Chapter 32
Chapter Thirty-Two
Darcy was at his desk writing a sentence about bales when Hadley came in.
“Sir. A man at the Lantern this morning. Not local. Not trade.”
He set the pen down. He could hear his own pulse in the ear nearer the window.
“Name?”
“Briggs, he said. From Derby, he said, though his boots said London and his coat said somewhere the mud did not match either.”
“What was he asking?”
“Whether the big house above the water was once Wetherthwaite. Whether the gentleman at it was the one lately come down from the south. Whether there were ladies in the household and how many.” His throat went dry. The breath he took next would not fill the top third of his chest.
“Did he get answers?”
“The landlord gave him nothing. He asked the Pemberton girl who had come down for flour. She answered him civilly because she is a well-taught girl.”
“What did she tell him?”
“That the gentleman had been here since autumn and was known to be a good master. That there were his sister and a lady staying. She gave no name for the lady. She did not know one to give.”
No name. One breath of reprieve, and then his hands were cold to the knuckle. Briggs had come to the valley with a name in his pocket. A well-taught girl meant only that he had not had to produce it.
“Where is he now?”
“Gone from the Lantern before noon. Took the Buxton road. I sent Jem after him at a distance. Jem is to report back by evening.”
“He will come back.”
“Aye, sir. A man who asks questions at an inn and then departs for Buxton is a man who means to look like he has left. He will come back this afternoon or tomorrow morning. I should be ready.”
“Yes.” His voice came out level, functioning without him. “The household is to be told nothing. I will speak to Miss Bennet myself. Miss Darcy is not to hear, nor Mrs Marsden. If Mrs Reeves asks why your boys have been at the lower turning, say it is the carrier.”
“Aye.”
“And Hadley?”
“Sir.”
“What of the mere?”
Hadley’s face altered very slightly. It was not an expression one would have called change in another man, but on Hadley it was the same thing as crossing himself.
“I was coming to that, sir.”
Something cold opened in the pit of Darcy’s stomach and stayed there.
“Go on.”
“It has fallen three inches since Tuesday. Cleared four days ago, like I’d not seen, but then dropped again middle of the day.
With no weather to explain it. The southern spring—the one your cousin Edmund had piped to the still-room—has stopped entirely since Sunday.
Two of the other four are running thin. The outflow at the lower hatch is no quicker than it was.
The water is going somewhere that is not the hatch. ”
“The middle?”
“Dark as I have known it. Nan saw it from the south chamber yesterday and said so to Martha. Mrs Pemberton said the same at the cottage.”
He closed his eyes. It was worse with the light out of them. He opened them. A cold came up through him from somewhere below his feet.
“Do you have an opinion as to cause?”
“I have an opinion, sir. Whether it is fit for the study I cannot say.”
“Give it.”
Hadley looked at the carpet. “The mere has gone dark before. I have seen it dark three times in my life. Once when Wetherthwaite the grandfather died. Once in the autumn before your cousin Edmund sold it to you. Each time it has had a reason, and each time the reason has been a matter of faith broken in the house. I would not presume to say the mere knows such things. I would only say that when such things have occurred, it has darkened, and when they have been mended, it has cleared. I have never known it darken without a cause, and I have never known the cause to be weather.”
Hadley kept his eyes on the carpet. It was a mercy. Whatever was on Darcy’s face just now, he was not equal to governing.
“Thank you, Hadley.”
“Sir.”
“I shall not keep you.”
Hadley went out. The door closed behind him.
For three breaths he did not move. Then he rose—the room gave its small lurch—took Wainwright’s letter from the drawer, put it in his coat pocket, and went out.
The parlour door stood open by an inch.
He pushed it back. She was at the writing-table with her hand around the stem of a pen. Her leg, under the skirt, was stretched out along the second chair she had drawn up to hold it, the crutch against the far wall.
She did not turn. She knew his step. “Mr Darcy.”
“Miss Bennet.”
He closed the door behind him—all of it—and the sound of the latch going home was the first sound in the room she reacted to. One shoulder moved. Only the one.
He crossed to the fire because the alternative was to cross to her, and he did not yet trust his hands.
“Jane is at the cottage with Tom Pemberton, who has taken a turn again. Georgiana is upstairs with Nan.”
“I know.”
Something in his voice, which he had not been able to keep out of it, made her turn.
She turned the chair slowly, bracing on the seat, and when she had got round far enough to see his face her hand went to the writing-table for a different reason than it had been there before, and did not grip it to rise but to hold herself where she was.
He had never seen her look at him with that sort of fear.
It sharpened his own. She had just understood, from his face, that he could destroy her if he chose, and that the world would stand by him while he did it. Her hand on the writing-table was holding her in the chair against the impulse to stand.
He could not look at her like this.
He walked from the fire to the window and turned and walked back.
The seven paces did nothing. He did them again.
He did them a third time, and stopped at the mantel with his back to her, because the sight of her face arranged the way it was arranged just now was a thing he could not keep looking at and govern his voice at the same time.
“A man has been at the Lantern this morning asking after your sister.”
She closed her eyes. She did not open them quickly. When she did, her face had arranged itself into something that had not been on it a minute before.
