Chapter Fifteen #2
Lady Catherine watched her go. “The girl is still nervous. You must do something about that, Fitzwilliam.”
“Georgiana is well,” Darcy said, in a tone that did not invite further comment.
Lord Matlock appeared in the doorway, unhurried, because he had survived decades of his sister’s arrivals and had learnt the value of a late entrance. “Catherine. What a pleasant surprise.”
“It is not a surprise, Matlock. I wrote to you.”
“You did not.”
“I intended to. The effect is the same.”
“It is not remotely the same,” Lady Matlock said, entering behind her husband, “but we shall manage. Mrs Reynolds says you will have the blue rooms, Catherine; they face east, and I know you prefer the morning light. Mrs Darcy, shall I see to the arrangements?”
“Thank you,” Elizabeth said, and meant it with her whole heart, because Lady Matlock was already steering Lady Catherine out of the yellow drawing room and in the direction of the staircase. Elizabeth was quite desperate for a few moments alone before she disgraced herself entirely.
“I like Margaret,” George said, watching the two women disappear up the stairs. “I have always liked Margaret. She is the only person alive who can make Catherine do anything without Catherine noticing she is being made to do it.”
Elizabeth allowed herself, for one brief moment, to close her eyes.
Anne de Bourgh had not followed her mother upstairs.
She stood in the entrance hall, small and quiet and looking around at Pemberley as though seeing it clearly for the first time.
When she caught Elizabeth watching her, she smiled; a tentative thing, uncertain.
Elizabeth smiled back, and thought: here is a girl who has been told all her life what to think, and is beginning to wonder whether any of it was true.
“Miss de Bourgh,” Elizabeth said. “Welcome to Pemberley. I hope you will be comfortable here.”
“Thank you, Mrs Darcy,” Anne said. “I believe I shall be.”
It was such a simple sentence, and Anne delivered it so quietly, but it sounded remarkably like relief.
“We’ve the yellow rooms ready for you, Miss de Bourgh,” Mrs Reynolds said warmly. “If you’ll allow me to escort you upstairs?”
“Thank you, Mrs Reynolds,” Elizabeth said, deeply grateful for the housekeeper’s efficiency. How Mrs Reynolds had two of the best guest suites prepared on ten minutes’ notice was a mystery, but Elizabeth had no doubt that Pemberley would not be disgraced by the efforts.
By the second evening, Elizabeth understood that Lady Catherine was going to be a problem of an entirely different order to the Matlocks.
She had expected the disapproval. She had expected the comments about the furniture, the menus, the household management, the fact that Elizabeth had been born a mere country gentleman’s daughter rather than into the peerage.
She had weathered Lady Catherine’s opposition before, and she was not afraid of the woman’s opinions.
What she had not expected was the watching.
Lady Catherine watched everything. She watched Elizabeth at meals, during walks, in the yellow drawing room.
She noted who Elizabeth spoke to and how long the conversations lasted.
She tracked Elizabeth’s exits and entrances: when she left a room, how long she was gone, whether she returned looking different than when she had left.
Kitty, alert to the danger from the first moment, adjusted accordingly.
In the yellow drawing room after tea, when George Darcy appeared beside Elizabeth, talking about Lady Catherine’s petty cruelties toward her sister when they were young, Kitty launched into a long, animated account of a novel she was reading, directing it at Elizabeth in a way that required nothing but the occasional nod and murmur of agreement.
Elizabeth could listen to George while appearing to listen to Kitty, and Lady Catherine, watching from her chair by the fire, saw only a young woman being bored by her sister’s literary enthusiasm.
It was seamless, the product of years of practice, and Elizabeth was grateful for it in a way she could not express.
But Kitty could not be in every room.
The following morning, Elizabeth paused in the corridor to listen to Nana, who wanted to tell her about an under-housemaid who was making eyes at one of the footmen, and when she turned, Lady Catherine was standing at the far end of the corridor, watching.
“Were you speaking to someone, Mrs Darcy?”
“I was counting the candle sconces,” Elizabeth said. “Mrs Reynolds asked me to check whether they all had fresh candles before the ball.”
“You were standing quite still. And your lips were moving.”
“I was counting,” Elizabeth said again, and smiled, and walked past Lady Catherine with her heart hammering.
“Witch,” Nana said, and for a moment Elizabeth thought it was Lady Catherine who had spoken, directing the remark at her, and the terror that washed over her almost stopped her breath.
At dinner that evening, Lady Catherine held forth on the management of great estates, a subject upon which she considered herself the foremost authority in England.
She addressed most of her remarks to Darcy and Lord Matlock, though she directed the occasional observation at Elizabeth that carried the sting of a test.
“I trust you have not been making changes to the household, Mrs Darcy. A new wife ought to observe for at least a year before she presumes to alter anything.”
“I have made few changes,” Elizabeth said. “Mrs Reynolds and I consult daily, and she guides me admirably.”
“Mrs Reynolds.” Lady Catherine’s tone suggested that relying on a housekeeper was a confession of inadequacy. “When I took charge of Rosings, I did not require guidance. I knew at once what was needed.”
“How fortunate for Rosings,” Lady Matlock murmured, and Lord Matlock became intensely interested in his wine.
