Chapter 30
Chapter Thirty
The weather held. It was cold. It was dry. It was as mild as late February in Derbyshire was ever likely to give them, and if any of them meant to improve upon it by waiting, they would wait until April and serve no one.
Darcy had already resolved that they would go.
He had resolved it yesterday in the study after she left his room.
He had resolved it again at five o’clock this morning on the settee, lying with the fire gone down and the unlit lamp on the desk at his feet, and that resolving had been less a decision than a line he had drawn beyond which he would not retreat.
He would walk with her. He would hear whatever she offered.
He would not give her the letter in the drawer.
By nine she was at the parlour door in Mrs Marsden’s grey cloak and her own darker shawl under it and a bonnet he suspected was also Mrs Marsden’s, with the crutch angled under her right arm and her left hand gloved.
She was not looking at him when he came to the passage. She was looking at the door.
“If the ground is wet,” he said, “we return at the first turning.”
“You have my word, sir”
“I am relieved to hear it.”
The yard was paved, swept of leaves, colder in the shadow of the north wall than the sun had yet had time to warm.
She set the crutch on the paving and stepped onto the yard-stones carefully—good foot first, crutch braced, wounded leg following.
She drew breath once as her weight came onto it and let the breath out and went on.
He walked at her pace.
The stones of the yard gave way to the packed earth of the path that ran behind the lower wall, and her pace adjusted to the new surface—a little slower, the crutch set with more care.
He had offered her his arm as they cleared the yard.
She had taken it. He held his arm at the angle that made the contact easiest for her.
He held his face at the angle that made it possible for him to look at the path and not at her.
“Is the leg holding?” he asked.
“The leg is holding. Though I note with interest that Mrs Hadley provisioned you against its failure and not me. I am to faint. You are to deliver me home with the oilcloth and the cordial. It is a very efficient division of labour.”
“She has given me the cordial because she has satisfied herself that I shall not drink it myself.”
“That is a serious slander on the cordial, Mr Darcy.”
“It is an accurate assessment of Mrs Hadley’s kitchen.”
She produced the small low laugh that had been disordering him since January.
He kept his face angled toward the path. He did not permit the sound into his mouth as a smile. He permitted no alteration in his pace. He corrected for it. He would not produce another sentence of that kind until he had himself in hand.
They went along the path behind the lower wall.
The mere was visible now through the gaps in the orchard trunks—grey under the pale sky, the western reeds lifted in a wind that barely moved at their level. He did not mention the water. It was her walk to it, not his leading of her.
She took her hand from his arm to reset the crutch where the path dipped.
He missed the contact at once. He kept his arm at the same angle, because she would need it again in three steps, and held the silence the situation required. After three steps she did take it up again.
“Have you,” she said, “been avoiding the parlour these last two days?”
He had not expected the question. She delivered it in the tone of a woman remarking on a stair that needed repair.
“I have had correspondence.”
“Of course. I asked yesterday. You told me nothing disagreeable was in it. I am forming a theory that the word correspondence in this household is a kind of polite fiction, like indisposed or not at home to callers. One uses it when one means to be left alone.”
“I was not avoiding the parlour.”
“Then you were merely not crossing the passage to it, which is a different thing.”
“It is a different thing.”
“I am satisfied with the distinction. I mention it only because Mrs Reeves has begun to talk about you in the voice she reserves for those she expects to have to feed against their will. I think she means to corner you at supper and produce a pudding.”
“I have been cornered before.”
“I trust you survived.”
“At a cost to dignity I am not at liberty to describe.”
She laughed again. He did not answer that sentence.
There would have been no safe answer. He let her laugh stand on the cold air between them and walked on.
The path rounded the last of the orchard trunks and the mere opened before them in a wide grey sheet that ran from their feet almost to the far reeds without interruption.
She stopped.
The water lay under the pale sky at whatever the tint of mid-morning mere water in late February was not black, not stained, not actively bright.
A shade lighter than he had expected after Hadley’s report of last week.
A shade lighter than he had expected after his own view of it from the study window this morning.
A single moorhen worked the reeds at the far side and was silent.
Elizabeth looked at the water a long while. He did not speak. He held his arm at the angle she needed for balance. She stood on the crutch and on the sound foot and took her own time. “Help me down.”
He looked at her. Her eyes were on the water.
“I should like to touch it,” she said. “Only my hand. If you will keep me upright.”
He did not ask her why. He did not permit himself to ask her why.
He put his arm under hers more firmly and braced his feet on the bank, and she leaned on him to the full of his offered support for the first time that morning, and lowered herself by careful degrees until she was kneeling on the edge of the bank with the crutch laid in the frosted grass behind her and his arm across her back and under the shoulder to hold her where she was.
She pulled off her left glove with her teeth.
She reached over the edge and put two fingers into the water.
He was watching the water because he could not safely watch her face.
The water was at her fingertips, and then the water was not the same water at her fingertips.
The stained dark that had lain across the shallows below the reeds withdrew from the point of her contact—did not boil, did not move in any way the eye could call movement, simply was no longer there in a small clear circle around her hand.
He could see the pebbles of the bottom under her fingers.
He could not see the pebbles a foot to either side.
She drew in a sharp small breath.
She took her hand out of the water.
The clear circle began to refill, but slowly—more slowly than water had any business moving back over a place it had just left—and he watched the darkness flow back into the clearing with the reluctance of a thing being reminded of an older obligation.
Elizabeth did not look at him. She did not look at the water. She looked at the frosted grass of the bank and said, in a voice she had trained to levelness in the half-second since her breath had given her away, “It is colder than I thought.”
