Chapter Twenty-Three Lady Catherine
She arrived on a Tuesday.
There was no warning, which was consistent with the specific variety of power that Lady Catherine de Bourgh had always exercised, which was the power of a woman who did not consider that her presence required advance arrangement, because advance arrangement implied that the people being arranged for had a prior claim on their time that was worth notifying around.
They did not. She was Lady Catherine de Bourgh and she had come to Longbourn, and that was the notification.
Elizabeth was in the garden when the carriage came up the lane, the large carriage, the one that had a specific quality of self-importance that extended to the vehicle itself. She saw it from the garden gate and she had a moment of thinking: well.
She went inside.
Her mother, who had come to the drawing room window with the specific speed of a woman who monitored approaching carriages as a professional activity, identified the crest on the carriage door and produced a sound that fell somewhere between excitement and alarm.
Kitty appeared. Mary appeared. Jane, who had been sitting with their father, came to see what had produced the sound.
Lady Catherine de Bourgh came into the Longbourn drawing room with the posture of a woman who had never in her adult life been required to adjust herself to the dimensions of a room and did not intend to start.
She looked at the room with the expression of a woman taking inventory.
She looked at Mrs. Bennet, who had arranged herself into the warmest possible hostess posture and was already speaking in the specific register she used for people of consequence.
She looked at the assembled daughters, each of whom received a fraction of a second of assessment.
She looked at Elizabeth.
She looked at Elizabeth the way she had looked at her at Rosings, with the focused, appraising quality of a woman who had identified a specific problem and was arriving to address it.
"Miss Bennet," she said. "I should be glad to speak with you. Alone."
Mrs. Bennet received this with the quality of a woman who found a titled guest requiring her daughter's private audience somewhere between flattering and alarming.
She looked at Elizabeth. Elizabeth looked at her mother with the expression she used when she needed her mother to do a specific thing without being told what it was.
Mrs. Bennet said that they might use the small sitting room and removed everyone who was not Elizabeth from the vicinity with the efficient energy of a woman who had spent twenty years managing a household.
Elizabeth and Lady Catherine sat in the small sitting room.
The small sitting room was not well suited to Lady Catherine.
It was the room the Bennets actually lived in, as opposed to the drawing room they received people in, and it had the marks of being genuinely inhabited: a book left open on the table, a piece of Kitty's mending on the chair, the fire laid but not yet lit because the afternoon was not cold enough to require it.
Lady Catherine received the room with the expression of a woman cataloguing its inadequacies and declined the chair Elizabeth indicated.
She preferred to stand.
"I shall come directly to the point," Lady Catherine said.
"I would expect nothing less," Elizabeth said.
Lady Catherine looked at her. It was the look that had looked at her at Rosings and that Elizabeth had looked back at without adjusting the quality of the looking, and it was the same look now, and Elizabeth was doing the same thing now, which was looking back.
"A report of a most alarming nature has reached me," Lady Catherine said.
"I was informed that Miss Elizabeth Bennet of Longbourn had lately been at Pemberley.
That she had been seen walking with my nephew for a considerable time.
That the visit had been of a character that suggested she entertained hopes of a connexion with my family. "
"I am unable to speak to what character the visit suggested to the person who reported it," Elizabeth said. "I can only speak to what the visit was, which was an arrangement to see the grounds of a fine estate in the neighbourhood of my aunt's village, which I have now seen."
"You saw considerably more than the grounds," Lady Catherine said. "You were in the company of my nephew for nearly two hours."
"I was."
"And you do not consider it necessary to explain that?"
"I am not aware that walking in the grounds of a house requires explanation to persons who were not present."
Lady Catherine's eyes did something that was not quite surprise. It was the expression of a woman who had been doing this for forty years and knew the complete range of responses available to young women of limited fortune when confronted with herself, and this was not in the range.
"Miss Bennet," she said, and her voice was quieter now, which was not gentler.
It was the voice of someone who had decided to use a different instrument.
"My nephew is engaged to my daughter. It has been a plan of long standing between their respective mothers.
Anne's fortune, Darcy's estate. The union of the two estates is the object of many years of careful arrangement.
Do you imagine that the preference of a young woman of no fortune and no connexion could be allowed to overthrow it? "
Elizabeth looked at her steadily.
She thought about the doorway. She thought about six months of carrying it. She thought about what it had cost and what she had learned from the cost and who she was on the other side of the carrying.
She thought: I am not the woman who was afraid of this conversation in April.
"If Mr. Darcy is engaged to Miss de Bourgh," she said, "then no concern of mine could affect the matter. He is a man of honour. He would not seek another woman's regard if he were engaged to your daughter."
"I require more than this evasion," Lady Catherine said. "I require your assurance that you will not seek to attach my nephew, that you will not accept any offer he may make, that you will honour the prior claims upon his future."