But then, as the dessert was cleared, Lady Catherine turned her attention to Elizabeth again, and this time there was nothing casual about it.
“You look tired, Mrs Darcy. Are you sleeping well? I have always believed that women of a nervous disposition require more rest than others. It is a failing of the constitution, not a moral deficiency, and there is no shame in admitting it.”
The table went quiet. Darcy set down his glass.
“Elizabeth is in excellent health,” he said.
“I did not say she was not. I said she looked tired. There is a difference, Fitzwilliam, and a husband ought to attend to these things.”
Elizabeth smiled and said, “I am perfectly well, Lady Catherine. I thank you for your concern.” Beneath the table, she gripped her hands tightly together, because Lady Catherine had just played her first card.
Nervous disposition. A failing of the constitution.
The language of physicians, of commitments, of women put away.
And one which was easy to target at Elizabeth, the daughter of a woman who complained constantly about her nerves.
After dinner, she found Kitty in the library, reading quietly in the company of Miss Pardoe, though Kitty of course thought she was reading alone.
“She is watching me,” Elizabeth said, flopping rather ungracefully into a chair. “Not casually. She is looking for something.”
“She has always wanted this marriage to fail,” Kitty pointed out. “If she can find evidence that something is wrong with you, she will use it.”
“I know.”
“Then you must be more careful. No more conversations in corridors where anyone might see. No pausing. No looking at things that aren’t there.”
“George Darcy has information I need. I can’t stop speaking to him because Lady Catherine is in the house. And Nana will certainly not be quiet, not ever.”
“Then find somewhere to speak to them that doesn’t involve standing in hallways moving your lips.”
Elizabeth sat, considering the shape of the problem.
Thus far Pemberley had been a sympathetic household, where Mrs Reynolds was kind, Darcy patient, the Matlocks fond.
Lady Catherine was none of those things.
She was hostile and perceptive, and she had the weapons society gave women who wished to destroy other women: gossip, insinuation, the suggestion of madness.
In 1812, a husband could commit an inconvenient wife on nothing more than a physician’s word.
And Elizabeth had still not told Darcy the truth, for which she was now berating herself even more thoroughly.
“Catherine knew this house well,” George Darcy said from behind Elizabeth, startling her.
He seemed to have been more present this evening, as though his sister-in-law’s arrival had stirred something restless in him.
“She visited often when Anne was alive. She and my wife argued about everything, from carpets to child-rearing, but they were family, and family came when it was needed. Catherine was here when Fitzwilliam was born. She was here when Georgiana was born too, and Anne died in her arms.”
“Was she here when you died?”
“No. We had quarrelled. Catherine thought me foolish for the favour I showed Wickham. A steward’s son, she called him, as though that settled the matter.
She told me I was being sentimental, that I was elevating a boy with no claim on the family above my own son and heir.
” He paused. “She was right, though not for the reasons she imagined. She saw the problem of rank. She did not see the problem of character. Nobody did, except Fitzwilliam.”
“And you quarrelled over this?”
“Bitterly. The last time she visited, she told me I would live to regret my blindness where Wickham was concerned. I told her that the management of my household was not her affair. She left the following morning and did not return.” His voice went flat.
“I did not live to regret it, as it happened. I simply died of it.”
Elizabeth was quiet. Lady Catherine, who was wrong about so many things, had been right about Wickham.
Not about his character; she had objected to his station, not his soul.
But the conclusion had been correct even so, and George had dismissed it because it came wrapped in Catherine’s particular brand of snobbish condescension.
Just as he had dismissed Fitzwilliam. Just as he had dismissed everyone who tried to tell him what he did not wish to hear.
“She won’t make this easy for you,” George said.
“Catherine does not forgive, she does not forget, and she has never once in her life let a matter rest when she believed herself to be in the right. She came here to find fault with you, Elizabeth. She will find it, if you give her the smallest opportunity.”
“Kitty,” Elizabeth said. “We need Jane.”
“Jane is coming.”
“Jane needs to come faster.”
She went to the writing desk, drew out a fresh sheet of paper, and began a second letter to Jane.
This one was not about the ball. Kitty left her alone, and so did George, both perhaps sensing that she needed to concentrate.
To focus on expressing her urgency in words that would not convey it to anyone but her intended target.
She had barely sealed it when there was a knock at the door. It was her husband. He stood in the doorway, still dressed for dinner, and looked at her for a moment before he spoke.
“You were going to tell me something, when you came to my study yesterday morning.”
“Yes.”
“My aunt’s arrival does not change that. Whatever it is, Elizabeth, I would rather hear it from you than discover it some other way.”
She looked at him. He was not demanding. He was not angry. He was simply standing in her doorway, asking her to trust him, and the worst of it was that she wanted to.
“You will,” she said. “Soon.”
“You said that before.”
“I know. And I mean it more each time, which ought to count for something.”
He studied her face. Then he crossed the room, kissed her forehead, and said, “Goodnight, Elizabeth.”
“Goodnight.”
He left. Elizabeth listened to his footsteps retreat down the corridor, then turned back to her letter, and added a single postscript on the back: Come quickly.