Two #2
“No, I do not think, Miss Elizabeth. I am merely reacquainting myself with an old friend.” He met her eyes. “I think it is very polite indeed.”
A small smile spread along her lips. It was barely there, and it ached in muscles she had not used in months. “If you say so, Mr Darcy.”
They reached the street. Conduit Street was busy—carriages, pedestrians, a woman selling violets from a basket—and Elizabeth blinked in the sunlight as if she had just emerged from a cave. She had been inside that grey room for two hours. The world outside it seemed offensively bright.
A pack of street urchins came barrelling around the corner, all elbows and shrieks, chasing something—a dog, a rat, each other, it was impossible to tell.
Mr Darcy stepped sideways, putting his body between Elizabeth and the oncoming trouble.
His hand came to her elbow, steadying, and the urchins streamed past them.
He did not remove his hand immediately. He guided her across the street to the tea shop—a small, quiet establishment, frequented by clerks’ wives and ladies’ companions. He held the door and pulled out her chair at a table by the window. He ordered tea and a plate of toast and butter.
The tea arrived. Elizabeth wrapped her hands around the cup because the warmth was a small mercy, and small mercies were not to be wasted.
Mr Darcy did not touch his.
“We are both in a predicament, Miss Elizabeth,” he said, “and I think we could help each other.” He laid his hands flat on the table, palms down, as though steadying himself.
“I am in need of a governess. You are in need of a governess’s position.
The mathematics, as I see them, are not complicated. ”
Elizabeth set down her cup. “Pardon me, Mr Darcy. You are aware of my social and financial circumstances? If you found them lacking seven years ago, I assure you, these days both are in tatters.”
He did not flinch. She had expected him to—had half dreaded it, but it never came.
“I am aware, Miss Elizabeth.” His voice was quiet and level.
“But it is of no consequence. You are a genteel-bred woman, with impeccable education, cleverness, and wit. These are qualities I should like to instil in my daughter.” He hesitated for a second.
“She has no mother. She has had a procession of competent women who have taught what they could of her letters and deportment.
They left at the earliest opportunity. She does not need another competent woman.
She needs... “ He stopped, fascinated by his own gloved hands on the table. “She needs someone extraordinary.”
Elizabeth’s throat constricted. She picked up her cup, commanding her hands to stop shaking.
“You flatter me, Mr Darcy.”
“I am not in the habit of flattery, Miss Elizabeth. As I believe you once pointed out to me, at considerable volume.”
She laughed and shook her head. He had just referenced the worst night of their entire acquaintance with, if she was not mistaken, humour. Mr Darcy. She had not known he possessed any.
“Very well.” She set her cup down with a steadiness she did not feel. “Let us discuss terms.”
She straightened in her chair. If they were going to conduct business, she would do it properly.
She had spent years learning that sentiment bought nothing, while practicality bought bread.
She was not about to forget the lesson now, regardless of how unsettling it was to negotiate her own worth with a man she had once brutally rejected.
“Fifty pounds per annum,” she said. She did not blink nor look away.
Fifty pounds was bold—outrageous, even, for a woman with no references and a surname that could clear a drawing room in seconds.
But Elizabeth had learned something useful in the years since her fall: if you are going to gamble, gamble high.
You will lose either way, so you might as well lose spectacularly.
Mr Darcy’s expression did not change.
“One hundred,” he said.
Elizabeth’s cup halted midway to her lips. She set it down again, very carefully, because her hands had developed an opinion about one hundred pounds per annum and were expressing it through trembling.
“Mr Darcy. That is...” She paused, recalibrated, and chose her next words. She could not afford to say the wrong ones. “That is a very generous figure.”
“It is a fair figure,” he countered, as though he routinely paid double what anyone asked and considered it unremarkable.
“The position requires immediate filling.
My daughter has been without a governess for a fortnight, and she is.
.. “ A flicker of fondness crossed his face, or maybe exasperation.
“She has opinions, Miss Elizabeth. Strong ones. The longer she goes without structured occupation, the more creative those opinions become. I should like to engage someone before she terrorises the household entirely.”
Elizabeth bit the inside of her cheek, trying not to smile.
“One hundred pounds,” he continued, “with room and board. Your own room, near the nursery. Laundry, candles, and coal provided. A half-day each week—you may choose which day—to visit your family.” He ticked each item off.
