XXXVII Three Good Reasons #2
She had been listening to him since he came in the door, and she had nothing she had not already had on the headland.
The man across the small table from her in her bedchamber, eating his soup, talking to her about the most mundane of domestic arrangements — all of him at her disposal in the dark, and none of it sufficient to put the name down or to take it up.
He was on the north fence again — Angus had told him about its frost-heaved post on the seaward end, the question of whether to reset it before the ground hardened or wait until spring, the opinion of the elder herd boy, the opinion of the herd boy’s grandmother.
He had been on it for some minutes. She had been letting him.
“You have been very dutiful with that fence.”
“It is a great deal of fence to be serious about.”
“You have not seen it.”
“I have heard about it for a quarter of an hour.”
“Then you have only heard about a third of it.”
She heard Falstaff give a small, contented noise from somewhere near his ankles.
“That dog,” she said, “has been leaning on your leg through the whole of our supper, which I do not think he has been once since you sent him to me. I am compelled to suspect a conspiracy.”
“He is a very disciplined dog.” The whisper had the deadpan in it that so perfectly echoed the Netherfield drawing room, and which, the longer she dwelt on it, was the worst piece of evidence she had against the man she was being asked to believe he was.
“He is a very bribed dog.”
“That is a slander against a household member who cannot answer for himself.”
“Then I shall answer for him.” She set down her spoon and addressed the dark below the table-cloth in the gravest voice she could summon. “Sir Falstaff, do you confess to having received favours below the cloth?”
Falstaff, hearing his name, gave the tail-thump that was the most useful confession in the world.
She heard him shift slightly. The dog had laid his head on his knee, she thought, perhaps both paws too, the way he sometimes did at the end of an evening when his master had been generous with his fork.
“I have been attempting to teach him stoicism. We are not making rapid progress.”
She had been smiling for some moments without having decided to. She heard her own breath gone uneven with it, and could not, for the life of her, govern the next thing she said.
“The teacher is not at all what one would call a stoic. You have just been induced into a confession by your own dog.”
“I was not induced. I was betrayed.”
“By a stoic?”
He made a small huff. “I retract the curriculum.”
Her hand was still on the stem of the wine glass. It could not be him. Mr Darcy of Pemberley had not joked. The man at the small table four feet from her had just been caught in some foolishness by his own dog and had let her tease him into a laugh. The two facts could not coexist in the same man.
Unless the man at Netherfield had been someone she had not been permitted to see, who had been there all the same.
Darcy.
She knocked it down. She had spent two hours on a cliff knocking it down. He had taken Bingley out of Hertfordshire because Bingley had formed an attachment to her sister, and he would have wanted nothing to do with any of the Bennets.
She let the laughter settle, and she gave him a quarter-minute of the sort of silence supper had taught them was not unfriendly, and then she picked up the next thing on her plate and did the most ordinary thing she could think to do.
“I had a letter from my sister Kitty today.”
“Was she well?”
“Tolerably. The letter is older than it looks; Kitty wrote a fortnight or more ago, by the date on it, and the post was held up somewhere south of the border by weather, so the news must be older still. Kitty has had a letter from Maria Lucas — they were our neighbours in Hertfordshire. You have heard me speak of Maria, who travelled with me to Kent for Easter last spring. Maria has had news of her elder sister Charlotte, who is the friend I have spoken of often. I had not had a letter from Charlotte herself since the spring, because my cousin Mr Collins, who is her husband, took possession of my father’s house at the time of the entail and has not been disposed to let her write to me since. ”
“I am sorry to hear it.”
“You have heard so much from me that is sorry to hear that I begin to feel I have run my entire life on a pension of your sympathy.”
“It is, as I have said, generously allowed.”
“I am grateful for it.” She took a bite of her fish and chewed for a moment. “Maria’s news, however, is not sorry. Charlotte has been delivered of a daughter.”
The whisper did not answer her at once.
She was not certain, the first heartbeat afterward, that she had heard anything at all.
The breath had come in shorter than it should have, perhaps, or the breath had not come at all for a count she did not entirely trust herself to have measured.
She was reaching, she knew that. She had been reaching all day.
It might have been a man considering the proper response to a small piece of domestic news from a household he had never met.
It might have been any number of things, and she could not know which, but she had been listening to him for weeks now, and what she had just heard was something she had never heard from him.
“I am glad to hear of the child.”
The deadpan was gone out of it. What had replaced the deadpan was a feeling he had not given her at the table tonight, and the change itself was the cleanest piece of evidence she had heard from him all evening.
“And I am sorry,” she countered, “for the lady’s connection.
Mr Collins is my father’s cousin, and I knew him very ill before he became master of Longbourn, and not better since.
He has the living at Hunsford from a great patroness named Lady Catherine de Bourgh, of whom no description of mine could do justice.
I saw Rosings, her estate, in the spring, and walked the dullest lane in Kent every morning, and conceived a permanent dislike for Easter. ”
There. If anything might provoke some sort of sputter or rise in his breath, it might be the mention of Lady Catherine.
But his whisper was perfectly neutral. “That sounds restful.”
“It was nothing of the sort. The parsonage was as full of Lady Catherine as the great house at the top of the lane. I think the autumn rain has now been added to her grievances. I have it on excellent authority.”
“Your authority being?”
“Maria, by way of Kitty. Charlotte’s view of the lane has not improved with weather, and her opinions on Lady Catherine are much the same.”
“I am sorry to hear of it.”
“You are sorry to hear of the lane or of Lady Catherine?”
“I suppose I must divide the sorrow between the two.”
“You have a remarkable economy of sympathy.”
“Such a thing must be rationed.”
She laughed. “Have you been to Kent? If you can ignore my account, which is complicated by other connections, it is rather a pleasant part of the country.”
“I have been over a great deal of England in the course of my life.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It is the only answer I have for you tonight.”
The whisper had not faltered through Maria or Mr Collins or Lady Catherine or the parsonage or the lane or a single thing she had laid out for him in the last three minutes.
Either there was nothing in any of it that meant anything to him, or he had learned to prepare himself against her, and his discipline had held.
The discipline had held everywhere except at delivered of a daughter.
And delivered of a daughter was a piece of news at which any number of men would have caught their breath, for any number of reasons she could not begin to enumerate, and she had no business making the foundation of her entire investigation rest on a single short breath she might or might not have heard from a man speaking in a whisper four feet from her in the dark.
It could not be Fitzwilliam Darcy.
But then… Why else had he been intercepting her on those paths at Rosings?
Seven or eight mornings, perhaps. The same lane.
The same hour. She had decided at the time that he had been bored, that the lane had suited him, that he had been condescending to her in the way he was condescending to everyone — and any of those was true, and any of those had been reason enough — and the man four feet from her in the dark, who would not now answer whether he had been on a lane in Kent in April, was not — could not be —
The whisper had stopped. He had heard her not pick up the wit again, in the way he had been hearing every small alteration in her for two months together; he was hearing this one now.
“You are tired,” he said.
“I am.”
He rose. He came round the table, and he was at the door of the room, and he was about to kiss her good night.
She caught his sleeve.