Chapter 9 #2
Mrs. Morgan squeezed her hand but did not speak.
Elizabeth climbed the stairs to lie down upon the bed. After she had rested for a few hours, she came down the stairs just as there was a knock at the front door.
Hannah carried a folded note into the parlour with Elizabeth just behind her. “For you, Mrs. Morgan. From Marine Parade.” Mrs. Morgan broke the seal, read, and then held out the page to Elizabeth.
Mrs. Morgan—
I must speak with you and Miss Bennet regarding the events of this morning. I fear I have done Miss Bennet a terrible wrong, and I must make it right.
If you would permit me to call upon you at four o’clock this afternoon, I would be most grateful.
F. Darcy
“He will offer marriage,” Mrs. Morgan said, greatly relieved.
Elizabeth could not be as sanguine. “Or he will offer me a settlement to make up for the damage to my reputation.” A settlement would not restore her or help her sisters, not really. None of them would wed. It would only give them a little extra to live on when her father died.
“I did not expect it of him,” Mrs. Morgan continued quietly. “When we departed, I was not certain he would think beyond his own reputation and expectations. But he means to do the honourable thing.”
Elizabeth did not know that this was the case, but perhaps Mrs. Morgan was correct.
She had spent the past hours preparing herself for the alternative, for the slow, grinding work of surviving a scandal with no remedy.
She had considered her sisters, of what their prospects would look like through the lens of her disgrace.
And now she knew how deeply Mrs. Morgan had been wounded too.
How strange that just when she had been recovering, every good choice for the life restored to her had been stripped away. But there was nothing to be done. If Mr. Darcy was willing to save her, her family, and Mrs. Morgan, she could not turn him away.
“Write back, Mrs. Morgan,” she said, and handed the letter to her companion. “Tell him he may call at four.”
She felt incredibly weary, and returned, upstairs, again, to rest.
His knock came precisely at four.
Mr. Darcy looked dreadful. All colour was gone from his face, his features were sharp and austere.
But his coat was immaculate, his cravat precisely tied, as though he had taken great care with his appearance.
The care made it worse, somehow. Perhaps because it meant he understood the gravity of what he had come to do.
Behind him, half-hidden in his shadow, came Georgiana. She would not meet Elizabeth’s eyes.
Elizabeth was surprised that Mr. Darcy had brought Georgiana with him on this errand, but she supposed he would not allow his sister out of his sight for some time.
They sat, the four of them arranged in the small parlour, figures in a painting no one would ever have commissioned.
Mr. Darcy cleared his throat. “Mrs. Morgan, Miss Bennet. I have come to discuss . . . the situation. The events of this morning. At the bathing establishment,” he added, as though she might have forgotten which catastrophe he meant.
“Yes,” she said. “I had suspected as much.”
He was marshalling his thoughts, which, given that he had presumably had all day to do so, did not inspire confidence.
“The events of this morning,” he began.
“You have used that phrase twice now. And once in your letter.”
He stopped.
“The events of this morning. You are circling the subject, Mr. Darcy, like a man circles a horse he suspects will bite.”
“Very well.” He drew a breath. It was not a steady breath. “This morning a boy came to the bookshop and told me my sister was in distress. That she was locked in a room with Mr. Wickham and he was attempting to force her to leave with him. He claimed that Mrs. Morgan had sent him.”
There was an outraged gasp from Mrs. Morgan. “I most certainly did not.”
He dipped his head in a nod. “Unfortunately, I did not understand that until it was too late.” There was a brief pause.
“I did not verify the claim. I did not seek a woman to locate my sister. I did not stop to consider that there were no raised voices as there surely would have been had something untoward been occurring.”
He was not looking at her. He was looking at his clasped hands. “I was so certain Georgiana needed me that I did not think. I allowed my judgement to be compromised, Miss Bennet, and that judgement sent me into your bathing room.”
Where he had compromised her.
Elizabeth admired him for not placing the blame elsewhere, for he easily could do so. But he was at least partially to blame. He had not stopped to think things through and had burst in on her without hesitation. And because of that . . .
“You are telling us what happened,” Mrs. Morgan said. “Will you also explain what you propose to do about it?”
He flinched at the word “propose.”
That was not, Elizabeth thought, an auspicious beginning.
He addressed her. “I will marry you.” The words came with no preamble, no careful arrangement. Just the blunt fact. “Not because I have the right to ask. I know I do not. But because I cannot think of any other way to undo what my carelessness has done to you.”
He had not, in fact, asked. He had announced.
The room was very quiet, though Elizabeth heard Georgiana sniffle. She handed the girl her handkerchief as Mr. Darcy said, “I recognise that this is not . . .” He stopped. “I am aware that this is not the manner in which such a proposal is customarily made.”
“No,” Elizabeth agreed. “Customarily you would wish to propose. Customarily you would ask and then, if I accepted, you would speak with my father. But these are not customary circumstances.”
“Indeed. I have made a terrible blunder, and the consequences have fallen upon us as a result,” he said. “I am aware of that. I wish it were not so.”