She wondered briefly if he had composed this list in his head sometime between the registry stairs and the tea shop door.
“You will have full use of the library, either in my London house or Pemberley.”
He said this last part as though it were a minor addendum. It was not, and they both knew it.
“We reside currently at my London townhouse,” he went on, “but we will remove to Pemberley for the summer. Travel expenses will be covered, naturally.”
Elizabeth looked at him, bewildered. She did the arithmetic rapidly: one hundred pounds would cover the rent on the Somers Town house, keep her mother and sisters fed, clothe them decently, and leave money for the small necessities that made the difference between surviving and living.
Mary and Kitty could stop taking in washing.
Jane could stop pretending she was not exhausted.
Her mother could stop rationing candles.
And Lydia, well, she hoped for the best for Lydia.
One hundred pounds was not a salary. It was a godsend.
“I only have one condition,” he said, his eyes firmly on the carriage passing on the street.
There it is. She braced herself.
“You begin today.”
She blinked. “Today?”
“Today. Or tomorrow morning, if you require time to make arrangements with your family.” He picked up his cup for the first time since it had been poured, took a sip, and set it down. “But I should very much prefer today.”
Elizabeth studied him. He sat across from her, nervous, as though he were uncertain she would accept, as though she had the luxury of refusing anything, let alone this.
But she would not let him see that. She would accept his offer, and she would do so with dignity. As if she had chosen it, not been rescued by it.
“Tomorrow morning, Mr Darcy.” She met his eyes. “I shall need to inform my family and pack my things. Such as they are.”
His face relaxed visibly. She saw relief, perhaps—quick, unguarded, gone almost in a second.
“Tomorrow morning then. I shall send a carriage to collect you. Pray, what is the direction?”
“Somers Town. Number fourteen, The Polygon.”
If the address told him anything about the depth of her family’s circumstances, he gave no sign of it. He merely nodded.
“Eight o’clock?”
“Eight o’clock.”
They looked at each other across the remains of the tea. The toast sat untouched between them—Elizabeth had not eaten it, because eating a man’s food while negotiating your wages was a concession of something, although she was not yet sure of what.
Mr Darcy rose. He extended his hand—not to shake, but palm up, open, the way a gentleman offers a hand to a lady stepping into a carriage or across a threshold.
She took it. His fingers closed around hers, brief and warm, and then released.
“Until tomorrow, Miss Elizabeth.”
“Until tomorrow, Mr Darcy.”
He settled the bill, held the door, and they parted on the pavement—he turning right towards Mayfair and whatever world awaited him there, she turning left towards Somers Town and the conversation she was about to have with her mother.
The walk was long and her shoes thin. The spring air was sharp and smelled of smoke and horse dung and, faintly, of the violets the woman had been selling on Conduit Street.
One hundred pounds.
Elizabeth walked faster.
Number fourteen, The Polygon, was a narrow house wedged between two equally narrow houses, all of them leaning slightly to the left, seemingly tired of standing.
Elizabeth fumbled with the key, her fingers clumsy with haste.
Her heart had not stopped hammering since the tea shop, and her mind kept circling the same thought—one hundred pounds—as if it might evaporate if she stopped thinking it.
She opened the door and was immediately assaulted by the smell of boiled cabbage. She had come to know it intimately—the smell of economy, of making do, of a vegetable that cost almost nothing and tasted like it.
She followed it to the kitchen.
Her mother stood at the stove, stirring the pot with an expression of profound personal offence, as if the cabbage had insulted her directly.
Mrs Bennet had once presided over a fully staffed kitchen, and her only connection with the food was the settling of the menus.
Now she cooked every meal for six, she did it competently, and she hated every moment of it.
“Lizzy, there you are.” Mrs Bennet looked up.
“Oh, how I miss Hill; you shall never know. Who knows how the Collinses treat her, poor soul.” She set the ladle down and turned fully, her eyes sharp.
Whatever else poverty had taken from her mother, it had not dulled her ability to read a face at twenty paces.
“But let me see you. Are you smiling? Whatever has happened?”
“Did you find a position?” Jane’s thin voice came from the doorway.
Elizabeth’s eldest sister, once the greatest beauty of Hertfordshire and the neighbouring counties, now weighed no more than a sparrow and ate as much.
