Chapter Twenty-Seven #2
Merebank was his own property, and too obscure for its name to have reached the outside world through any channel but one.
His aunt, instructed by Mr Collins upon the afflictions of the Bennet family, would have pronounced with her customary confidence that she happened to know of a suitable property in Derbyshire, and would have surrendered the name before Collins had finished thanking her for her attention.
That the pronouncement had been made in ignorance—that Lady Catherine did not know, any more than her former rector did, that Miss Bennet was at present in his own parlour—was a mercy Darcy could not permit himself to rely upon for longer than the week.
The circular was out to every attorney in the county.
Wainwright had written first. Others would write to Tilney.
He had known since nearly her first week at Merebank that Miss Bennet was hiding from something material enough to make her white at the mention of her own county. Three days ago in the lane he had received her plainest confession yet—I cannot—and had accepted it without question.
What he had not known was that she was the subject of process.
Not gossip. Not private pursuit. A filing in Chancery.
An instrument of law, drawn up by an attorney in Gray’s Inn, naming her by name, describing her flight in the forensic language of a claim.
And a circular by that same hand, hunting her through enquiries after her sister, that had printed the name of his own house in black ink.
He had been sheltering, in his own house, under the same roof as his sister, a woman against whom a cause had been filed in a court of law, without knowing she stood so charged.
His eye went, almost of its own accord, to the other letter upon the desk.
He picked up Fitzwilliam’s pages and read them again.
This time he read them differently.
Pronounced upon Merebank four times. At the second, six.
Five upon the comparative merits of southern and northern waters (the latter suddenly risen in her estimation).
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.
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.
She does not, in either letter, supply the lady’s name.
If you are at liberty to supply any particulars, I should be glad of them.
The Merebank campaign was no longer a family joke. Lady Catherine had pronounced upon Merebank at Rosings with the frequency of a woman determined the entire dinner-table should know of it by the close of the meal, and she had been doing so for months.
And Fitzwilliam was already asking questions.
Not the questions Darcy most feared—Fitzwilliam had no reason yet to connect an unnamed patient in Derbyshire with a young gentlewoman named in a filing in London.
He had only marked the omission of a name in Georgiana’s letters and put the inquiry to Darcy with his usual directness.
But it was not nothing that the man Darcy was about to send hunting, on his behalf and without explanation, had already begun collecting unanswered questions about the same household.
Fitzwilliam had heard her. So had the other guests at the two dinners.
So, certainly, had Lady Catherine’s physician at Harley Street, because Lady Catherine never said anything to her physician that she did not also say four times over in company.
The Merebank name had been broadcast, by a voice designed for broadcast, throughout an acquaintance that reached from every drawing-room in Kent into the chambers of several attorneys of the better sort.
Mr Rowland Tilney, counsel to Lady Catherine, was within the natural compass of that voice.
The circular’s specificity was accounted for.
So was its velocity.
He went to the window.
The yard offered no counsel. The lower field beyond the south wall showed a colder green today, still uneven where the water had drawn wrong after her attempt to leave.
Ashby was at the carrier with two boys and a length of timber.
Hadley, farther off, moved along the meadow with the patient stoop of a man who distrusted every surface while pretending only to inspect one.
Beyond them, under the noon-white sky, the mere lay dark in the middle where, after so much rain, it ought to have carried more light.
He had believed her.
He had wanted to believe her, which was worse. He had been, for some time he could no longer date, arranging his afternoons around the parlour she was in and his sentences around the hope of making her laugh.
He had accepted I cannot in the lane because the woman who said it had looked at him from within his own coat, white to the mouth, and he had wished to spare her further question. A gentleman sparing a lady. The gentleman, he saw now, had been sparing himself.
A man who had once been cut in half by the discovery that his father’s favourite protégé had been working upon his sister for a month, and who had in the years since been lied to by the father he had revered upon points he had not expected a father to lie about, by agents of his own estate whose ledgers would not survive a second glance, by cousins upon entries of credit, by Lady Catherine upon her own age and her daughter’s constitution, by half the society that wished anything from him, did not, lightly, extend credit to uncorroborated accounts.
And yet he had, each time. Faith once given he had found it costly to withdraw.
He had been taken in at twelve, at fifteen, at twenty-two—by nurses and tutors and friends and lovers of his father and stewards of his own—had trusted and been trampled, and trusted again, as if the fault lay in his own scepticism rather than in the world’s unfailing calibration of its dishonesty against his own patience.
He had extended it here because he had wished to. He had wished to, and he had been a fool for a second time in his life upon the same ground, and this time the woman was in his house and he was losing his heart to her.
He would not ask her. To ask her now would warn her, and a woman in fear of her history would not answer in the interests of the truth. He would know what she was from another source.
He sat down and drew Fitzwilliam’s letter toward him.
He took down a fresh sheet.
He sat with it blank for the best part of ten minutes.
He had intended to set down the particulars as he had them—the filing, the name, the attorney, the matter—and ask Fitzwilliam to act on them before the Rosings Easter.
He did not. He was a man who had been trained from boyhood to believe that the mail was a safe place to set serious things, and he had come, this month, to believe nothing of the kind.
A sheet written in his hand, travelling south by the same stages as every other packet between Derby and London, bearing the name Bennet and the name Collins and the name Merebank in black ink on a single page—no.
A fool’s confidence. If Tilney had put clerks on the northern post, Tilney had put clerks on the southern.
He wrote four lines.
He wrote that a matter had reached him which he would not commit to paper, that it required Fitzwilliam’s particular mind and the particular trust he had held from boyhood, and that Fitzwilliam would oblige him by coming to Merebank at his earliest convenience and by saying to his aunt, if the question were put to him, that he was discharging a commission for the War Office in Manchester.
He begged him not to announce his coming by letter to the house.
He signed it. He sanded it. He sealed it. He rang for Norton.