Chapter Fourteen
By evening, Elizabeth had learned three truths about invalidism at Merebank.
The first was that Mrs Hadley and Mrs Bannon could disagree without raising their voices and yet make the air between them more perilous than a quarrel in any other house.
The second was that Jane, ordered to sleep for an hour after dinner by a woman whose authority she half accepted, could indeed be compelled if enough competent females conspired against her.
The third was that Georgiana Darcy wrote notes with the gravity of a cabinet minister and the curiosity of a girl starved for new friendship.
The second note arrived before the light had fully faded, again borne by Nan Reeves, whose expression now resembled a trusted envoy on active service.
Miss Bennet,
Nan says you wrote while lying nearly flat, which seems an unnecessary distinction unless she thinks it a feat.
I am therefore impressed. I send you Miss Edgeworth because I most wanted somebody else to read her today, and because my brother becomes unjust whenever a woman in a book has more sense than the man she speaks to, which I think may entertain you.
I do not know whether you like being in a strange house. I did not, the first fortnight here. It smelled age and neglect, and at first I thought I had been carried to the end of the earth. I no longer think so. The end of the earth would have less mud.
G. D.
Elizabeth read the note once, then more slowly for the pleasure of the second sentence.
There was wit there, quiet, almost apologetic, but wit nonetheless.
She had not yet known Georgiana long enough to say whether it belonged naturally to her or whether the note lent courage the body lacked.
It scarcely mattered. The note held more spirit than her own poor sister could do.
Nan lingered in the doorway.
“You may tell Miss Darcy,” Elizabeth said, “that I agree with her about the mud, and reserve judgment on the end of the earth, never having seen enough to compare.”
Nan waited.
“And?”
“That if Mr Darcy becomes unjust whenever a woman in a book has more sense than the man she is speaking to, I shall observe the phenomenon before pronouncing.”
Nan’s mouth twitched. “That sounds like teasing, miss.”
“It is teasing. You may carry it upstairs if you think Miss Darcy equal to harbouring dangerous materials.”
“Miss Darcy is equal to everything except stairs,” Nan said with impartial conviction and came in to fetch paper.
Elizabeth wrote back with the cautious awkwardness still imposed by bed, bandage, and the fatigue settling into her wrist after too many lines.
Yet the fatigue was welcome. It belonged to exertion chosen rather than pain borne.
By the time the note had gone up she thought not of the paper but of the room above, the girl in it, the expression awaiting her reply.
The thought stayed through the next clothing and the tray Mrs Reeves brought at twilight, and lingered when Darcy entered with a lamp in one hand and an account book in the other.
Jane had just gone to fetch clean linen from the press in the passage. Elizabeth, propped against the pillows with Miss Edgeworth in her lap, looked first at the lamp, then the account book, then Darcy.
“Have I grown so dull in a single afternoon,” she said, “that you must bring both illumination and figures to preserve me from myself?”
He set the lamp on the table and turned the wick higher. The light threw his face from evening shadow into sharp definition—the strong brow, the mouth too grave by habit and too ready on occasion to betray its owner by almost smiling.
“You expressed this afternoon a dangerous attachment to the drawing room ceiling,” he said. “I brought an account book as warning against sentiment.” Darcy’s eye dropped to the book in her lap. “Miss Edgeworth. My sister has chosen strategically.”
“Has she?”
“She wishes to know whether you laugh.”
“And if I do?”
He drew his chair nearer the fire but did not sit at once. “Then she will conclude you may be trusted. Georgiana distrusts anyone who reads solemnly by choice.”
“How wise of her. Has she always been so severe a judge?”
“Only where books are concerned. In every other respect, she is inclined to think well of the world until it gives her reason not to.”
There was nothing elaborate in the sentence. Elizabeth heard the weight beneath it—a brother who had kept watch over a sister’s goodness for years and feared every fresh occasion the world might answer it badly. She looked at the ledger in his hand.
“And what do you intend to accomplish with your account books?”
“I doubt I shall accomplish very much, but it is proof that Hadley despises generalities and that my late cousin deserved more censure than I could bestow in life. The lower carrier needs clearing, the wall by the west field wants stone, the meadow gate needs rehanging, and every one of these facts grows more expensive when translated into London by a man who has never seen Derbyshire mud.”
