Chapter Twelve #3
Lady Catherine descended first, as was her custom and her right, and stood for a moment at the lychgate with the expression of a woman surveying an arrangement she has made and finding it satisfactory.
The morning was clear, the air sharp with the first real suggestion of autumn, and the church door stood open, the interior beyond it dim and cool.
Mr. Collins was already at the door—indeed, had been there, Mrs. Collins suspected, for the better part of an hour—dressed in his best coat and wearing an expression of such concentrated solemnity that it had crossed, some time ago, the boundary into something approaching the sublime.
“Lady Catherine,” he said, with a bow of a depth that suggested he was not entirely certain he would be able to straighten again. “This is—I find myself—the honour of this occasion—”
“Yes, Collins,” Lady Catherine said, and passed him with the brisk kindness of a woman who has learned, over many years, to receive his tributes without encouraging them to develop further. “We are ready when you are.”
Mr. James Bennet straightened. He was ready. He had been ready since eight o’clock.
The party arranged itself in the nave with the quiet efficiency of people who have been told where to stand and have the good sense to stand there.
Lady Catherine took her place in the front pew on the right, beside Mrs. Collins, who had dressed with a quiet care that suggested she understood the occasion and had chosen to honour it without drawing attention to herself—which was, James thought, entirely characteristic of her.
Lady Caroline sat to the left, her hands folded in her lap, her face composed with the particular steadiness of a woman who has decided that she will not weep and is not yet certain she can keep the promise.
The church smelled of old stone and beeswax and the faint, dry sweetness of the autumn flowers that someone—Mrs. Collins, James suspected—, had arranged in the window niches: late roses, a few stems of rosehip, something pale and feathery that he could not name.
The light came in through the east window in long, angled bars, falling across the stone floor in a pattern that shifted almost imperceptibly as a cloud moved across the sky.
James stood at the chancel steps and waited.
He had stood in many places in his life and waited in many of them, and he was not, in general, a man who found waiting difficult.
But this was a different quality of waiting—not the waiting of a man who does not know what is coming, but the waiting of a man who knows exactly what is coming and finds, to his own mild surprise, that he is impatient for it.
James heard the door.
Fiona came in on her mother’s arm.
She was dressed simply—a beige muslin gown with a high waist and long sleeves, a cream shawl over her shoulders, her hair dressed close to her head with a single strand of small pearls that James thought had probably belonged to her grandmother.
She carried no flowers. She wore no veil.
She walked with the same quality he had noticed in the hall on the first morning—that quality of being entirely herself, without performance, without pretence—and she looked, as she came down the aisle toward him, like a person who has made a decision and is at peace with it.
Miss Eliot looked up when she reached him, and found James looking at her, and the colour came to her cheeks, and she did not look away.
“Good morning,” Fiona said, very quietly.
“Good morning,” James replied.
It was not the most eloquent exchange that had ever preceded a wedding ceremony. But it was honest, and it was theirs, and it was enough.
Mr. Collins opened the Book of Common Prayer with the reverence of a man handling a sacred object, which it was. He cleared his throat with the gravity of a man who is about to perform the most significant act of his clerical career, which he was, and began.
“Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this congregation, to join together this Man and this Woman in holy Matrimony...”
His voice, to his credit, was steady. He had practised, Mrs. Collins knew, the previous evening, in the empty church, until the words came without stumbling.
He had also, she suspected, rehearsed the expression of grave dignity with which he now delivered them—but the expression, however rehearsed, was not insincere.
He was genuinely moved. He was, beneath all the ceremony and self-importance, a man who believed in what he was doing, and that belief, however imperfectly expressed, gave the words their proper weight.
“...not by any to be enterprised, nor taken in hand, unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly...”
Lady Caroline’s hands tightened in her lap. She did not look at Fiona. She looked at the east window, and the light coming through it, and kept her promise to herself by the smallest possible margin.
“...but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God...”
Lady Catherine sat entirely still, her hands folded on the head of her cane, her expression composed.
She had arranged this. She had seen it done.
She was satisfied. She would not permit herself to be anything more than satisfied, because satisfaction was sufficient, and anything more would be indecorous.
