Chapter 12 #3
“No,” Mr. Bennet agreed. “She is not.” He rose, and Darcy rose with him, uncertain whether the interview had gone well or badly.
“Well. I suppose that is what I ought to expect from a man who has known my daughter scarcely a fortnight.” He moved to the window.
“I should like some port, Mr. Darcy. I am not entirely equal to the situation without fortification. Would you like a glass?”
Darcy nodded. He would.
“Elizabeth tells me you attempted a compliment at dinner.” Mr. Bennet sank into his chair after the drinks were brought in. “Stimulating, I believe?”
Darcy winced.
“Do not look so alarmed. I have spent my entire marriage attempting to compliment her mother and have yet to find a formulation that is both honest and well-received. It is a family trait. The Bennet women do not make it easy.” He paused, contemplating his glass.
“My wife, for instance, has very fine eyes. I said so once, early in our marriage, and she asked me whether I meant to suggest the rest of her was deficient. One learns to tread carefully.”
“Miss Bennet also has—” Darcy began, and then stopped, because he could feel the sentence careening towards a precipice.
“Yes?” Mr. Bennet’s eyes were bright and amused.
Darcy sighed and set his glass down. “I find that any attempt to describe your daughter reduces her. Every word I choose is inadequate.”
“Now that,” Mr. Bennet said, “is a better answer than stimulating.” He swirled his port. The amusement was still there, but the performance was thinning. “I find I cannot describe her properly either, and I have been trying for a good deal longer.”
He was quiet for a moment, and when he spoke again, the dryness had left his voice entirely.
“She and her elder sister are the best of us, Mr. Darcy. But Elizabeth has held that household together since she was old enough to realise that someone ought to, and she has done it with grace and humour and a strength that I have relied upon far more than any father should.”
He paused, and Darcy heard what the man was not saying, that he knew he had failed her and did not want to give her up to another man who might do the same.
“If you make her unhappy,” Mr. Bennet said, “I shall never forgive either of us.”
Darcy met the older man’s eyes and did not look away. “I shall do my best, sir.”
Mr. Bennet held his gaze a moment longer, then nodded. Mr. Bennet set down his glass, clearly a man returning to practical matters after an uncomfortable foray into sentiment.
“I understand we are to visit St. Laurence tomorrow.”
“Yes, there is a surrogate there where we can purchase the common licence as Miss Bennet is not yet one-and-twenty.”
“And you require my consent before the clerk will issue it. Yes, I am aware of the law in regard to my daughter.” He brushed a speck of dust from his sleeve.
“It is one of the few areas in which the law and I are in agreement. She is too young for this. But then, she has been too young for most of the responsibilities she has carried, and that has not stopped anyone from placing them upon her.” He stood.
“You will want to speak to Lizzy, I suspect. I will send her down, and you can speak in private for a quarter of an hour with the door ajar. No more.”
He did not know how to respond to this, so he simply nodded. “I shall call for you tomorrow at nine,” Darcy said.
“Make it ten, if you would. It is only two miles away, and I have been in a carriage since before dawn. I intend to sleep past the hour at which sensible men rise.” He stood.
“I will say this for you, Mr. Darcy. A lesser man would have offered my daughter money and considered his conscience clear. You did not. Whether that speaks to your character or merely to your inability to take the simpler path, I have not yet decided.” He moved towards the parlour door.
“But I am inclined to think well of a man who makes things harder for himself. I have done it all my life and look how splendidly I have turned out.”
Darcy heard Miss Bennet’s light, quick step on the stairs before he saw her. She appeared in the doorway a moment later, slightly breathless. She looked at him. Then at the door, which she left slightly open. Then back at him.
“My father,” she said, “has allowed us to speak in private.”
“He has,” Darcy said. “I hope that is agreeable.”
She came further into the room. “I do have something to ask.”
He watched her. She sat near him with her hands folded in her lap and looked at him, a careful blend of challenge and anxiety writ upon her countenance. The challenge had always been there, and he quite enjoyed it. But the anxiety was new, and that he did not know how to address.
It was Miss Bennet who spoke first. It was, he was beginning to understand, generally Miss Bennet who spoke first.