Elizabeth looked at him for a long moment. He might at least have pretended that this was not a hateful idea to him.
But then, Mr. Darcy must have expected to make a very great match.
Though she felt they had been on their way to a friendly sort of acquaintance, she truly was Georgiana’s friend, not his.
She barely knew him. And yet here he was, sitting before her with a stillness that must require enormous effort.
Even as everything within her cried out at the injustice of her plight, she had to concede that he was not attempting to direct or convince her.
He was simply offering her the only thing he had to give.
Well, that was not true, was it? He could have offered a good deal less.
She thought again of her sisters, her mother. She thought of Mrs. Morgan. She also thought of herself. This decision could protect them all.
Elizabeth closed her eyes, took a breath, and said, “I accept your proposal, Mr. Darcy.”
“You accept?” he asked.
Had he believed her so stubborn as to refuse? Perhaps he had hoped she would. “I do. Not with pleasure on either side, I think; but because we both know what follows if I do not.”
“Thank you” was all he said.
“It is a strange thing to be thanked for agreeing to marry someone.”
“It is a strange thing to be accepted so quickly when one has proposed so poorly.” He looked almost angry with himself as if he had rehearsed something better and was now dissecting what had come out of his mouth instead.
“I had intended to be . . . warmer. Less . . .” He gestured vaguely, as though the right word might be plucked from the air if he could only discover it.
“Perfunctory?”
Mrs. Morgan developed a sudden interest in the upholstery.
“Yes,” Mr. Darcy said. He met her eyes, and the stiffness fell away. Beneath it she saw exhaustion, and guilt, and something else she could not name. “I am sorry, Miss Bennet. For the proposal and for the necessity of it. You deserve better than this.”
He meant it. That was the trouble. He meant every word, but when he said she deserved better, he meant a better proposal, with warmer words, a more graceful delivery, perhaps a room without a sister and a companion as he spoke the words.
Not that she deserved to choose the direction of her own life.
“We shall have to make the best of it,” she said.
Before either could speak again, Georgiana stirred. She had been so quiet Elizabeth had almost forgotten she was there. Now she looked up, and her face was the colour of ash.
“I am so sorry. This is all my fault,” she said. “If I had never trusted Mr. Wickham, if I had seen what Mrs. Younge was, my brother would never have been so afraid for me. He would have thought before he acted.” She looked at Elizabeth. “Everything that has happened is because of me.”
Elizabeth crossed to Georgiana’s chair and knelt beside her, just as she had done in the bedroom at Marine Parade and took the girl’s hands.
“You did not send the boy. You did not lure Mrs. Morgan outside. You did not jam a wedge beneath the door or scream your brother’s name.
Mrs. Younge did those things. And I am certain Mr. Wickham helped her to plan them.
” She held Georgiana’s gaze and spoke so that both Mr. Darcy and Mrs. Morgan would hear her as well.
“Guilt is a cage, Georgiana. You must not allow those two to keep you in one.”
Georgiana did not cry. She sat perfectly, terribly still. “I shall never forgive myself,” she whispered.
“Then you and I shall quarrel,” Elizabeth said with a lightness she did not feel, “because if there is any reason to forgive you then I have already done so, and I do not enjoy being contradicted.” Elizabeth looked at Mr. Darcy over his sister’s head.
He was watching them, and the look in his eyes was . . . intense.
She rose and returned to her seat. “I must write to my father,” she said, because practicalities were safer than whatever she had just seen cross his face. She brushed her hands down her skirt to give them something to do.
“As must I.” Mr. Darcy paused. “I confess I do not know what to say to him. I do not imagine there is a form of words that will make a father easy about this.”
No, there was not. And the fact that he knew it was something, she supposed.
“My father will wish to know the character of the man his daughter is marrying,” Elizabeth said. “And he will wish to know whether I am happy.”
“And what will you tell him?”
Elizabeth considered. What could she tell her father?
That she was marrying a man she had known for a few days, a man she had initially judged as cold and proud and who would certainly never have offered given a choice?
That she was doing it because the alternative was ruin for herself, for her sisters, for the woman who had been charged with her care and tricked into leaving her unprotected?
That the man in question had confessed his own arrogance to her face, but that he had also moved a chair to the fire without being asked, that his sister adored him, that he had attempted to face down their accusers, and that when he looked at Georgiana his face held more love than his words could ever express?
That she would have preferred a husband who looked at her in a similar way?
“I shall tell him the truth,” she said. “That you are a good man placed in an impossible situation, and that I believe we can work ourselves into a companionable marriage.” She would tell herself she believed this until she actually did.
There was relief in his eyes. “Thank you,” he said again.
Elizabeth attempted to rally her spirits. “You really must find another phrase, Mr. Darcy. We are to be married. You cannot always be thanking me for everything.”
“You did instruct me that it was the way to respond to kindness,” he told her.
“But we were not to be married then.”
“I suspect that you will still be owed my thanks.”
Elizabeth looked away and was grateful when Mrs. Morgan cleared her throat and began speaking about a common license.