Chapter 17 #2
The sensible thing would be to ring for a servant to pull down a selection of books from the upper shelves for her to peruse.
Or she could wait for her husband, who could step up onto the ladder without any loss of dignity.
But she did not wish to call anyone from their work simply to fetch her a stack of books from the uppermost shelves when there were so many easily within her reach.
Besides, the ladder looked . . . exciting.
It rolled smoothly along its brass rail as she pushed it easily into position. Elizabeth tested the first rung with her foot. Solid. She gathered her skirt in one hand, set the other on the rail, and climbed.
The ladder was taller than she had appreciated from the ground. By the fourth rung she was above the gallery rail, and by the sixth she could see the tops of the shelves, where a thin layer of dust suggested the maids had been instructed not to climb this high.
She stretched her right arm as far as it would go, braced one hand between the sides of the ladder and against the shelf for balance, then curled her fingers around the spine of a book with an interesting title.
It was wedged between its neighbours quite firmly, which only made her want it more. She adjusted her grip. Pulled. It shifted a quarter of an inch. She pulled again. It gave another quarter.
“Mrs. Darcy?”
Elizabeth did not startle, because startling on a ladder eight feet above a stone floor would have been both indecorous and inadvisable. She did, however, pause to look back at the doorway.
Mr. Darcy stood there in his dark green coat, one hand braced against the frame, his expression changing so rapidly that Elizabeth could not entirely identify the mix from this height, though alarm and exasperation were among its constituents.
“Mr. Darcy.” She spoke as calmly as if they had met in the breakfast room, for she would not allow him to see her embarrassed. “Good morning.”
“You appear to be ascending.”
She tugged at the book again and at last it began to move. “I have ascended. The ascending is complete.” She freed the tome with one final, decisive tug.
“So I see.” He had not moved from the doorway. “May I ask what has compelled you to scale above the fixtures?”
She read the title on the front of the volume and was pleased with her find. “Gilpin’s Observations on the River Wye. It was inconsiderately shelved.”
“I could have reached it for you.”
“Alas, you were not here.”
She watched him absorb this. He was learning, she thought, to hear what she meant beneath what she said.
She did not wish to be treated as though a library ladder were beyond her capabilities simply because she was small compared to him and had recently been ill.
She wished to reach for the things she wanted and to acquire them herself.
Whether he understood all of that from a few words pronounced from atop a ladder, she could not say. But the alarm faded and the exasperation softened.
“The Gilpin is very fine,” he said. “My mother’s copy. She annotated the margins.”
Elizabeth looked down at the book in her hand. “I did not know.”
“You could not have. But I am pleased you found it.” He paused. “Please do come down.”
“Is that a request or an instruction?”
“It is a fervent hope expressed with as much restraint as I can currently summon.”
She laughed. She could not help it. The man was standing in his own library, rigid with the effort of not charging across the room to steady the ladder himself, and he was being both honest and amusing about it.
“Here,” he said, approaching at last. “Allow me to hold the book, at least.”
She handed it down and descended, one careful rung at a time. When she reached the floor, she was flushed and slightly breathless and quite pleased with herself.
He was watching her with a different look now, one she was beginning to recognise. It appeared when she said something unexpected or did something that did not fit whatever picture he had constructed of what his wife ought to do or to be. It was not displeasure so much as revision.
“You might have fallen,” he said.
“I did not.”
“The rungs are narrow.”
“My feet are also narrow. We are well-matched.”
He opened his mouth, wisely reconsidered, and closed it. Then he said, “I shall have the maids dust the upper shelves. If there is anything else you wish to reach, you might leave a list, and I will bring them down for you.”
“Or,” Elizabeth said, “I could use the ladder.”
“Or you could use the ladder,” he agreed, with the look of a man conceding a battle he had never expected to win. “But perhaps when I am in the room, if you would be so kind, so that I may be present to catch you if you fall.”
She tucked the Gilpin against her chest. “I suspect you would tire of such a vigil rather quickly.”
“I doubt that,” he said, then left the room before she could ask what he meant.
Elizabeth stood in the library alone, the book warm in her hands, and wondered whether she had just been complimented. She could not be sure. He had a way of saying things that were not quite compliments and not quite confessions but instead occupied some unknowable territory between the two.
