Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
It began with the Gilpin.
Darcy had not planned it, which was perhaps why it worked.
He came into the library after dinner to attend to a letter he had been putting off, a dry matter of fencing on the Kympton tenancy, and found the Gilpin on the small table between the two chairs.
Elizabeth must have left it there this morning, and as she was not one to leave her books out, he thought she must be planning to return to it.
He picked the book up and opened it where Elizabeth had placed a marker.
His mother’s handwriting greeted him from the margins, her familiar pencilled annotations sharp and certain in their opinions.
A mallet judiciously used! He smiled, as he always did, and turned the pages.
His mother had drawn a small sketch of the view from Symonds Yat, correcting what she considered Gilpin’s poor draughtsmanship.
It was not a good sketch. She had known this.
Beneath it she had written, I cannot draw well either, but at least I admit it.
He was still reading when Elizabeth appeared.
She did not announce herself. She simply entered, saw that he had her book in his hand, shook her head when he offered it, then selected another from the lower shelf. She sat in the chair opposite and opened it.
Neither of them spoke.
He returned his attention to the Gilpin.
He read the same sentence about the arrangement of trees on a distant hillside four times without absorbing a single word of it.
He was not, he told himself, distracted by the fact that his wife was sitting six feet away reading a novel as though he were not in the room.
He was merely having difficulty with Gilpin’s prose, for it was not the man’s best passage.
He read it a fifth time. The trees remained unarranged.
This was new. In the week since their arrival at Bereford House, they had spoken at meals, exchanged courtesies in the hall, and conversed when Georgiana and Fitz were present to carry the conversation forward.
But they had not yet been alone together in a room without purpose or obligation. They had not simply been.
Neither of them acknowledged this. He stared at the Gilpin.
She turned a page of her novel, into which she had tucked a letter which she used to mark her place.
The fire crackled. A coal shifted. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked with steady, unobtrusive regularity.
The whole performance was faintly absurd, two grown people pretending very hard that the other’s presence was a matter of supreme indifference.
He glanced at her. She was absorbed in her reading, her feet tucked beneath her in a manner that would have scandalised both his aunts and which he found inexplicably charming. One dark curl had escaped its pin and lay against her neck.
They read for the better part of an hour. When the clock struck ten, Elizabeth closed her book with a soft sound.
“I should retire,” she said.
“Yes.” He rose when she did, because manners demanded it, but he found he was reluctant for her to go. “Goodnight, Mrs. Darcy.”
“Goodnight, Mr. Darcy.”
She took her novel with her. He listened to her footsteps on the stairs, lighter than his own, and then the house was quiet again.
Darcy sat back down in his chair and stared at the fire. He did not return to the Gilpin. He was thinking about the hour that had just passed, about how strange it was that silence could feel like a gift when shared with the right person, and how much he wished she had stayed.
The room was simply quieter now, he chided himself, less interesting without someone to not-talk to.
He returned to the library the next night, and she did too.
No arrangement was made. No invitation issued.
She simply appeared after dinner, took a book from the shelf, and sat in the opposite chair.
Usually, she read. Sometimes she wrote letters.
Once she brought her embroidery, though she did not seem to derive much pleasure from it and eventually set it aside in favour of a volume of Cowper’s poems that she held up for his inspection with an expression that dared him to comment.
He did not comment.
He noticed other things. Rosemary tucked among the roses on the breakfast table. The menus quietly changing, dishes he had never seen from Mrs. Carroll’s kitchen appearing alongside the ones he had eaten without complaint for years.
He began, in return, to leave books at her setting beside the teacup.
Not with notes or explanations, for that would have been too much.
Simply a volume he assumed she might enjoy.
The first was Crabbe’s The Village, because she had mentioned her father admired him.
The second, a collection of Maria Edgeworth’s stories that had belonged to his mother and which he had read twice himself.
The books disappeared from the table and reappeared on the shelf near her chair in the library.
The third book he left was Johnson’s Rasselas, a personal favourite.
