Chapter 8
Sound Judgment
“If I am forbidden from walking to the village alone, then you are forbidden from getting in or out of that bed again without my assistance. Is that clear?”
Darcy’s eyes had not yet opened far enough to blink away the blur of daylight before he received this angry set-down from Elizabeth.
It brought him to his senses more quickly than he was used to, though he could not say he did not enjoy the novelty of being scolded.
He rolled his head cautiously to look at her and was diverted to see her with hands on hips and cheeks tinged by pique.
“Have you been waiting long to upbraid me?”
She scowled over his words, mouthing them along with him as she unpicked his meaning.
“You frightened me!” she explained angrily once she had.
“I came back expecting to find you in that chair, and instead you were sprawled here insensible, making a horrible sound as though you would stop breathing at any moment! As if it were not bad enough the first time you attempted it on your own. What on earth possessed you to try it again?”
Darcy sobered and mouthed an apology. “Forgive me. I needed to lie down.” Agreeable though it was to be the object of Elizabeth’s concern, Darcy did not like that she was distressed and made a concerted effort to breathe more shallowly in the hope the unpleasant rasping would diminish.
“Is the snow melting?” he enquired to distract her, and because he wished to know.
She made a visible attempt to calm herself. “Only a very little,” she replied. “But John has offered to try to take our letters to the village for us anyway. I told him your cousin would bring men to clear the road if only we could get word to him.”
Darcy smiled with relief and managed to communicate that he would write to his cousin if she passed the pen and paper.
“In a moment. First you must eat something.” She crossed to the other side of the room and returned with a bowl. “This broth has a little more substance to it than the last. It ought to help you regain your strength more rapidly, but take care swallowing it.”
Darcy could have hugged her. She had brought bread as well, which, after chewing excessively with mouthfuls of water, he was able to swallow without incident.
By far the most enjoyable aspect of the meal, however, was that Elizabeth shared it with him.
She had, until now, eaten downstairs with the other guests.
This time, she sat close by with her own bowl of broth balanced in her lap and conversed with him so easily they could have been dining at a table instead of languishing in a squalid bedchamber with him half-undressed and festering in a bed.
And unlike every other table at which they had dined together, he was not stuck at the far end with half the population of Meryton between them, preventing his talking to her.
They were each other’s sole company—as would be the case every mealtime at Pemberley, were she to live there.
“It could do with more salt,” Elizabeth remarked, “but I must say, I have tasted far worse in far grander places.”
“Which places?” he enquired, wondering if she meant Netherfield, where he had dined on more than one unappetising dish.
“Oh no! I suspect my idea of a grand place is a far cry from yours. I shall not be drawn into naming one only for you to laugh at me for it.”
“I would never laugh at you.”
She was growing faster at reading his lips and replied almost instantaneously. “Perhaps laugh was the wrong word. I can readily believe you would never do that. I am of a mind to teach you how, though, for teasing a person is always kinder than despising him.”
“I see little difference—both are forms of contempt.” Disliking the implication that he would do either, he appealed for pen and paper, which Elizabeth swapped for his empty bowl, freeing his hands to write.
I would not despise anyone, least of all you, for having seen less of the world. Are you sure it is not your own feelings you are imposing on the matter—that actually you are embarrassed by your own unworldliness?
“Yes, quite sure,” she answered quickly, though there wavered a look in her eyes as hinted at a greater uncertainty than she professed.
“By the same token, I could ask whether you are unjustly proud of your worldliness—whether you think less of anyone who does not possess experiences and knowledge equal to your own?”
I would think less of any person who had no wish to experience or learn about the world. That is not the same as holding them in contempt for not having had the means to see it.
Elizabeth frowned as she read this, though more pensively than quarrelsomely, Darcy thought. Indeed, she betrayed no particular desire to oppose him when she sat back in her chair and enquired whether he had visited many places.
“Quite a few,” he replied.
“Which is your favourite?”
“Pemberley.” He wondered if he would need to write the name or give an explanation of it, but she appeared to recall it from their conversations at Netherfield.
“It is very quaint that you should prefer your own house to any other place, but that is not quite what I meant. Allow me to rephrase. Which was the most impressive?”
He did not even attempt to mouth the answer and instead committed it to paper where it would be better understood.