She sat in the less-worn chair and opened the Gilpin.
The handwriting in the margins was small and precise, the observations sharp—The proportion here is wrong.
Later, A mallet judiciously used! One might as well suggest improving a sonata by removing the notes one finds too orderly.
Elizabeth traced the words with her fingertip and felt the ghost of the woman who had raised her husband and newest sister.
She read for an hour, her feet tucked beneath her, the fire crackling softly. When she finally rose, she placed the volume not back on the high shelf where she had found it but on the small table between the two chairs, where it could be easily resumed.
That evening after dinner, Elizabeth retired to her chambers and closed the connecting door to the sitting room.
She stood with her hand on the key for a moment.
The house was quiet. Through the wall she could hear nothing.
These doors were thick, the rooms generous, and whatever sounds Mr. Darcy made in his own chamber on the far side of the sitting room were swallowed by the distance between them.
At the cottage, the wall had been thin enough for him to hear her cough.
Here, she might scream and he would not know it.
Perhaps that was an exaggeration. She turned the key. It engaged with a soft, decisive click.
She had locked doors all her life—at Longbourn, where Kitty and Lydia had no concept of privacy; at Ramsgate, where the lodging house was unfamiliar; at the cottage, where she had locked it the first night simply because one did.
She had locked the door every night in London without thinking much about it.
She was not locking her husband out. She was simply locking the door.
Elizabeth changed into her nightdress, washed her face, and climbed into the bed, which was far too large for one person and also too soft. She sank into it like a stone into moss.
On the bedside table lay two letters that had arrived that afternoon. The first was from Jane, unsealed, brief and warm, tucked into a letter from her father.
My dearest Lizzy,
Uncle Gardiner has very kindly offered to bring me to London as soon as you are ready to receive me. Aunt Gardiner says to tell you there is no hurry, but she has already begun to plan for my arrival, so I think perhaps there is a little hurry.
Mamma wishes me to add that she is telling everyone of your triumph, and that the general response has been very satisfactory.
I am so glad to hear that you are well. Write when you can, Lizzy. I think about you every day.
Your Jane
She set the letter down on the counterpane and looked at it for a moment.
Jane would have said, Of course you can do this, Lizzy. Because she would truly believe it, and because she was the one person whose courage Elizabeth had always been able to borrow when her own ran short.
She picked up her father’s letter and tilted the page towards the candlelight.
My dear Lizzy,
I trust London agrees with you, or at least that you are making it agreeable.
Your mother has informed the neighbourhood of your marriage no less than fifteen times by my most recent count.
Mrs. Long has taken to crossing the street when she sees your mother approaching, though I suspect this has less to do with the intelligence itself than with the volume at which it is delivered.
Your sisters send their love. Jane has sent you a letter of her own, Mary sends a moral observation I have elected to spare you, and Kitty and Lydia send demands for descriptions of your husband’s house, his carriage, his income, and whether he has any officers among his acquaintance.
Apparently, the answers I gave did not satisfy.
I know your husband’s income as we signed the marriage articles. He has been very generous to you. Do not put it aside for your sisters, that is for me to accomplish. You will have more expenses as Mrs. Darcy than you did as Miss Elizabeth Bennet and you will require the funds.
I know that an ample allowance and a house in London is not what you had most hoped for in a marriage.
I had hoped more for you as well. Thus, I hope you will forgive me for asking—are you well?
Not well in the way you will affirm because you do not wish me to worry, but truly well.
I shall know the difference, so do not attempt to prevaricate to spare my feelings.
Your devoted Papa
She could hear her father’s voice in every line, the dry wit shielding the tenderness he had never learned to show directly, the way he deflected with humour because sincerity cost him too much. She hoped his project was proceeding well.
Elizabeth would write back tomorrow to tell both Jane and her father that she was indeed well. She would even mean it, mostly.
She blew out the candle and lay in the dark, listening to the silence of a house that did not yet feel like hers. Through the window she could hear the distant sounds of London—the rumble of a carriage, the bark of a dog, the faint cry of a watchman calling the hour.
No sand in the entry. No wind against the glass. No sound of someone moving quietly on the other side of a thin wall. Elizabeth curled up on her side and thought about a ladder, and a book, and a man who had stood in the doorway and let her climb.