Chapter Fourteen The Grove #2
"I was brought up," he said finally, "to value my own judgment very highly.
To trust my own analysis. To consider my position and my history as evidence of something.
I do not mean this as vanity. I mean it as the way you are taught to navigate the world when the world has given you a certain weight in it from the beginning.
" He paused. "The difficulty is that it is very hard, having been taught this, to learn the places where the judgment fails.
And harder still to correct it once the failure has had consequences. "
She said nothing. The grove was quiet around them. The birds had moved to a different set of opinions.
"I think you have been doing the work of correction for longer than is immediately visible," she said, before she could decide not to.
He looked at her with an expression she could read now, or was beginning to. It was surprise, honest surprise, the kind that arrived when you said something true to a man who had not expected it from that direction.
They had reached the stile again.
"I hope," he said, "that you will allow for the possibility of further progress."
"I allow for it in everyone," she said.
She went back to the parsonage carrying the conversation in the way that certain conversations were carried, not filed away but present, not examined but felt, in the specific place she had been keeping things that did not fit her existing arrangements.
She found a letter from Jane in the morning post. And a letter from home.
Her mother's letter was full of Lydia. Lydia, who was to go to Brighton with the regiment.
Colonel Forster had invited her. Mrs. Bennet had agreed.
The letter contained the news with the enthusiasm of a woman who found her youngest daughter's pleasure in militia officers entirely comprehensible and saw no reason to apply any particular supervision to the nature of the pleasure.
Elizabeth read this three times.
Then she sat down at Charlotte's small writing desk and wrote to her father.
She wrote carefully and she wrote honestly, which meant she wrote about Lydia's behaviour in the neighbourhood over the winter and the specific quality of attention she had been paying to a specific set of officers and the risk she could not see herself because she was sixteen and had never been required to look further ahead than the next assembly.
She wrote: Papa, I am afraid. I do not say this lightly.
I think the situation wants more supervision than Brighton will provide, and I think Lydia wants more guidance than she has received, and I think the costs of not providing it will be higher than we can easily meet.
She sealed the letter and gave it to Charlotte's housemaid for the post.
She walked out to the grove the following morning with the letter sent and the answer not yet arrived and the specific quality of waiting that you did when you had said a true and important thing and could not yet know whether it had been received.
He was in the grove. He was becoming a feature of the grove in the morning, like the beech tree and the birds.
She had been walking for perhaps ten minutes in a conversation about a subject she was not afterwards able to account for, because the subject changed as the path changed, and she was attending to the grove and to the quality of his thinking rather than to the topic it was currently occupying, when Colonel Fitzwilliam appeared at the far stile.
He came in with the easy energy he brought to everything and joined them with the natural authority of a man who found all social arrangements instantly navigable, and the conversation became three rather than two, which had a different texture entirely.
She found that she did not entirely welcome the difference.
This was information. She attended to it without looking at it directly.
Fitzwilliam walked with them for the better part of the morning, and he was excellent company, as he always was, and the conversation moved between three people with the warmth that Fitzwilliam made possible, and at some point the subject turned to the question of second sons and their position in the world and the necessity of marrying with some attention to financial prudence, and Fitzwilliam said it all with the self-deprecating lightness of a man who had made his peace with his position in a family structure that had not arranged itself for his maximum convenience.
"You are an advocate for prudent marriage," she said.
"I am an advocate for honest accounting," Fitzwilliam said.
"Which is not the same thing, though the two occasionally align.
" He glanced at Darcy, who was walking on her other side with his usual composure.
"My cousin, who is not a second son and has a very great deal of money, has rather more latitude in the matter. "
"More latitude does not always produce more enlightened decisions," Elizabeth said.
"True," Fitzwilliam said pleasantly. "Though it at least permits them. Latitude is the difference between choosing your situation and managing it." He paused. "Though Darcy has not always distinguished himself in the use of the latitude he has. He will not mind my saying so."
Darcy said nothing, which was its own variety of response.
"He congratulated himself quite recently," Fitzwilliam continued, in the same light tone, the tone of a man who was telling a harmless story rather than a pointed one, "on saving a particular friend from what he judged an imprudent attachment. I think he considers it a service well rendered."
Elizabeth was walking.
She was still walking. Her feet were continuing through the grove in the rhythm they had established and the path continued under them and the beech tree was behind them and the stile was ahead of them and she was walking.
She said something. She did not know what she said.
She said something that fell within the register of normal conversational response and Fitzwilliam said something back and the conversation continued in the direction conversations continued and she attended to the rest of the walk with the part of her mind that was available for attending to anything at all, which was not the largest part.
At the stile she took her leave of both of them.
She walked back to the parsonage along the lane.
The friend. The imprudent attachment. The saving, which was how he had described it to his cousin, which was how he thought about it: a service, a piece of good judgment well applied, an action taken on behalf of a man who did not know to be grateful for the management of his own heart.
Bingley.
Jane.
She had suspected this. She had told herself she suspected it since November, since the letter in London, since the specific timing and the specific silence and everything she knew about the way Darcy's mind worked, which was that it worked efficiently and with great confidence in its own conclusions and without, it seemed, particular attention to the question of whether the conclusions were correct.
She had suspected it and the suspicion had been one thing.
This was another.
She turned away from the parsonage gate and kept walking because she could not go inside yet, because she needed the lane and the movement and the air and the very great effort of not being furious in a way that was visible.
Jane, she thought.
Jane who did not blame anyone. Jane who was in London receiving the management of her own heart as though it were the ordinary working of the world. Jane who had written a letter without bitterness because Jane did not permit herself bitterness even when she had every possible right to it.
She walked to the end of the lane and back.
She thought: he was wrong. He was wrong about Jane and he was wrong about his right to decide, and the ease with which he had told Fitzwilliam, the congratulating of himself, the service well rendered, said everything necessary about the distance between what he had done and what he understood himself to have done.
She thought: and I knew. I knew in November.
She thought: I did not say it then. I will not say it yet. But I know.
She turned at the parsonage gate and went inside.
She had breakfast with Charlotte in the specific composure of a woman who had made a decision about what she was carrying and how she was going to carry it, and Charlotte, who knew her, looked at her once and said nothing, which was the most useful thing Charlotte could have done.
Something had solidified. Not the prejudice, which had always been present. Something underneath it, more specific and more certain.
Something cold.