Chapter Eighteen
Darcy fell into step beside Elizabeth as naturally as though they had been walking together all their lives, and Bingley and Jane went ahead of them almost immediately; ahead and then further ahead, and then around the bend in the lane, and gone from view.
Elizabeth did not remark upon it. Neither did Darcy.
They walked in silence for a little way, which was not an uncomfortable silence. She had become accustomed, over these last weeks, to the quality of Darcy’s silences; the way they had substance and direction, like a room with a door at the end of it. She waited for him to reach the door.
“I must tell you something,” he said at last. “About Lydia.”
She looked at him. Whatever she had expected him to open with, it was not that.
He told her about the orders, plainly and precisely, as a man does when he respects his listener enough not to soften the edges.
He told her about Canada, the timeline, Plymouth and the twenty-third.
He told her that Fitzwilliam was inside the house at this precise moment telling Lydia the same, and that Lydia did not yet know she would not be going with him.
Elizabeth was quiet for a moment after he finished. The garden was very still around them, the late summer warmth settling into the afternoon.
“She will mind terribly,” Elizabeth said. “But I believe she will not show it. A month ago she would have raised a din to deafen the household, but… she is not the same Lydia she was a month ago.”
“I know.” He paused. “Fitzwilliam knows. He is not expecting her to show it, which may make it a little easier.” Another pause.
“My aunt and uncle have promised to make Matlock her home while he is away, and perhaps it is right that she would be with them.” He looked ahead along the path.
“In addition, however, I have given Fitzwilliam my word that Lydia will have a home at Pemberley whenever she wishes it. I believe she and Georgiana could become quite good friends; they are close in age and I think might enjoy each other’s company. ”
Elizabeth glanced at him. “That is very good of you.”
“It is not goodness. She is family. Or will be, very shortly.” He stopped walking.
She stopped a step ahead of him and turned. He was looking at her with the expression she had learned to read; the one that meant he had arrived somewhere and was steadying himself to say it.
“That is, she will be family in the sense that, the reason I hope she will feel at home at Pemberley is that, what I mean to say, Miss Elizabeth, is that I hope Pemberley will be her home because it will be her sister’s home.
Because you will be its mistress.” He pressed on before she could speak.
“If you would be. I should like you to be. I should very much like…”
He stopped. A muscle worked in his jaw. She watched him arrive at the conclusion, apparently, that there was no elegant route and he had best take the direct one.
“I am in love with you,” he said, with the air of a man setting down a very heavy object.
“I have been for a very long time. I made a dreadful job of telling you so at Hunsford, and I have since spent considerable time thinking about what I ought to have said instead. I had, in fact, prepared something quite coherent, which words I seem to have entirely misplaced.” He met her eyes.
“I would like very much to marry you. And I would like you to know that the offer is made without reservation of any kind; you are everything I could wish for, and I know I am asking for more than I deserve.”
Elizabeth looked at him for a long moment.
She thought of Hunsford, and the shock of it, and the anger that had followed.
She thought of Pemberley, and Mrs Reynolds, and the panic and terror she had felt when Lydia’s letter arrived.
How Darcy had taken charge, and the way he had handed her down from the carriage step at every stop on the road from Derbyshire with precisely the same careful attention each time.
She thought of him outmanoeuvering Lady Catherine in Brighton, calm and exact and immovable, and of the way he looked at her, Elizabeth, whenever he forgot to conceal what he was feeling.
“You did considerably better just then,” she said, “than you did at Hunsford.”
Something shifted in his face. “I hoped I might.”
“Considerably better,” she said. “Though you are quite correct that you made a muddle of the beginning.”
“I cannot account for it.” The faintest trace of rueful humour in his voice. “I am generally considered a tolerable speaker.”
“Yes.” Elizabeth tilted her head. “I wonder why it can be that whenever you want to ask me something important, you make a dreadful mull of it.” She let that sit for just a moment, then took pity on him. “The answer is yes, Mr Darcy. I will marry you.”
He looked at her as though he was still deciding whether to believe it.
“I have been,” Elizabeth continued, more quietly, “coming to love you for some time. I believe I should have arrived there sooner, had I not been quite so determined not to.” She offered him a small smile. “Yours is not the easiest character to truly comprehend.”