It reappeared at his own place the following day, untouched.
He spent a thoroughly disagreeable morning convincing himself he was not disappointed and an equally disagreeable set of hours after their nuncheon retracing every conversation they had shared for evidence that she might find Johnson tedious.
That evening she quoted a passage from the fourth chapter.
“You read it,” he said, before he could stop himself.
“Of course I read it. I have read it many times. But I have my own copy, which my sister has sent me, and so I have returned yours.”
The relief was, he recognised, entirely out of proportion to the situation. He had not lost a fortune or averted a war. He had simply learned that his wife liked Johnson.
Clearly, he had married a very intelligent, astute woman.
The letter from Fitz arrived on Thursday, delivered by a private courier rather than the regular post. Darcy recognised the significance at once. His cousin had only been gone for a day, and he did not pay for couriers when the post would serve. The expense meant urgency.
He took the letter into his study and broke the seal.
Fitz’s writing was spare. Mrs. Younge had for some reason moved from Edward Street and taken rooms in a lodging house in Somers Town, under a different name.
She had been seen in the company of a man the agent had identified as matching Wickham’s description.
The lodging house was respectable enough to avoid questions but cheap enough to suggest diminished circumstances.
Whatever Mrs. Younge was about, it was not the quiet retirement of a disgraced companion.
His cousin would meet Darcy the following day to discuss the matter further, and in the interim, Darcy should say nothing to anyone.
Darcy set the letter down and pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger.
After so many days with no news, he had convinced himself that this was over.
He had allowed the distraction of their gentle routine, of library evenings, breakfast table books, and the fire in Elizabeth’s sitting room.
But Wickham and Mrs. Younge had not slunk away to whatever hole would have them, and the danger had not passed.
He should have known better. Wickham never simply disappeared. He regrouped. He calculated. And then he struck where one was least prepared.
The question was what he wanted. Revenge?
Hardly. Wickham’s pride was considerable, but his instinct for self-preservation was stronger.
Money, then. Mrs. Younge had lost a lucrative position and would want compensation.
And Wickham was no doubt furious to have been denied Georgiana’s thirty-thousand pounds.
A knock at the study door interrupted his thoughts. One of the footmen entered with a salver bearing a letter. “The gentleman followed his own letter, sir, said he had changed his mind about waiting. He is below, if you wish to see him.”
Darcy took the letter with a distracted nod. Bingley. He had entirely forgotten that Bingley had written last week to propose a shooting party at an estate he was considering letting in Hertfordshire, some place called Netherfield. He opened the note, surprised that there were no blots at all.
Darcy—
I am in town for the day and could not resist calling. I am now quite settled at Netherfield. Caroline read out the announcement of your marriage to us and says she has heard nothing about the new Mrs. Darcy, which in my opinion must mean she is delightful.
I understand, of course, why you could not join us at Michaelmas, but surely you can make a visit now. I have promised a ball, though we have not yet set a date. Say you will both come. I shall be devastated if you refuse, and you know how tiresome I am when I am devastated.
Yours, etc.
Bingley
Any other time, he might have accepted the invitation.
Bingley was an easy companion, generous and intelligent but uncomplicated, and some time spent out of doors would do him good.
But Fitz’s letter sat on the desk like a stone, and the notion of leaving London for a house party while Mrs. Younge lurked in Somers Town and Wickham moved in her shadow was intolerable.
He heard Georgiana before he saw her.
”—and she spoke to Mrs. Carroll about the menus, which no one has done in years, because my father liked them and Brother simply eats whatever is put in front of him and never complains, so Mrs. Carroll has been making the same seven dishes since my father died.”
Darcy stopped short.
”—and now we have had more variety at table in a fortnight than in the whole of forever. It turns out Mrs. Carroll is a wonderful cook, Mr. Bingley. She knows dozens of dishes. She was only ever asked for seven.”
Bingley’s voice, warmly amused: “And the béchamel?”