Chapter 25 #2
Darcy looked at his wife. She had tucked her feet slightly beneath the settee, not quite proper, entirely Elizabeth, and was leaning into her sister’s shoulder, wholly at ease in a way he did not believe he had ever seen her.
He was pleased that her sister had come to visit. What a wonderful morning this had turned out to be.
At the door Miss Bennet and Elizabeth held each other a moment too long for a simple farewell, Miss Bennet’s hand at her sister’s shoulder.
Bingley made arrangements to visit the Gardiner home to call on Miss Bennet while Mrs. Gardiner kissed Elizabeth’s cheek and said something quiet that Darcy did not catch.
Then Bingley and Darcy helped the ladies into the hackney, and it pulled away.
Bingley waved to them all as he set off for his hotel.
When they all sat down at dinner, Georgiana began asking a stream of questions. “What was Miss Bennet like?” she said. “Elizabeth, you must tell me everything about her. Is she very pretty? My maid says she is very pretty.”
“Jane is remarkably pretty,” Elizabeth said.
“And kind? She looks kind in my imagination and of course, she is your sister, so she must be. Oh, I was so sorry to have missed her. The signore kept me an extra half-hour on the Clementi, and by the time he left it was too late. Is she kind? Oh, and your aunt?”
“They are both very kind.”
“And Mr. Bingley, did you like him?”
Elizabeth lifted a spoonful of soup to her mouth, swallowed, and then said, “Mr. Bingley seems a pleasant man.”
Fitz threw Darcy a confused glance. Elizabeth was not her usual lively self.
“And Mrs. Gardiner,” Georgiana continued, undimmed. “Is she very elegant? She sounds elegant. Elizabeth, is she often in town?”
“She and my uncle live in London,” Elizabeth said.
“You must have them all again,” Georgiana said firmly. “Soon. Could they come to dinner?”
“I shall ask my aunt about their schedule.” Elizabeth looked at her plate.
Darcy picked up his wine, though he had only just put it down.
He watched the candles burn down and had concluded, by the fish course, that this must be homesickness.
It was not a conclusion he was proud of, given that it had taken him until November to form it.
He had known she wrote and received letters from her sister with notes from her other sisters and mother.
Even her father, from time to time. But he had not known she had an uncle and aunt in town until she mentioned them in terms of their servants.
Elizabeth had been away from her home since the summer, and her leave-taking was not supposed to be permanent.
She had been in London since September, in this house, learning his routines, aiding in his sister’s recovery, and he had watched her absorb all of it without complaint and assumed, because she did not complain, that she wanted for nothing.
But he had seen her this afternoon with her sister’s shoulder under her cheek, her feet tucked beneath the settee, and the contrast with every other day was not flattering to him.
She had been taking care of Georgiana. She had been learning Bereford House.
She had been, in her humorous, patient, and self-contained way, taking care of him.
And he had not once asked whether she missed them.
He put down his fork and looked at his wife.
He would ask whether she wished to have her sister to stay, whether he had perhaps been, in his well-intentioned way, inattentive to what she needed.
He would be, in short, a better husband than he had been in the preceding months. It was not too late to begin.
When they withdrew to the music room, Georgiana sat at the pianoforte and played something gentle, still murmuring to Fitz about Miss Bennet. After sitting in silence for two concertos, Elizabeth stood.
“Thank you for the music, Georgiana,” she said. “I am for bed.”
Georgiana bade her a good night, and Fitz shot a look at him. He need not have, for Darcy was already rising and offering his arm to his wife.
They stepped into their private sitting room, and Elizabeth walked directly to her door.
“Elizabeth,” he called after her.
She turned.
“Is something wrong?”
She looked at him for a long moment. “Jane has been in love this autumn,” she said.
He waited.
“She did not tell me. She wrote, but she did not even mention his name at first, and then she did not tell me of his connexion to you. She was protecting me, in case it came to nothing. In case I hoped too much for her or for us, that we might be married to men who saw one another often and therefore we might see one another often too.” Elizabeth’s voice was even but lifeless.
“I saw it today for the first time. The way she looked at him when he came into the room. She has been falling in love since just after Michaelmas and I saw it for the first time today.”