“Mrs. Morgan thinks a few days away together after the ceremony would be advisable. Something that looks like a wedding trip.” She coloured. “So that people will draw the obvious conclusion.”
The obvious conclusion being, Darcy supposed, that the obvious thing had occurred. It would support Mrs. Morgan’s narrative that they were a love match.
“She knows of a cottage for let, in Margate. By the sea. Are you willing?”
“If you wish it,” he told her, not knowing how else to respond.
“It is sensible, I suppose,” Miss Bennet said with an unusual briskness. “A week. It will give us time to— She appeared to encounter the same difficulty he had. “It is sensible,” she said again.
“It is,” he agreed, and considered being alone with his intended.
What he hoped was that a few days in a cottage by the sea, without Georgiana or Fitz or Mr. Bennet or the assembled observers of Ramsgate, might show him what they were like when there was no one to perform for.
Whether any of what had passed between them over the last fortnight would survive the removal of crisis.
Whether she would laugh with him when there was nothing to deflect, nothing to arrange, no one to save.
He suspected Miss Bennet was hoping for something similar. He had noticed that she laughed differently when she thought no one was watching.
“Good.” She met his eyes briefly, and there was something in her expression he was not yet skilled enough to fully read. She took a full breath and coughed slightly. He reached for his handkerchief, but she waved him off. “I have also been thinking,” she said, “about what will happen after.”
“After the cottage?”
“After the wedding.”
He had been focused on what must be done for the wedding to take place, and realised, to his chagrin, that he had not spent much time considering the marriage that would follow. “What did you have in mind?”
“I am so pleased you asked,” she said. “Rules. Terms. An understanding between us about how this will work, since we did not have the luxury of an extended courtship to sort these things out properly.”
He understood rules. Rules were structure, and structure was how he had survived every crisis of his adult life.
The death of his father, the management of Pemberley, the near destruction of his sister.
The absence of rules unnerved him: the yawning uncertainty of no boundaries, no expectations, no way to measure whether he was succeeding or failing.
And yet, it seemed an odd request from an intended.
“You wish us to agree upon rules for our marriage,” he said, just to be certain he understood.
“I wish to establish terms we can both live with, so that neither of us is left guessing. Guessing leads to resentment, resentment leads to coldness, and coldness leads to inhabiting separate rooms in the house and pointed silences at dinner, and I think I might rather throw myself in the sea.”
He wanted to smile, but she might think he was not taking her seriously. “The water at Margate is cold.”
She stared at him. He kept his expression neutral, though the effort cost him something. He was not a man given to levity but teasing her was . . . he liked it.
“Rule the first,” she said, straightening. “Separate chambers.”
“Agreed.”
She narrowed her eyes. “You might at least pretend to deliberate.”
He lifted his brows. “Would you prefer I deliberated?”
“I would prefer you did not look quite so relieved, Mr. Darcy.”
He had not thought he looked relieved. “I am not relieved. I am respectful.” It was important to him that when she agreed to share a chamber that she come to him of her own accord.
“Respectful.” She turned the word over as though examining it for defects. “Very well. Separate chambers, by mutual and respectful agreement.”
He dipped his head. “There is one practical matter,” he said carefully, “which that rule does not address.” He kept his voice even.
“Not now, not soon, but eventually, the question of an heir will require our attention. I wish you to know that I am aware of it, and that I intend to leave that entirely in your hands.”
“Thank you,” Elizabeth said, after a pause, in a tone he could not entirely read. “That is—yes. Thank you.”
“Rule the second,” he said, because they both needed rescuing.
“This is one we have discussed before,” she said, moving on, “but it bears repeating. In this marriage, we tell each other the truth, even when it is uncomfortable. Especially when it is uncomfortable. I do not wish to live with a man who tells me only what he thinks I wish to hear.”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “I do not think anyone has ever accused me of that particular failing.”
“No, your failing runs in the opposite direction. You tell people nothing and expect them to divine your meaning by reading whichever particular silence you are employing.”
Her conversation was unique, he would give her that. “I have more than one sort of silence?”
“You have several. I have begun cataloguing them.”
He did not know what to do with this information. All he could do was repeat her words and tell himself that he was beginning to sound like an echo. “You are cataloguing them?”