“No,” he said. “I am aware of that.”
He took her hand. She let him. They stood together in the quiet lane for a moment in a silence that was different from the one they had begun with, and it struck her that this was, of all the moments she might have imagined for this occasion, quite one of the nicest.
“Pemberley,” he said at last, “will suit you very well.”
“I had rather thought so,” Elizabeth agreed.
“Mrs Reynolds will be beside herself.”
“I suspected as much. She is very invested in your happiness, I think, and she showed a clear partiality for me.”
Darcy, helpless to prevent it, smiled. Elizabeth thought, not for the first time, that he ought to do it considerably more often.
They walked on to find Jane and Bingley, and Elizabeth reflected that she had come quite a long way from the sitting room at Hunsford, and felt, all things considered, that the journey had been worthwhile.
Mrs Bennet required several minutes to fully absorb the intelligence.
This was not because she was slow on the uptake, but because her expectations required considerable reorganisation. Jane and Lydia had been anticipated, in their various forms, all summer. Elizabeth and Darcy fell outside the scope of her prepared positions.
“But,” Mrs Bennet said, and then stopped.
“Mama.”
“Ten thousand a year,” Mrs Bennet said, as though locating a fixed point from which to triangulate. “And Pemberley.”
“Yes.”
A silence of some duration. Then, abruptly, the full force of the thing arrived.
“Oh, my dearest Lizzy! How rich and great you will be! What pin-money, what jewels, what carriages!” She seized Elizabeth’s hands.
“And when Lady Lucas hears of this she will positively expire with envy, for you know Charlotte will never…”
“There is Lydia’s wedding first, Mama,” Elizabeth said. “We shall have time enough to think of everything else after.”
This was a temporary measure, and she knew it.
But for now her mother subsided into a pleasurable contemplation that left Elizabeth in sufficient peace to catch Jane’s eye across the room.
Jane’s expression was all warm congratulation and gentle, private amusement, and it did more to settle Elizabeth’s spirits than anything else could have done.
She found her father in his library.
He looked up when she came in, and then looked at her again more carefully, with the precise attention he gave her when he suspected she had something of consequence to say.
“Sit down, Lizzy.”
She sat.
“He has spoken to me,” her father said. “This afternoon, after you came back from your walk. He is not the kind of man it would be easy to refuse, but for your sake, Lizzy…” He studied her face. “But I see that will not be necessary.”
Elizabeth met his gaze. “Have I told you enough?”
“Your face has.” He was quiet for a moment, looking down at his book without reading it.
“You told me in Brighton that he was not the man we thought him. Less proud, you said. Kinder. I believed you, because I had seen a little of it myself.” He paused.
“But I understand a good deal more of what you meant, having spoken with him today. He talks about you in a way that I had not anticipated.” A further pause. “As though he is paying attention.”
“He always pays attention,” Elizabeth said. “It took me longer than it should have to see it.”
“Mm.” Her father was quiet again. Then he picked up his pen, which she knew to mean he was approaching the end of what he wished to say aloud.
“I shall tell him yes, Lizzy. And I will say to you what I said to him; that I hope with all my heart he makes you happy. You are the one daughter I could least bear to see in an unhappy marriage.”
Elizabeth, finding she had nothing adequate to say in return, crossed the room and kissed his cheek. He patted her hand a little awkwardly, as a man does when he is more moved than he would prefer anyone to see.
“Off you go,” he said, and she went.
Netherfield had never been so full.
The earl and countess appeared comfortable in any room they entered.
Lady Catherine had the superior air of a woman who considered every house she visited inferior to Rosings and was prepared to tolerate it charitably.
Caroline moved through the drawing room with the precision of someone who had spent the day planning her path through it, greeting each guest with a warmth so carefully calibrated to their consequence that it functioned, if you were watching closely, as a nearly perfect map of how she had assessed the room.
Elizabeth was watching closely.
So was Lydia, she noticed; standing beside her, her attention moving about the room with the same quiet assessment. Though her conclusions, Elizabeth suspected, were arrived at by rather different means.
Caroline reached them last, which told its own story.