Her cheekbones, which had once been universally admired, were too sharp beneath her skin.
Her dress hung loosely at her shoulders.
She was nine-and-twenty, but she looked older.
The quiet patience in her eyes did not come from serenity but from having given up on expecting anything good.
Elizabeth crossed the kitchen and hugged her from the side, gently, mindful not to squeeze. There was not enough of Jane to squeeze.
“Yes, dearest.”
“Well?” Mrs Bennet said, pointing the ladle in Elizabeth’s direction. “Are you waiting for pleas to elaborate?”
Before Elizabeth could answer, Lydia appeared behind Jane in the doorway.
Her face—her tortured, guarded face—cracked into a small smile at the sight of her sister.
If Jane was thin in body, Lydia was thin in every other possible way.
Thin smile that never quite reached her eyes.
Thin gaze that never settled in one place for long, always sliding away as though eye contact were a debt she could not afford to pay.
Thin patience but not with others. Only with herself.
Lydia at fifteen had been loud, reckless, and alive.
Lydia at two-and-twenty was a woman who moved through rooms apologising for taking up space in them.
“Lizzy has news,” Jane said softly, and Lydia nodded and slipped into the kitchen, folding herself into a chair by the wall.
Mary and Kitty appeared next, still in their working aprons, their hands red and rough from the day’s washing. Kitty looked hopeful. Mary was as she always was—watchful, assessing, reserving judgement until sufficient evidence had been presented.
“I shall tell you at the table,” Elizabeth said. “Is supper ready, Mamma?”
“It is cabbage, Lizzy. Cabbage is always ready. That is the only virtue cabbage possesses.”
They sat. Mrs Bennet served measured portions into six bowls—each one identical, each one modest. She served herself last, and when she did, the ladle scraped the bottom of the pot and came up with barely enough to cover the bowl.
Elizabeth noticed. Her mother had done this every night for seven years—served herself the least, eaten the smallest portion, and never once mentioned it.
The shrill, nervy woman who had once taken to her bed over a megrim now quietly starved so that her daughters could eat, and she did not consider it worthy of remark.
Elizabeth picked up her spoon. The cabbage was terrible.
“I have secured a position,” she announced. “As a governess.”
Five faces turned to her, all with different expressions—hope, relief, curiosity, wariness, and, from Lydia, fear. For her, any change in their circumstances was scary. She had learned the hard way that change usually meant things getting worse.
“A governess,” Mrs Bennet repeated. “For whom?”
“As we all know from Charlotte,” Elizabeth explained, keeping her voice steady, “Mr Darcy’s wife died some years ago and left him with a little girl. The child is six and requires a governess. He has offered me the position.”
The silence that followed was considerable.
“Mr Darcy,” Mrs Bennet said slowly. “The Mr Darcy? The proud, disagreeable man from the Meryton assembly?”
“The very same, Mamma.”
“The man with ten thousand a year who would not dance with you?”
“His dancing preferences are not relevant to the position, Mamma.”
Mrs Bennet opened her mouth, then thought better of it. She narrowed her eyes. “What are the terms?”
Elizabeth laid them out. Room and board, a half-day per week. The household would remove to Pemberley for the summer. A carriage would collect her tomorrow morning at eight.
“And the salary?” Mrs Bennet asked what everyone was burning to ask but did not, out of politeness.
“Eighty pounds per annum.”
She said it without hesitation, without a flicker, without so much as a glance at Jane. Eighty pounds. The rest she would keep. Twenty pounds a year, until there was enough for a modest dowry. Jane deserved a future outside of this kitchen and this slow, patient diminishing.
“Eighty pounds!” Mrs Bennet’s eyes went wide. “Eighty pounds, for a governess? Lizzy, that is... “
“Very generous, Mamma. Yes. Mr Darcy was insistent.”
“Well.” Mrs Bennet sat back in her chair. “Well. It seems Mr Darcy’s manners have improved considerably nowadays.”
Jane reached across the table and took Elizabeth’s hand but said nothing.
Mary, who had been silent throughout, spoke. “Pemberley has one of the finest private libraries in England.”
Elizabeth met her sister’s eyes and, for the first time that day, smiled without it hurting.
“Yes, Mary. I know.”