significant means.
But it was not Auchengray money. She knew the Auchengray accounts tolerably well by now — not because he had shown them to her but because she had found the estate ledgers in the library.
The barony was comfortable. It was not twenty-five thousand pounds comfortable.
It was not five hundred pounds in a single disbursement comfortable, let alone twenty-five thousand.
Someone else had funded the settlements.
Someone who had twenty-five thousand pounds and was willing to spend them on women he had never met.
The solicitor had said that the Baron of Auchengray had heard reports of her character — which she had thought at the time was the polite formula a solicitor offered when he meant the matter is concluded, do not press the point.
She had thought it then. She did not think it now.
Reports of her character in the right hands was not boilerplate. It was selection. It was a man who chose the second sister, the one with a temper, over the elder, prettier one, and would not state his reasons.
But some of them were clear enough. Five thousand pounds for Jane would not have drawn her out of Blackwood’s reach. Ten would. Whoever had set those figures had known what Blackwood was and how much it would take to outbid him.
He had also discerned that Jane would not have survived this marriage. Jane would have withered in the dark, refusing to ask the questions and refusing to push back, and the silence would have closed around her until there was nothing left to find.
Whoever had picked Elizabeth Bennet for this had picked her because of the things in her temperament that would let her live in it. He had been right. He had been four months of evenings at this table right.
Which raised a further difficulty. Had George Carlisle been in want of a wife at all?
A man in want of a wife went about it differently — through introductions, through visits, through the ordinary social mechanisms by which a baron with twenty-five thousand pounds might have been spoiled for choice in any drawing-room in the kingdom.
A man in want of a wife did not, by preference, marry a stranger sight unseen by a proxy offer from a tower house in Aberdeenshire.
Either he had wanted a wife and had gone about it in the strangest possible way, or he had not in the first place wanted a wife and had wanted, instead, the rescue of two specific women from two specific men.
In which case, the marriage was the means by which the rescue had been effected, and the wife was the consequence of the rescue, not its object.
Which would suggest a man who had reason to know Sibley and Blackwood, and to act against them, and to have at his command twenty-five thousand pounds with which to do it.
But no… she had asked him that once, bluntly, and he had answered with what sounded like honesty. He had no enemy in Sibley or Blackwood. So, it was the rescue of the hare, not the thwarting of the hound he had sought. Who could possibly have known enough of her to interpose himself?
And it still did not answer for the darkness and the whisper.
There was a voice under it that he was protecting. She had caught real fragments of it, enough to begin to sense the form of it. But his discipline was… well, it was beyond what a common man could command.
A man in the throes of passion cried out.
At least, she assumed so on the evidence of her own conduct, since she could hardly govern her own voice in such a moment, and a husband intent on her pleasure was not in any position to refuse her any sound he might have given her.
Her husband did not. Her husband let escape only the breath of him, the shudder of him, the inarticulate gasps that meant he was past speaking — every sound, every time, and never the voice underneath.
He had mastery of himself even then. He could feel the cry coming and silence it before it left him.
But still, she had the depth of what his throat could produce. The resonance of it. The chest behind it.
She had heard that resonance before.
Not in a dark room. In a room with firelight and other people, and no reason to attend.
Hertfordshire — she was fairly certain now.
She had not liked the man she was now assembling from evidence.
She had found him cold, and she had been too busy being annoyed by his coldness to attend to the pitch of his voice when she had had it in front of her.
Mr Darcy.
Good heavens, no!
It could not be. It could not possibly be. He was dead!
Mr Collins had told her so himself, standing in the morning room at Longbourn with the deeds of the house in his coat and his face arranged in the offended grandeur of a clergyman whose patroness had suffered a personal calamity, and she could not have invented the man’s pomposity if she had tried.
Then Colonel Fitzwilliam, weeks later, broken on the steps in Cheapside — broken in a way no man could perform, the kind of grief that had not yet had time to become dignified.
Two witnesses, each in a different cast, neither of them lying.
He was dead. He had been dead since April.
A man who had been dead since April could not be sitting across from her at a small table in Aberdeenshire whispering about a fence!
And he would not have done it if he were not.
He had not wanted her! He had pronounced her barely tolerable in a Meryton ballroom, and he had stood through two months in Hertfordshire scarcely speaking to her, and at Rosings, he had borne her presence with the civility one extended to an unwelcome relation of the hostess.
He had not wanted her. He had not wanted her in any room she had ever shared with him.
He could not possibly have wanted her this much!
No, no no!
Oh.
Oh, God.
She had taken this man to her bed. Nearly a dozen times, she had taken him, and lain in his arms afterwards like the veriest besotted fool. She was worse than Lydia.
The things he had done to her… that she had done to him…
She had thought more than once that she would not be half so daring in her dark bed if she had to look him in the eye in the morning, trying to reassemble her dignity before one who had known her utterly undone.
Who had rendered her so himself, and permitted her to do the same to him. To think that man might be…
Mr Darcy.
Mr Darcy of Pemberley, who had pronounced her barely tolerable. Mr Darcy, who had looked askance at her family and probably kept Mr Bingley from offering for Jane. That Mr Darcy.
The man whose hand she had held at supper last night and whose mouth had pressed against the back of her hair this morning while she pretended to be asleep. The man whose face she had been tracing under her fingers for seven weeks.
Darcy. No. No, it was not possible!
She did not move. The wind off the water did not move her. Falstaff bounded thirty feet ahead, ridiculous and pleased with himself, and she stood on the cliff path with the name in her ears and could not, for some seconds together, do anything else.
Then her mind, which had never permitted itself to be governed for long, came back to her. He cannot have done it.
The Mr Darcy she had known would no more have arranged twenty-five thousand pounds and a tower house in Aberdeenshire than he would have crossed a ballroom to ask her to dance a second time.
He would not have spent four months at a small table teaching himself her mind.
He would not, on any earth she had ever lived in, have sent her a large, clumsy dog.
And the man who had come to her in the dark — patient, attentive, generous past anything she had been led to expect of married life by anyone who had been in a position to instruct her, with a passion she had not known a husband was capable of giving to a wife — was not, could not be, the cold man who had stood in Charlotte’s drawing room at Hunsford, refusing to take a chair until he had been pressed three times.
And yet, some man had done all of those things. And the resonance under the whisper was Hertfordshire. And the half-laugh on her wedding night had been a man startled by her wit. And…
She did not finish the sentence.
She turned for home. She had until supper.
Falstaff came bounding back. She put her hand on his head and walked into the wind.