But when Collins reached the words “to have and to hold, from this day forward” and James repeated them in his steady, unhurried voice—the voice of a man who says what he means and means what he says—she permitted herself, in the privacy of her own thoughts, to be rather more than satisfied.
“Wilt thou have this Woman to thy wedded wife, to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of Matrimony? Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honour, and keep her in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all other, keep thee only unto her, so long as ye both shall live?”
“I will,” James Bennet said.
He said it without hesitation, and without ceremony, and without the slight upward inflexion that sometimes crept into such declarations when the speaker was not entirely certain of them.
He said it as a statement of fact, in the same tone in which he might say that the morning was clear or that the south walk was pleasant—the tone of a man for whom the thing being said is true, and requires no decoration.
Fiona heard it. She had been looking at Collins, as was correct, but at the sound of those two words, she looked at James, and he was already looking at her, and for a moment, the church and the morning and the small, watchful congregation ceased to exist entirely.
“Wilt thou have this Man to thy wedded husband, to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of Matrimony? Wilt thou love him, comfort him, honour, and keep him in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all other, keep thee only unto him, so long as ye both shall live?”
There was a pause—not a long one, not a hesitation, but the pause of a person who is about to say something she means and is taking the moment to mean it fully.
“I will,” Fiona said excitedly.
Her voice was quiet and entirely clear, and it did not waver, and Lady Caroline, who had kept her promise to herself through the whole of the service up to this point, found that she could not keep it any further, and did not try.
The ring was plain gold, and it had been produced that morning by Lady Catherine from a small velvet case, with the brisk efficiency of a woman who had thought of everything and saw no reason to draw attention to the fact.
“I took the precaution of having one prepared,” she had said, when she pressed it into James’s hand before they left Rosings. “You may thank me later.”
“I shall thank you now,” James had said, and she had looked at him with the expression that he had come to recognise as her version of being pleased, and said nothing further.
James placed it on Fiona’s finger with the same steadiness with which he had done everything in the past three days.
She looked down at it for a moment—at the plain, unadorned gold, at the hand that had placed it there—and then looked up at him, and the expression on her face was not the expression of a woman who has completed a transaction.
Still, the expression of a woman who has, against considerable odds, arrived somewhere she did not expect to be and finds it, to her own surprise, entirely right.
“Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder.”
Collins said it with a solemnity that was, for once, entirely proportionate to the occasion.
He looked at them both—at James, steady and certain, and at Fiona, composed and clear-eyed—and he felt, in the private depths of his not inconsiderable self-regard, that he had done something today that was genuinely worth doing, and that Lady Catherine would be pleased, and that he would remember this morning for the rest of his life.
He was right on all three counts.
***
They came out of the church into the September morning—into the clear light and the cool air and the yew tree’s long shadow across the path—and stood for a moment on the step while Lady Caroline embraced her daughter and Lady Catherine shook James’s hand with a firmness that conveyed, in the Regency manner, everything that a lesser woman would have said in a speech.
Mrs. Collins stood a little apart, as was her habit, and watched, and was glad.
James offered Fiona his arm, and she took it, and they walked together through the lychgate and down the lane toward the waiting carriages, and the morning was very fine.
The light was very clear, and neither of them said anything at all for a moment, because there was nothing that needed to be said, and they had both, by now, learned the value of that easy silence which belongs only to people who are entirely at their ease with one another.
At last, Fiona looked up at him.
“I think,” she said softly, “that we shall be very happy.”
James smiled, a quiet, certain smile that answered her more clearly than any speech.
“Yes,” he said. “I think we shall.”
She looked up at him again, and the smile arrived—the full smile, the one that transformed her face entirely—and he thought, not for the first time and not for the last, that he had come to Kent expecting a negotiation and had been given something he had not known he was looking for, and that Lady Catherine de Bourgh was, whatever else might be said of her, a woman of very considerable judgment.
The carriage door was opened. James handed Fiona in, and followed, and the door was closed, and the horses moved, and Hunsford church receded behind them in the morning light, its old grey stones patient and unchanged, as they had been for centuries, as they would be for centuries more.
Fiona’s hand found his almost without thought, and he closed his fingers over it, and neither of them felt any need to speak again.