He said nothing.
“Jane was at Longbourn the whole of the autumn, three miles from Netherfield. And we were invited.” She looked at him steadily. “Perhaps not all of the autumn, but several weeks. Yet you did not tell me.”
He could feel the danger coming, though he was still not certain where it would land. “I did not.”
“Did it even occur to you to tell me?”
“We had arrived only a few weeks before and we had—”
“I am not asking whether you had reasons,” she said, cutting him off.
“I am certain that you did. I am asking whether it even occurred to you that I might wish to go. Did you ever think, ‘Elizabeth was married unexpectedly and had only her father at her wedding. Elizabeth was married far from her own parish. Elizabeth’s home and family are in Hertfordshire.’ Did any part of that enter the question when Mr. Bingley’s invitation was offered? ”
It had not. He heard, in the plainness of her question, exactly what that meant.
“No,” he said, his heart pounding.
She nodded slowly. “The Bingleys held a ball only last week.” She paused.
“We could at least have attended that. We might have made wedding visits to my neighbours, people who know me and my family, who would have congratulated my mother and given her something to be pleased about. We could have had Jane to stay at Netherfield. I could have seen her every day instead of reading vague letters.” Her voice did not rise or break, nothing so dramatic as that; instead, it was hollow and pained.
“I cannot have the autumn back, but even the ball would have been something. Unfortunately, that is all gone.”
Darcy’s stomach flipped over. He had made the decision quickly, it was true, but now he realised he had been making the decision for them both every day since.
“I thought,” she said, “that you keeping the matter with Mr. Wickham and Mrs. Younge from me was the worst of it.” She shook her head slightly.
“But oddly, this feels worse. With Mr. Wickham, you made a choice. You chose wrongly, but you had a reason. With Netherfield, I was not a consideration at all.”
She moved back to the settee, sat, picked up the book he had left there. Not to read it; she seemed to need something to do with her hands.
“You are right,” he told her, because she was, again.
She looked up.
“I received Bingley’s invitation, considered the timing, and decided against it. I did not think of you once. That is the sum of it. I cannot give you the autumn back, and I do not have an account that makes it any better.”
She was quiet for a moment, and Darcy recalled Bingley’s simple declaration that Jane Bennet was his family too.
He thought about Elizabeth in this house for months, not merely patient but cheerful and kind.
He thought about the way she said “A great shame” at the tea table this afternoon, and how he had heard it as a pleasantry.
“Dancing,” Elizabeth said.
His brows pinched together. “I do not—”
She took a deep breath. “You have said you do not enjoy it. I wonder now whether it is the dancing itself, or whether it is the fact that dancing well requires allowing someone else’s movements to affect your own.” She paused. “I think perhaps that is not only a question about dancing.”
He did not answer. There was no answer that was not a confirmation.
Darcy stood there with her question in the air between them, and the longer he stood, the more plainly they both understood why he was not answering.
He had been making the decision for them both every day since arriving in town.
He saw that now. Not in the catastrophic sense, not in the manner of a man who had plotted and suppressed and calculated, but in the far quieter, far more ordinary sense of a man who had simply gone on living his own life as though nothing had changed for him when everything had changed for his wife.
“I take your meaning,” he said at last.
It was not enough. He could see it was not enough, and she was right to find it insufficient. The acceptance was honest, but correction was not yet possible.
“I have been making such decisions on my own for a long time,” he said. “I fear I shall make such mistakes again. But I will work diligently not to.”
It was not a speech. It was not a defence. He had no defence.
Elizabeth looked at him for a long moment. He could see by the way she held herself that she was tired—not cold, not ill, simply exhausted—and there was something in that weariness that was worse than anger, because anger could be met. This had nowhere to land.
“Goodnight, Fitzwilliam,” she said.
She turned and went through her door.
The sliding of the bolt sounded almost deafening in the silence.
Darcy had kissed her last night. He had stood in this very room last night, in the quiet of the house, and found himself content to wait, certain that they had found their way and it would not require anything more from him than patience.
He had been wrong about that.
He remained looking at the closed door—the locked door—for a long time.