Le Chateau de Versailles.
Elizabeth’s eyes widened, and she looked up from the page with an expression of ingenuous wonder that rendered her even more handsome than usual. “Truly? That is enough to make me envious in earnest. Would that you could speak, for I should dearly love to hear you describe it.”
I should dearly love to take you there, Darcy thought, though more things than Napoleon’s army stood in the way of such a wish.
“All this you have seen, and still your favourite place in all the world is Pemberley?”
“It is.”
“It must be quite a house.”
“It is my home,” he mouthed.
She regarded him intently, and disliking not knowing what she thought, he took up the pen and wrote,
Have you been to many places? You cannot have always been at Longbourn.
She did not reply directly upon reading this. First, she tore off a small piece of bread roll and ate it, all the while peering at him dubiously. “I am not sure I wish to know why that is your opinion,” she said presently. “I am certain it is your design to be severe on somebody.”
He regretted making such an inelegant compliment, for he ought to have known Elizabeth would see directly past it to his slight upon her family.
“But you are right,” she continued. “My mother’s father had a house in Hampshire, and I visited him there often before he passed away.
He was a dear, gentle man—calmer and, dare I say, more sensible than his wife or daughters.
Much like his son, my Uncle Gardiner, with whom Jane and I spent a good deal of our childhoods.
He and his wife have a house in London. I am due to travel with them this summer, as it happens.
To the Lakes. I have never been before. I am excessively impatient to see it. ”
Darcy felt an irrational resentment for these relations with the privilege of seeing Elizabeth’s face as she beheld that sight for the first time.
Like as not they knew none of the best places to show her, or any of the finest establishments in which to stay.
He briefly wondered whether, if he could discover when they meant to go, he might engineer a chance encounter—until he recalled that his present predicament was the result of a similar scheme and chided himself for his foolishness.
“If you object so violently to my connexions, I wonder that you troubled yourself to enquire about them,” Elizabeth said tersely, dropping what was left of her roll into her empty bowl.
“Pardon?”
“You cannot deny your disdain, sir. You frowned at the mere mention of my visiting my uncle in Cheapside.”
I was not frowning, and you made no mention of their living in Cheapside—only London.
Darcy surprised himself with the latter, for it was less than completely honest. Though Elizabeth had not mentioned it, he knew full well her relations lived in that part of town, for the information had been passed on with great relish by Miss Bingley when they were at Netherfield.
Still, it gave Elizabeth pause. She opened her mouth to object, closed it again, nodded to herself, and said instead, “Very well. But, pray tell me—in truth—now that you know they live in the City, will you still credit them with having had such a favourable influence on me?”
If they are the relations from whom you learnt your sense and disposition, then I credit them with a great deal.
“And their condition in life does not diminish your opinion of them?”
The ink ran from the pen to blot the page where Darcy pressed it as he thought overlong on how to answer.
The situation of Elizabeth’s relations was one of the paramount objections to his marrying her.
It would be a falsehood to claim otherwise.
Yet, he could have no objection to the individuals, having never met them, and, judging by this conversation, possibly ought even to admire them.
This, he supposed, was Elizabeth’s meaning.
A sudden flush assailed him as he wondered at her deeper purpose. He felt compelled to remind her that even were her relations the best people in the world, they would never be his relations.
The condition in life of anyone so wholly unconnected to me is immaterial.
After reading this, Elizabeth fixed her eyes on him and tipped her head sideways, as a hawk does when judging the distance to its prey. “The sense and worth of anybody outside of your circle is not important then?”
Not particularly, he thought, surprising himself again. Rattled and a little ashamed, he deflected the conversation back to her by writing,
You take great delight in questioning my judgment. Are you confident your own is always sound?
The parade of expressions that crossed Elizabeth’s countenance suggested it was not a matter she had ever before considered. He was unsurprised that the sentiment upon which she settled last was amusement.
“As certain as anyone ever is, I suppose. I take your point.”
He almost pressed the matter, for it seemed the perfect opportunity to query something that had been troubling him since the day before, but he decided against it.
Quite apart from the possibility of his not liking her answer, there were weightier concerns to attend to.
He thanked her for the broth and the conversation but suggested they set both aside that he might write a letter to his cousin.