Chapter Nine #7
For the briefest instant, her eyes lifted and met his across the candles.
It was a look long enough for the amusement to be recognised and returned.
James found that he was smiling too, though he suspected he would have found it difficult to explain the reason to Mr. Collins.
***
After dinner, when the covers had been removed and the party had moved to the drawing room, Lady Caroline turned to her daughter with the air of a woman who has been waiting for a suitable moment and has now decided that this is it.
“Fiona, my dear,” she said, “I wonder if you would play for us. Lady Catherine’s instrument is, I believe, very fine.”
It was the kind of request that was not quite a request, and Fiona received it with the composure of a young woman who has received it many times before and has long since ceased to object.
She glanced at Lady Catherine, who inclined her head with the gracious permission of a woman who considers the pianoforte one of the more useful accomplishments and is pleased to see it properly employed.
“Of course, Mama,” Miss Eliot said, and rose without ceremony and crossed to the instrument.
It was a very fine pianoforte—a Broadwood grand, James thought, by the look of it—and Fiona settled herself at it with the ease of someone entirely at home in the arrangement.
She did not open any music. She sat for a moment with her hands in her lap, as though she were deciding something, and then began.
She played a Haydn sonata first—the second movement, slow and clear, each note placed with a precision that was not mechanical but considered, as though she were thinking through the music as she played it rather than merely reproducing it.
The room was quiet. Mr. Collins, who had been about to say something to Mrs. Collins, did not say it.
Lady Catherine sat with her hands folded and her eyes on the middle distance, and her expression was one that James had not seen on her face before—not satisfaction, exactly, but something softer than satisfaction, the expression of a woman who is reminded, by something beautiful, of a feeling she does not often permit herself.
Then Fiona moved without pause into something else—a simple air, in a minor key, that James did not recognise.
It was not a showy piece; it made no demands on the listener or the player that were not met with perfect ease.
But there was something in it—in the way she shaped the phrases, in the slight rubato she applied to the second strain, in the quality of her touch, which was light without being thin—that made it more than the sum of its notes.
James stood near the window, a little apart from the others, and watched her.
Miss Eliot was not performing. That was the thing that distinguished her from every other young woman he had heard play in a drawing room.
She was not paying attention to the impression she was making; she was paying attention to the music.
Her face, in profile, was entirely concentrated—not tense, but present, the way a person’s face is when they are doing something they love and have forgotten, for the moment, that anyone is watching.
James thought of what Mrs. Collins had said: Miss Eliot is not the source of the difficulty. She is its consequence.
He thought of the grey eyes in the hall, and the smile that had arrived like something long overdue, and the remark about the Norman stonework—more urgent, as though whoever built it was not entirely certain the ground would hold—and he found, standing in the candlelit drawing room of Rosings Park with the music moving quietly through the air, that he had concluded without being entirely certain when the process of arriving at it had begun.
The air ended. Fiona sat for a moment with her hands still on the keys, then lifted them, turned on the bench, and found him looking at her.
The colour rose to her cheeks again—that honest, unconcealed colour that he had noticed in the hall and found, then as now, entirely disarming.
Miss Eliot did not look away. She met his gaze with the steady composure that was characteristic of her, and then, very slightly, she smiled—not the full smile of the hall, but something quieter and more private, the smile of a person who has been seen and does not, on reflection, object to it.
“Thank you,” James said, and meant it as more than a courtesy.
“It is only Haydn,” she replied, which was the kind of remark that sounds modest and is not, quite, because it assumes the listener knows the difference.
“And the second piece, Miss Eliot?”
“My own,” she said promptly. “There are two more, if you will permit me.” And she turned back to the instrument.
***
Lady Catherine appeared at James’s elbow with the quiet precision of a woman who has been watching the room and has chosen her moment with care.
“Come, Mr. Bennet,” she said, in a tone that was not quite a command and not quite an invitation, but occupied the narrow territory between the two with perfect confidence. “There is a small parlour adjoining. I should like a word.”
James followed her through a door at the far end of the drawing room—a door he had not noticed, set flush with the panelling—into a room that was considerably smaller than the drawing room and considerably more comfortable: two chairs before a low table, a lamp already lit, the curtains drawn against the September night.
It was the room of a woman who conducts her real business in private and keeps her formal rooms for the world.
Lady Catherine sat, and at her sign, James sat opposite her, and she looked at him with the frank, comprehensive attention that he had come to recognise as her habitual mode of address.
“Well,” Lady Catherine said. “You have had the afternoon to think, and the evening to observe. I should like to know where you stand.”
“I stand,” James said, “where I stood this morning—willing to understand the situation more fully before I commit to anything.”
“That is a careful answer.”
