Chapter 12
Breakfast at Darcy House was seldom a lively meal, and Darcy liked it so.
The quietness of the morning was pleasant, and his London house was never more agreeable to him than in those domestic intervals when neither obligation nor ceremony had yet entered the day.
The breakfast room looked eastward over the square, and the pale morning light, filtered through a sky not yet persuaded into spring, fell cleanly across the silver coffee service, the folded paper beside his plate, and the small accumulation of letters which his butler had placed before him.
Mrs Annesley and Georgiana were not expected below for another quarter of an hour.
Georgiana preferred to keep hours that were a little later than his own whenever they were in town; and Darcy never thought the household worse governed for accommodating her.
He had already poured his coffee and unfolded a note from the estate manager at Pemberley before his attention was caught by another letter lying beneath it.
It was directed to him in a hand he did not know. Pricked by curiosity, he set down the first letter and took up the second.
At first, there was nothing in it of particular interest. The writing was plain and neat, legible without unnecessary flourishes, and the seal was both unremarkable and unfamiliar to him. It was the direction that had captured his interest at once.
Bennet of Longbourn.
Darcy looked at it again.
That Mr Bennet should write to him at all was strange.
Their acquaintance had never exceeded the most ordinary forms of civility, and though Darcy had visited Longbourn more than once during his time in Hertfordshire, he could not suppose himself to stand so particularly in that gentleman’s confidence as to invite a private correspondence.
Had some misunderstanding arisen? Had there been some consequence of what he had told Miss Elizabeth Bennet in December?
Or could the matter concern the misunderstanding of his intentions so readily entered into by Mrs Bennet?
At that thought, Darcy could not have named what he felt, even to himself.
As there was no point in delay, he broke the seal.
The letter within was brief, written on a single sheet, and couched in terms so careful that for the first few lines, his perplexity only increased.
There was nothing in the beginning to justify alarm, nothing that could be called improper, and nothing that explained why the writer should style themselves merely as Bennet of Longbourn.
Yet by the time he had reached the middle of the page, his uncertainty had given place to something sharper and far more arresting.
The letter had not been sent by Mr Bennet. He knew it with as much certainty as though the writer’s name had stood plainly at the bottom.
The conviction did not arise from any one phrase alone, but from the whole manner of the thing.
There was an intelligence in its reserve, a delicacy in what was avoided, and a steadiness in its reasoning that could belong to no one else.
Most telling of all, however, was a sentence of gratitude so carefully veiled that to any other eye it might have seemed no more than a general civility, but which to him bore one unmistakable meaning.
It referred, and meant to refer, to the confidence he had once placed in her regarding Wickham.
No one else could have written it. No one else would have had a reason.
Darcy read the letter through to the end, then returned at once to the beginning.
Sir,
I trust you will pardon me for taking the liberty of writing to you. I should not have done so if I were not persuaded that the occasion must justify it.
Some weeks have passed since you favoured me with information on a subject where I had before been much in error.
Reflection has only increased my sense of the obligation, though circumstances have prevented my expressing it more openly.
I have since become certain that the apprehensions then communicated were not without foundation.
Further inquiry has unfortunately confirmed enough to justify serious concern.
I will not venture to state more plainly what cannot be proved to the satisfaction of the world; yet I do not doubt that the gentleman of whom I speak continues in habits which may render him dangerous to those who do not know his true nature.
It is this consideration which must be my excuse for troubling you further.
My own conviction, and that of those whose judgement I most value, has not been sufficient to produce any effect where results are most needed.
Reports unsupported by consequence are too easily dismissed, and there are many disposed to think well of one whose address makes him acceptable in every company.
The matter is beyond my powers — but not, I think, beyond yours.
If, therefore, you should judge that any representation from a quarter entitled to greater weight than mine might properly be made to those who have authority over him, I believe it could not fail of usefulness.
Forgive my presumption in asking you to do yet more when you have already exerted yourself beyond what anyone could have considered your obligations.
I ask only out of the deepest conviction that what might be done by yourself could not be achieved by anyone else.
With deepest sincerity,
Bennet of Longbourn
Reading that careful, clever letter, Darcy could not help but smile. He had rarely seen a more careful dance between propriety and risk, nor one more elegantly perfect.
She had risked no name. No familiarity. No phrase that a curious servant, an officious companion, or even her own family might seize on with justice.
Had the letter been intercepted, no scandal could have resulted.
Every word was designed less to persuade him than to protect them both from any improper notice.
She had concealed everything she ought to conceal, and trusted him to understand the rest.
He understood it perfectly.
The choice of “Bennet of Longbourn” alone was almost enough.
Mr Bennet could not have been the author, because no man would have written so.
No man would have taken such pains to say only what might safely be said, while leaving the true sense clear to the single reader intended to receive it.
No man, above all, would have acknowledged gratitude in precisely that guarded way: enough for him, nothing for anyone else.
On that thought, Darcy lowered the letter, but he did not set it aside.
She believed him. She trusted him.
The knowledge was not entirely new. In her countenance and in her manner during that extraordinary walk at Longbourn, he had seen that she was persuaded by what he told her.
He had trusted her from the first to preserve Georgiana’s reputation with inviolable discretion, and on that point she had not disappointed him.
Yet this was something more. She had not only believed him in the moment; she had acted on that belief.
She had investigated. She had observed. She had risked enough to become certain that the danger remained.
And having done all that could be done within her own power, she had at last asked for his help.
It had not been done lightly. Of that, he had no doubt. Lost in thought, Darcy rose and crossed slowly to the window, the letter still in his hand.
The square below was alive with the ordinary motions of a London morning: a tradesman’s cart trundling along, a nursemaid shepherding a child along the pavement, two gentlemen passing one another with the mutual indifference of strangers.
He saw none of it with any real attention, for his mind had already left the room.
It was impossible not to retrace the course by which this letter had come into being.
He remembered her expression when he had spoken Wickham’s name at Longbourn and seen her whole countenance harden with anger.
He remembered, too, the speed with which indignation had given place to intelligent understanding once he began to state the facts.
There had been no affectation in her horror on Georgiana’s account, no morbid curiosity, no attempt to force from him what he had not chosen to tell.
Her questions had been few, pointed, and just. Even now he could hear her ask, with that mixture of spirit and seriousness entirely her own, why he had told her rather than her father.
He had answered honestly that he trusted her judgment more.
It had been a risk, but not one he regretted.
Indeed, he had not regretted it for a single hour. Yet what she now requested was no small consequence.
Darcy had long disdained acting openly against Wickham, and for good reason.
To pursue him publicly was to renew a history connected with his father’s misplaced favour and his sister’s greatest danger.
It was to enter a sphere of sordid detail and vulgar explanation from which every instinct recoiled.
He had preferred to withdraw any expectation of patronage or favour and permit the man’s own conduct to do the rest. That it had not done the rest, and might never do so while charm and good looks continued to serve in place of principle, was a conclusion he was finding increasingly difficult to resist.
Elizabeth Bennet was not timid or fanciful. She was not prone to alarm, nor inclined to magnify every discomfort into danger. If she had brought herself to write such a letter at all, after the care it must have cost her, the matter was serious indeed.