“What else did he ask?”
“Whether the house was once Wetherthwaite which it was. Whether there were ladies in it. How many. And whether there was a woman here by the name of Miss Elizabeth Bennet from Hertfordshire.”
Her breath stalled, and the colour, which had been high, bled from her cheeks. “And what was answered?”
“The Pemberton girl said Miss Darcy and a lady staying. Nameless for now. He will have a name by tomorrow.”
“Mr Darcy… there is something I—”
“I have not finished.”
She stopped. Her hand, which had begun to move away from the writing-table, returned to it.
“I have known for nearly a fortnight now.”
Her throat bobbed, and she gripped the table. “Known what?”
“That an attorney of Gray’s Inn is acting on a Chancery filing for the recovery of property and papers.
That the named parties are yourself and your elder sister.
That the estate is Longbourn. That the claimant is the Reverend Mr Collins—a name rather well known to me.
That a circular naming Merebank has been in my desk drawer for better than a week, unanswered, because I have been waiting for you to tell me yourself. Which you have not done.”
He stopped. He had not meant the last clause to arrive with the shape it arrived with. It was too late to take it back.
She had gone white to the lips.
“Better than a week?”
“Yes.”
“You have sat with me at supper. You have brought me books. You have walked me out to the water. You have permitted me —” her voice did not rise—it went, if anything, lower—”you have permitted me to be a woman called Bennet in your parlour, carrying in your desk a paper that named me.”
“Yes.”
“Why! In heaven’s name, Mr Darcy—why! You could have warned me. Could have acted, could have spoken…”
He had no answer that would stand up to the form the question had taken.
“I do not know.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It is the one I have. I believed at first the circular might be a false accusation. I continued to believe it after I knew it was not. I believed, then, that you would tell me when you were ready, and that until then my knowing of it was something you had earned the privacy of by never having been asked. I believed my silence was a courtesy. It was not. It was collusion. I see that now. I have seen it, if I am honest with you, for several days.”
She had not moved in the chair for some minutes.
He had been seeing it for some time before he understood that he was seeing it—her hands set on the table, holding themselves still, the knuckles beginning to whiten at the second joint.
The angle of her shoulders was wrong. The line of her good leg under the table was wrong.
The breath at her collarbone came shallow and deliberate, measured against the requirement of not making a sound.
He knew which line of her face went where when the leg went bad.
He knew the difference between the ache she had carried since teatime and the heat that had risen in her a quarter of an hour ago.
He knew, watching her, that it had sharpened in the last three minutes—and that she was holding her spine against the chair-back so he would not see, and her hands on the table so he would not have to ask.
He stood at the grate with the poker in his hand and the iron going cold, and he did not turn. The not-asking was the only thing left between them she had not yet been forced to refuse.
“You have been letting me lie to you. For eleven weeks. Why?”
He swallowed. “Because I wanted to believe you. Because of all the people I have ever known, you were the one person I hoped… I needed to believe that what you withheld was in good faith.”
Her lashes fluttered, and her chest rose in a trembling sigh. “Mr Darcy. Please sit down.”
“I would rather not.”
“You are shaking.”
His hand on the mantel was, and had been since he took the letter from his coat, and he had not stopped it because stopping it would have required a degree of attention he did not have any of to spare. He kept it where it was.
“I am aware.”
“Please—sit down. I cannot bear to look at you standing like that.”
“I… do not trust myself to the chair.”
“Stand, then. Only, do not stand over me.”
“I am sorry,” he said, “for the five days. Not for the rest of it yet. I will know whether I am sorry for the rest of it when I have heard you.”
“Mr Darcy—”
The change in her voice made him look at her. She had gone past white into a faint green—she was going to faint if she did not stop doing what she had been doing, and her hand on the edge of the writing-table was the only thing holding her upright.
“I must —” She did not finish. She had no breath spare to finish with.
He did not think. If he had thought he would not have done it.
He would have waited the half-second to consider whether she would permit it, and in that half-second she would have fainted.
He did not wait. He took her by the elbow and the opposite shoulder and lifted her out of the chair—the feel of her in his arms took the top off his anger in one pass—and got her the four paces to the settee before her knee had been asked to bear her at all.
He laid her down on it. He fetched the cushion from the chair by the window and put it under her leg without asking leave.
He bent over her to set the cushion straight where she had not been able to set it for herself, and the bending brought his face into the immediate distance of her face.
The warmth of his breath was at her temple.
Her own breath went out of her body and did not come back.
He moved his hand from the cushion because the hand had been the part of him most likely to make the thing happen if he did not first move it.
He straightened. When he had got her arranged he went back to the mantel, because she needed him not at her side for the next minute, and he knew it.
He stood at the mantel with his hand on the marble and the marble cold under his palm and the cold doing nothing for the fact that his hand was unequal to itself.
Her eyes were closed.
“Thank you,” she said, to the ceiling.
“Do not thank me.”
“Sit down.”
“Miss Bennet —”
“You will sit, Mr Darcy. I am not going to tell you what I have to tell you to a man looming above me like a magistrate. Sit down.”
He sat.