"And if I decline to give that assurance?"
The room was very quiet.
"Then I shall make it my business," Lady Catherine said, "to ensure that whatever hopes you may entertain are made impossible by other means.
I have influence. I have connexion. The name of Bennet is not one that can afford to attract the particular kind of attention that I am capable of directing at it. "
Elizabeth felt this land. She was meant to feel it land. It had the specific quality of a threat from a woman who was accustomed to threats being sufficient and who had not miscalculated the threat itself, only the target.
She thought about the settlement for Lydia.
She thought about her family's position, which was exactly as precarious as Lady Catherine understood it to be, and she thought about what it would mean if a woman of Lady Catherine's influence decided to apply herself to the Bennet family's social standing.
She thought: this is real. I am not going to dismiss it as though it is not real.
She thought: and I am still not going to do what she is asking.
"Lady Catherine," she said, with the voice she used when she was being entirely honest, "I hold you in the respect that is due to your position and to your evident care for your family. I understand that your visit today comes from that care, not from malice. I am not dismissing it."
Lady Catherine's expression shifted fractionally.
"But I will not give you the assurance you ask for," Elizabeth said.
"Not because I lack respect for your family or for the seriousness of what you have described, but because what you are asking is not yours to require.
Whatever there is or is not between Mr. Darcy and myself is a matter between Mr. Darcy and myself, and I will not settle it in someone else's presence on someone else's terms."
"You are a very obstinate young woman," Lady Catherine said.
"I have been told so," Elizabeth said pleasantly.
Lady Catherine looked at her for a long, measuring moment.
And in that moment Elizabeth understood something about Lady Catherine that she had begun to understand at Rosings and was completing now: that the woman in front of her was not simply a vehicle for social authority.
She was a woman who had managed an estate alone since her husband's death, who had raised a daughter alone, who had made all the decisions for two decades because there was no one else to make them, and who had arranged the world of Rosings into something she could control because the world beyond it was not controllable and she had learned this at some cost.
None of this made the threat idle.
All of it made the threat more comprehensible.
"I shall inform my nephew," Lady Catherine said, "of this conversation."
"You may tell him whatever you like," Elizabeth said. "I have nothing to conceal."
Lady Catherine de Bourgh left the small sitting room of Longbourn with the quality of a woman who had not received what she came for and was not certain what to do with that information, which was a condition she had very little experience of.
Elizabeth sat in the small sitting room after she heard the carriage on the gravel.
She sat for a while.
She thought about what the conversation had revealed, which was more than Lady Catherine had intended to reveal.
A woman of Lady Catherine's power and precision did not make this journey over an uncertainty.
She made it over something that had caused genuine alarm, and the thing that had caused genuine alarm was not the walk at Pemberley in the abstract but something that had reached her from Pemberley in a form that suggested it was worth the journey.
She thought: Darcy did not correct her.
Lady Catherine had said, with the confidence of someone reporting confirmed intelligence rather than rumour: that Miss Elizabeth Bennet had been at Pemberley, that she had been seen walking with my nephew.
She had not said: that I have heard a rumour.
She had the quality of a woman who had received a specific account from a specific source, and the most available specific source was the person who had been there.
He had not corrected his aunt's impression that the walk was significant.
He had either told her it was, or he had declined to tell her it was not.
Both versions of this were information. Both had the same quality: that he had let his aunt understand the walk as something that warranted her concern, which meant he had let his aunt understand that there was something in his feelings that warranted her concern.
Elizabeth sat with this in the small sitting room with Kitty's mending on the chair and the fire unlit and the sound of the carriage entirely gone, and she felt something that was very different from the cold thing she had been carrying since April, and she was not yet ready to name it, but it was warm.
She went to find Jane.
She did not tell Jane about Lady Catherine. Not tonight. Tonight she needed Jane in the way she needed Jane sometimes, which was simply the quality of her sister's presence, which was the best kind of steadiness.
They sat in the upstairs sitting room and talked about other things, and the evening went on, and Elizabeth was more at ease than she had been in several weeks, and Jane, who knew her, looked at her once with the expression of a person who has noticed something and is not going to press it.
Before bed, a note arrived from the Gardiners.
Her aunt's hand. Brief. It said: Mr. Darcy writes to your uncle with some matters of business relating to the Meryton property. He expects to be in the neighbourhood early next week and asks that his compliments be conveyed to the family.
Elizabeth read this twice.
She set it on the desk in her room.
She looked at it for a moment.
She thought: next week.
She went to bed with the note on the desk and the small sitting room still faintly warm from the afternoon and the thought that was not yet a plan but had the shape of one, and she slept, which was something she had been finding easier since Pemberley, for reasons she was no longer pretending not to understand.