Chapter Twenty-Seven
The post came in shortly after ten, two letters together. Darcy took them up without opening either and carried them into the study.
The room was cold because he had not yet been in it long enough to coax the fire properly.
Rain from the night still clung in the corners of the window glass.
On the desk lay the quarry account, Hadley’s meadow figures, Ashby’s pencilled demands for timber, and the unfinished reply to Wainwright in Derby regarding some tedious defect in the wording of Edmund’s last lease renewals.
Northmere now produced paper as incessantly as other houses produced dust, with a strong presumption that someone else had made the mess.
He opened Fitzwilliam’s first, because the sight of Fitzwilliam’s hand on an address had, since they were boys, been the one cheerful interruption of other people’s business he had never declined.
Darcy,
I write chiefly to warn you that our aunt has reopened the Merebank question.
I had taken it, upon her earlier campaigns, to be a closed one—namely, that Anne’s constitution, which has survived Bath, Tunbridge, and the dubious physicians of Harley Street with no appreciable improvement, is now to be entrusted to whatever obscure springs you had the effrontery to inherit in Derbyshire.
I have dined at Rosings twice in the past fortnight, having been summoned upon matters Lady Catherine declined to specify in advance, which is to say upon no matters at all.
At the first dinner she pronounced upon Merebank four times.
At the second, six. To these may be added, without unkind exaggeration, three reflections upon Anne’s delicate chest, five upon the comparative merits of southern and northern waters—the latter suddenly risen in her estimation—and not fewer than seven upon Georgiana’s rapid improvement under the influence of your springs, of which she has persuaded herself in the cheerful absence of any correspondence to contradict her.
It is my firm opinion that if Anne were actually conveyed to Merebank she should expire within the first four miles of the Peak, upon principle if not upon medical grounds.
It is my further opinion that you may expect, at any hour of the next six weeks, either a letter from Rosings announcing Lady Catherine’s intention to undertake the journey with Anne herself, or a carriage in your yard without warning.
I recommend the latter be prepared for by the removal of all decanters to a locked cabinet.
Georgiana’s last note much pleased me. I hope her improvement continues.
I am to be at Rosings again for the spring quarter, and in town meanwhile.
The weather in London is the kind of weather that makes a man consider the army a reasonable profession.
an continues, by Georgiana’s account, to read aloud with more feeling than skill, which I am not prepared to judge excessive until I have been obliged to live at Merebank in winter with no other entertainment in the house.
By the by—Georgiana has written twice now of a young lady come to stay at Merebank who broke her leg upon the ice in January and has been mending under your roof since.
She describes the recovery as remarkable, the patient as clever, and the acquaintance as the pleasantest thing to have befallen her this winter.
She does not, in either letter, supply the lady’s name.
I am aware that my cousin is punctilious upon points of her own that I should do well to leave alone, but Georgiana is a girl of sixteen writing to a cousin who has been asking after her since October, and the omission is sufficiently singular to remark upon, particularly as she seems so delighted with her new friend.
If you are at liberty to supply any particulars, I should be glad of them.
You have now been at your northern property six months, which by my count is five and a half months longer than a man of ordinary resources ought to require for the salvaging of any single estate in the kingdom.
The family looks forward to your reappearance in civilised quarters before the summer makes travel tedious.
Yours &c.,
Fitz.
There was nothing alarming in it.
Darcy read the Merebank passage twice for the particular pleasure of the voice behind it, smiled at the decanters line because Fitzwilliam would never write such things to anyone but him and would never say them aloud to anyone at all, and stopped at the paragraph about Georgiana’s unnamed friend.
He had known, in a general way, that Georgiana wrote to her cousin.
He had not known she had written of Miss Bennet.
That she had not named her was, in one sense, a gesture of consideration—Darcy had asked her, in the household’s first week, not to speak of their guest in company.
That in two successive letters she had failed to name a young lady she plainly wished to be able to write about was, in another sense, a small strain on Georgiana’s capacity for concealment that he had been relying upon without examining.
He would write to Fitzwilliam later.
He laid the letter by on the desk.
He took up the second letter.
The Derby frank he recognised. The hand was Wainwright’s clerk’s—formal, even, perfectly regular.
He broke the seal without particular attention.
Wainwright had been writing to him about lease renewals and a minor question of drainage for some weeks, and he had begun to leave the man’s letters unopened until after breakfast because there was rarely anything in them that required attention before the second cup of tea.
The first paragraph was, as expected, a preamble of punctilious apology for troubling his client with a matter that might yet prove to have no connection to his affairs. Darcy’s eye moved on with the ordinary impatience a gentleman applied to his own solicitor’s hedging.
The second paragraph stopped him.
There has come into my hands, by the ordinary circulation of such notices among the profession in Derby and the surrounding county, a copy of a filing lately made in the Court of Chancery by one Mr Rowland Tilney, attorney, of Gray’s Inn in London, on behalf of the Reverend Mr William Collins, late of Hunsford in Kent.
Mr Collins has lately succeeded to the entailed property called Longbourn in the county of Hertfordshire, of which he is now in possession.
The filing seeks direction as to the recovery of certain documents said to be material to the entail, which are represented as having been withheld from the estate by a young gentlewoman of the family, one Miss Elizabeth Bennet, believed to have removed herself from her home under a false direction and to have travelled, by routes unknown, into the northern counties.
Accompanying the filing is a circular of enquiry directed to attorneys throughout the northern districts.
The circular concerns not Miss Bennet alone but her elder sister, one Mrs Marsden, whose husband, Mr Marsden, was understood to have removed northward with his wife in the year preceding last for the benefit of mineral waters upon a chest complaint.
The pair are supposed by Mr Tilney’s client to be presently resident in that country, and the circular enquires after the lady’s direction on the assumption of their continuing establishment there.
It is supposed by Mr Tilney’s client, upon intelligence I cannot judge the source of, that Miss Bennet may have fled to her sister for shelter, and that the sister’s present place of residence may therefore be the object of direct enquiry.
The circular further specifies, in terms of greater particularity than I was at first prepared for, that the said Mrs Marsden is thought most likely to be found in the neighbourhood of Merebank in Derbyshire, that estate being described as an obscure property possessed of waters of the class in question, and the only such known to Mr Tilney’s client in the northern counties.
I need hardly represent to you, sir, that it is this final particular that has obliged me to write at once rather than await our next quarterly correspondence.
The circular has named your estate by name.
It is addressed to every attorney of my profession in this county.
I should suppose that by the end of the present week a dozen of my colleagues in Derby and Bakewell will have read it over their morning coffee and considered at their leisure whether their own clients have any connection to the property so identified.
I have not communicated any reply to Mr Tilney’s enquiry, and shall not without your instruction. I have, however, thought it my duty to bring the filing and the circular to your attention at the earliest opportunity, and to enclose a fair copy of the principal passages for your perusal.
If I may be of any further service in the business, I am, of course, entirely at your direction.
I remain, sir, &c.,
J. Wainwright
Darcy read it twice.
Longbourn. Hertfordshire. The Reverend Mr William Collins.
A young gentlewoman named Elizabeth Bennet, believed to have travelled north under a false direction, holding documents material to an entail.
A married elder sister supposed to be living with her husband near mineral waters in the north. Merebank named as the likely place.
He did not sit.
He set the page flat on the desk because his hand, after the third reading, had begun to produce a small unsteadiness in the paper he could not permit to persist. He stood with both hands braced on the desk’s edge and read Wainwright’s third paragraph once more, slowly, as if he were parsing an indictment whose charges turned on single words.
Each word held.