“Then London will require an interpreter.”
“It already has one. Me.”
“I do not know whether I trust you in that office, Mr Darcy. You have the air of a man who despises unnecessary adjectives but may, under provocation, indulge in righteous nouns.”
That did it. Not a smile exactly. Something rarer, more dangerous—the actual movement of amusement across his face before he remembered himself and suppressed it.
“Righteous nouns,” he repeated. “I shall write that into my next instruction and see whether the solicitor obeys more quickly.”
“Then heaven help the solicitor,” Elizabeth said.
“He has clerks for that.” He glanced toward the little table by her bed, where the laudanum stood untouched beside the lamp.“Mrs Marsden is out longer than she expected,” he said.
“So she is.”
“If your pain grows worse, you may require something before she returns.”
Elizabeth made a face. “I assure you, sir, I have formed an intimate dislike of ‘requiring something’.”
“Yes. I had observed that your principles are nowhere so firm as in resistance to being eased.”
“Laudanum does not ease. It conquers, which is a very different matter, and one I do not choose unless absolutely pressed.”
He smiled faintly. “Then I shall hope for absolute pressure before the hour is out.”
“How benevolent of you.”
His hand remained on the back of the chair, but his eyes moved toward the far end of the room, where the smoke from the morning fire had left its faint memorial above the door.
“I am glad to see your fire is still drawing properly,” he said, with an air too deliberate to be accidental. “The chimneys, I have discovered, are in a lamentable state.”
“Is that why you are here with your account books? You are fleeing another room?” she asked.
He made a noise that was close to a grunt. “The room is either cold enough to freeze the ink or so full of smoke that a man must choose between coughing and blindness. I could not see to write in it an hour ago, and I do not answer for the quiet of my hand when frozen.”
“A most affecting catalogue of hardships.”
“I thought you would feel for me.”
“Deeply. Especially as all these sufferings have brought you no farther than the next room.”
That checked him. Not because she had wounded him, but because she had come too near the truth for comfort. He inclined his head as if conceding a point in argument he had never intended to yield.
“The next room, Miss Bennet, has the superior fire.”
“And the more troublesome patient. I assume your sister’s fire upstairs draws well enough?”
“Georgiana finds my account books dull enough to lull her to sleep. She already sleeps far too much for my liking, whereas you, Miss Bennet, can hardly be persuaded to close your eyes when you ought to. Therefore, I consider it my duty to bore you into being a good patient. May I?”
Elizabeth tried to smile, probably failed, and opened the book on her lap. “It is your house, Mr Darcy.”
“Much to my regret, it is.”
He sat down then, the account book still in hand.
Not at the writing desk across the room, but in Jane’s chair.
Near enough that, when she passed the volume of Miss Edgeworth across the coverlet to free her hand for the cup at her elbow, her knuckles grazed the dark wool at his sleeve, and the contact was no longer the question it had been a half-second before.
It was a fact. Brief. The width of a knuckle.
Neither remarked upon it. Neither moved a hand away with any haste that would have made the not-moving plain.
The nearness changed the room more than the lantern in his hand had done.
“Did Mrs Hadley approve the day’s progress?” he asked.
“She approved it in the tone of a woman who would rather have found fault.”
“That resembles my own experience of her.”
“She informed me I would soon require occupation or become unfit for polite society.”
“I am not certain the second follows the first. You may already be unfit for polite society and yet require occupation all the same.”
Elizabeth looked at him over the edge of Miss Edgeworth. “Sir.”
“Miss Bennet?”
“You grow bold.”
“Only because you are not well enough to throw the book at me, and I count on the safety the circumstance affords.”
Jane came back just then with the linen and paused in the doorway, taking in the lamp, the book, Darcy in the chair, and Elizabeth distinctly more awake than half an hour earlier. Something unreadable crossed her face and vanished.
“Mrs Hadley says the next cloths in ten minutes,” she said.
Darcy rose at once, as if caught in an impropriety no one named. “Then I will not interfere with medical governance.” He set the account book on the bedside table. “If Miss Bennet grows weary of fiction, the sums may remind her that life contains more serious discouragements.”
“I shall take refuge in Miss Edgeworth at once,” Elizabeth said.
He bowed, which in a sickroom might have looked absurd and did not, and went out carrying the lamp, leaving only firelight behind.