“It is an honest one, your ladyship.”
Lady Catherine regarded him for a moment.
“Very well. I will be equally honest.” She folded her hands in her lap with the composure of a woman who has made this speech before, in her mind, and is now delivering it with the precision of long preparation.
“There is one circumstance which I have not yet disclosed, and which requires absolute discretion. I felt it necessary that you should first declare yourself before I troubled you with certain particulars.”
James said nothing, but his attention sharpened.
“The young lady has been most unfortunately betrayed,” Lady Catherine continued, her voice level and without apology.
“By a married man who was not at liberty to offer what he led her to expect. He has since removed himself entirely from the situation. Lord Eliot has acted to contain the damage as far as it is possible to do so.” She paused and looked at James with the directness of a woman who does not soften what cannot be softened. “A child is expected, Mr. Bennet.”
The room was very quiet.
James did not move. He sat with his hands resting on his knees and his eyes on the middle distance, and for a long moment, he said nothing at all.
The lamp on the low table burned steadily. Somewhere in the drawing room beyond the panelled door, Fiona was still playing—the same quiet air, its phrases moving through the wall like something heard from a great distance.
“I see,” James said at last. The words were entirely inadequate; he knew it and said nothing further.
“I appreciate,” Lady Catherine said, with a care that was unusual for her, “that this is not a small thing to be asked.”
“No,” James said. “It is not.” He rose from his chair and moved to the window, though the curtains were drawn and there was nothing to see. He stood there for a moment with his back to her—not from discourtesy, but because he required the space of a few seconds in which he was not being observed.
A child. Another man’s child. A child who would bear his name, be raised under his roof, and inherit what his family had built.
James had come to Kent expecting a sort of negotiation, but he had not expected this.
He turned around.
“The father, your ladyship,” James begun. “Does he know about the pregnancy?”
“He does not. But there is no future for him in the child’s life.”
“And Miss Eliot—does she know that I have been told?”
“She does not. She knows only that her family has identified a candidate. The particulars of what you have been told are known to four persons: Lord Eliot, Lady Caroline, myself, and now you. It will remain so.”
James was quiet again. He returned to his chair, but did not sit—he stood behind it, one hand resting on its back, as though he required something solid beneath his fingers.
“You ask a great deal, Lady Catherine,” he said.
“I am aware of it, Mr. Bennet.”
“You ask me to give a child my name who is not mine. To raise it as my own. To carry a secret that is not of my making for the remainder of my life.”
“Yes,” Lady Catherine said. She did not qualify it or attempt to diminish it, and he respected her ladyship the more for that.
“There is also an additional sum of five and twenty thousand—a settlement secured from the man responsible, in exchange for his name being kept entirely out of the matter. As I said, he is not aware of the child. He paid to prevent a scandal of a different kind—the ruin of a young woman he had compromised. The money is hers by right.”
James Bennet sat down. He looked at his hands for a moment, then at the lamp, then at nothing in particular.
He thought of Fiona in the hall that morning—the hat at a slight angle, the grey eyes, the smile that had arrived like something unexpected and stayed longer than she had intended.
He thought of her at the pianoforte, playing her own composition and saying my own with a simplicity that was not modesty but something more honest than modesty.
He thought of what Mrs. Collins had said in the parsonage parlour: she is not the source of the difficulty. She is its consequence.
James had known, even then, that there was more to it than he had been told. He had chosen to go to dinner anyway. He was not certain, now, whether that had been wisdom or something closer to inevitability.
“I should like to know,” he said carefully, “that Miss Eliot is not being compelled. That she has some say in whether I am the man chosen.”
“She has been consulted,” Lady Catherine said. “She has not refused. Whether she would choose you freely, in other circumstances, I cannot say. But she is not without opinion, and she has not been without opportunity to express it.”
James Bennet was silent for a long moment.
From the drawing room beyond the door the last phrase of the air lingered, quiet and unhurried, before fading into silence.
“The young lady shall not suffer further for another man’s fault,” James said at last. It was not quite an acceptance, and not quite a declaration—it was the statement of a man who has looked at a situation honestly and found, to his own mild surprise, that he is equal to it.
“I will give you my answer in the morning, your ladyship. But I think you already know what it will be.”
Lady Catherine looked at him with an expression that was, for the first time in his acquaintance with her, entirely unguarded—the expression of a woman who has arranged a great many things in her life and is not often surprised by the results, but finds, occasionally, that the world exceeds her expectations.
“I told Lady Caroline she was an excellent judge of character,” she said.
Then Lady Catherine led him back through the panelled door into the drawing room, where Fiona was still at the pianoforte, playing something very quiet, and the candles were burning low, and Mr. Collins had fallen asleep in his chair.