“Yes.”
He did not say more. She did not ask him to.
She pulled her glove back on with hands that were not quite working as she meant them to, and he took her weight and brought her up off the bank onto her good foot again, and handed her the crutch, and she fixed the crutch under her arm without meeting his eyes.
“My leg has had enough,” she said. “We ought to go in.”
“Yes.”
He turned with her. They began the walk back.
She was tired.
He could see it in the set of her shoulders against the shawl and in the small extra care she gave the crutch on the flat places.
She was not yet in distress. She was at the near edge of what she could do.
They would make it, and she would arrive spent, and Mrs Hadley would put her to bed for the afternoon.
He had perhaps six minutes.
She had told him nothing in speech. But she had knelt at the bank and put her fingers into the water and the water had answered her.
He had seen it. She had seen that he had seen it.
Neither of them had said one word about it.
She was walking beside him now in a silence whose thickness was the shape of the thing that had happened on the bank and the shape of her refusal to let him name it.
He had ruled out every direct question and every indirect one.
What he had not ruled out was the ordinary conversation of a gentleman with a lady on a walk—the kind he might make in a drawing-room with any number of acquaintances—and which he could be accused of using for advantage only if the listener knew how much hung on it.
He began with his uncle.
“My uncle Fitzwilliam has been writing to me with some tedium on the subject of the northern property. He holds the view that a second son of his—Colonel Fitzwilliam, whom I hope to present to your acquaintance if he ever consents to visit a county that produces neither society nor good hunting—should be the one inspecting my northern concerns on his behalf. My uncle distrusts anything north of Warwickshire and has extended the distrust to my own judgement now that I have spent longer at Merebank than a gentleman’s business strictly requires. ”
“Your uncle Fitzwilliam.”
“The Earl of Matlock. I believe you have not had the pleasure.”
He watched.
There was nothing. A polite attention, no more. She had not recognised the name.
“My aunt, his wife, is kinder than he deserves and writes to Georgiana every fortnight. I owe her a letter I have not yet composed.”
“A common failing.”
“Georgiana has also a cousin at Cambridge who writes her poetry of an increasingly alarming character. We are in some suspense as to whether he means to be sincere or merely fashionable. Both outcomes would require management.”
Another small laugh.
“I may have to go to London in the spring. My affairs there have gone unattended longer than is prudent. There is the question of Georgiana’s town doctor, who has not been consulted since we came north and will be aggrieved.
There is the question of my agents, who are also aggrieved but less expensively. ”
“You have a habit of aggrieving people, Mr Darcy.”
“It is a family gift.”
“Shared by all your relations, or only you?”
“A general endowment, variously applied. Lord Matlock aggrieves his agents. His wife aggrieves her dressmaker. Fitzwilliam aggrieves the officers under his command. I have merely inherited the constitution.”
“And your aunt in the south? Has she been spared the family gift?”
He let the smallest measure of a breath through before he answered. This was the approach he had planned. He was not prepared for the sheer difficulty of keeping his own tone at the level hers had set.
“My aunt in Kent has the family gift in its most unmitigated form and bestows it with the freest hand of any of us. I shall have to disappoint her this year by not attending at Rosings for April, which she will take as an act of unfilial neglect requiring a letter of eight pages to correct. I expect two.”
“Eight pages—or two letters?”
“Two letters, each of eight pages. I have received them before.”
She laughed.
He laughed with her.
He had not intended to. He had intended to offer her the sentence in the exact dry tone he had planned upstairs at five o’clock this morning and let her laugh against it without joining her, and the plan had held until her laugh reached him and met something in him for which no plan had been adequate.
The laugh was louder than he wanted it to be and warmer than he could afford, and he could not retrieve it once it was in the air between them.
“Poor Mr Darcy. Besieged by aunts.”
“One aunt. Who is the equal of several.”
“And her name, so I may pity you properly?”
He had not expected her to ask outright. It disordered his plan by half a second, but he recovered. “Lady Catherine de Bourgh.”
He did not look at her.
He looked at the path, at the crutch, at the distance to the next bend. He held his pace at what it had been. He held his arm at the angle it had been. He did not turn his face, because if he turned his face he would not be able to keep it, and she would see him, and the whole thing would be over.
Her hand on his arm did not move. That was the thing he caught first—that her hand, which had been adjusting and lifting and resuming along the walk back, went still. It did not tighten. It did not lift. It simply stopped making the small movements it had been making.
Her next step was a half-count late.
She did not stumble. She compensated at once, with the crutch, and with a hand at his arm that found the grip it needed. But the half-count was there. He felt it under his sleeve.
He waited for her to produce the next line of the exchange.
It was her turn, if she were truly innocent of Lady Catherine's name.
He had offered it. The small social ledger required her to offer something back.
A formidable woman, I take it. A what a name.
Any sentence at all. She had produced three such sentences for the other aunts in the last quarter of an hour, each sharper than the last, each delivered in the dry tone she had been entertaining him with since January.
The sentence did not come.
She drew a breath and did not speak on it. And another.
He did not look at her. He could not. He kept walking. He kept his arm at the angle her hand required. The bend in the path went past. The next bend came up. Still no sentence. The gap where her wit had been was more conclusive than any answer she could have produced.
He did not fill the gap. The name had done what he had needed it to do. He owed her—he owed himself—the silence that followed.
They walked the last stretch of the path in that silence. He had his confirmation.
He had nothing he could do with it.
He had to sit at supper with her this evening.
He had to walk past the parlour door tomorrow, and the day after, and however many days followed, and know what he knew, and say nothing.