Chapter 34
Chapter Thirty-Four
He went past Norton without seeing him, past the staircase without touching the rail, and out into the yard by the side door because the side door did not give onto the study or onto any place he could be seen from any window he recognised.
The air in the yard was cold enough to hurt, and he was grateful for it.
He walked along the south wall and down toward the lower field without a coat.
Mrs Reeves would scold him for that later, and Mrs Reeves could keep her scolding.
The ground was the frozen-and-thawed ground of early March, and each step wanted to turn his ankle, and he kept walking.
At the turn of the wall he stopped because his legs stopped, and he put his hand against the stone, which had the cold of stone and did nothing else of any use to a man putting his hand on it.
I would rather have gone into service, she had said.
Collins had written to her. Collins had written to a woman whose father was unburied and offered comfort and propriety in exchange for a more humble mind. A more humble mind. Someone had written that sentence in a letter to Elizabeth Bennet and expected an agreeable reply.
He bent over with his hand still on the stone. What came up was not sickness, but something that wanted to be sickness and had been denied the means of becoming so. He stayed bent until it went back down.
When he straightened, the lower field was in front of him and the mere below it and the mere was as dark as Hadley had said, with the middle gone a colour he had no precedent for.
Along the southern bank the reeds that ought to have been standing out of water were standing out of mud.
The line of winter wrack marked where the water had been a fortnight ago.
He did not go down. He turned and walked back to the house by the long way, past the yew, past the stables, along the avenue and in at the front because the front door was the door he used when he meant to be seen.
Norton was in the hall, and Norton took the expression on his face and did not offer to relieve him of a coat he was not wearing.
“Bring me tea. In the study. And tell Hadley I shall not be wanting him this afternoon.”
“Sir.”
He went up to the study, closed the door, and sat. When the tea came he did not drink it.
Forgery. A capital crime.
He had half-reasoned most of it in the days since the letter, but reasoning and hearing were not the same thing—he had reasoned a case, had known she was running from something, and tried to credit her with honourable motives.
Forgery, to defend a widow and her daughters from such a man…
No matter how justifiable, it was still a felony.
But she had, in the end, told him. And from the shape of her face when he had entered, he suspected that if he had not confronted her, she had been on the cusp of approaching him.
Hargrove had not come, in his time, to any desk and told.
Edmund had not, in any year of his stewardship, given an account.
And Wickham! Wickham would have delighted in keeping Darcy ignorant and deceived long after any danger of discovery could have robbed him of his advantages.
Each of them had let him reason what they would not say.
But Elizabeth had told him. Had placed her safety—her life, even—in his hands, and trusted him not to destroy her.
He rose and went to the window. He put his forehead against the glass, which was as cold as the wall stone had been an hour before and offered no more comfort than the wall stone had offered.
Whether he would help her was not the question.
That had answered itself at some hour he could not now name, weeks ago, and he had been about the business of acting on the answered question without permitting himself to phrase it.
The question, at this hour, was what help required, and which persons of his acquaintance he was prepared to stand against in order to give it.
His aunt would learn, at some hour not of his choosing, that he had harboured Elizabeth Bennet.
She would not be gentle in the learning.
His uncle the Earl would take it with the laconic displeasure of twenty years’ correctness spent on a foolish cause.
Georgiana—Georgiana’s reputation rested in part upon the certain rectitude of her brother.
Fitzwilliam he could count on, having counted on him since boyhood.
The others he could not count on, and was not in a position to expect any cooperation.
He would lose standing in each of them by varying degrees, and he would provide Collins, in the process, with a further and possibly more damaging instrument against her—the discovery that the gentleman of Merebank had known and concealed.
None of this was reason to hesitate, and he did not hesitate.
He returned to the desk and took up a fresh sheet.
He wrote to Wainwright—the third letter that week—asking three questions by their proper legal formulations and instructing him by return post what steps Wainwright was to take regarding Mr Tilney of Gray’s Inn and regarding a particular debt paper originating in Hertfordshire and regarding the form of application by which the filing could be challenged before its hearing.
He did not set her name. He wrote the party concerned and the lady lately resident and such other forms as a careful attorney would understand without requiring the specifics to travel in ink across five counties.
He sanded the letter and sealed it, then called for Norton to take it from his hand.
He had just exposed himself. No matter how careful his language, Wainwright would read it knowing his client was now acting on particulars and not apprehension.
“You are up,” Jane said.
Elizabeth stiffened, roused a little from her reverie. “I have not been to bed at all. I did not intend to be up at this hour, Jane, but the matter has not permitted me to lie down.”
Jane closed the door. She came into the room and stood at the foot of the bed. She did not sit.
“I went to the parlour this evening to ask whether you would come to supper. Mrs Reeves headed me off in the passage. She told me that you and Mr Darcy had been occupied with a matter in the afternoon, that you had asked not to be disturbed, that a tray had been sent and refused, and that she thought I should leave the thing alone tonight and ask my sister in the morning. I went back to my room and sat with Georgiana for an hour and did not ask my sister in the morning. I am asking her now. What matter, Lizzy?”
Elizabeth looked at her. She could not undertake, at this hour, the graded way of telling a thing that her sister’s composure required, because she had spent whatever could do that yesterday.
“A man came to the village yesterday morning asking after you. And Mr Darcy had a letter more than a week past.”
Jane gasped. “So… he knew?”
“He came to me in the parlour and laid out what he had and asked what I had. I asked for the afternoon. I gave him the afternoon. I told him everything.”
Jane was very still. “Everything?”
“Everything. The papers. The night at Northampton. The bag. Collins’s letter. The forgery. My uncle’s coach. All of it.”
“When you say told him, do you mean—”
“I sat in the chair he had sat in and I told him. The full account, in such order as I could put it. There was no part of it I left out.”
“And he—what has he done?”
“He did not say. But I believe he has sent a letter. I heard Norton's horse go down the drive scarcely an hour later.”
Jane did not move. Her hand rose a little way and took hold of the post of the bed, and there was a silence in the room in which Elizabeth could hear, quite clearly, her sister’s breathing go unsteady and then right itself.
“You have laid it at his feet. You have put Mr Darcy in a position of concealing a felony at law for the sake of a woman on whose behalf he has no obligation of any kind. You might as well have written to Lady Catherine yourself and saved him the paper.”
“Jane.”
“I am not finished. I have been biting my tongue in this house since November, because I told myself you would come to him in your own way and your own hour, and I told myself also that a man of his sort would not be injured by a woman of our sort because I thought better of him than to believe him capable of being injured by any of the small ordinary follies I could imagine you bringing through his door. I did not imagine you bringing him a Chancery filing. I did not imagine you bringing him Collins.”
“I know you did not.”
Her voice pitched a little more. “Do you know what you have done to him?”
“Jane, I know. That is why I did not tell him for so long.”
“And then you did tell him.”
“As you insisted, if you recall. Did you, or did you not wish me to tell him?”
“I wanted you to relieve him, not to make his burden worse!”
Elizabeth's eyes widened. “As if I could choose in which manner it would affect him! I told him because I could not not tell him, and I told him knowing what it would cost him, and I would tell him again at the same hour with the same instrument because there was no decent alternative I could find in all those weeks of looking.”
“Because a man with a London coat came to the village and you were frightened.”
“Because a man with a London coat came to the village and he came to me with it. There was no longer any way to leave him with his hands clean.—I chose the next-cleanest thing I could choose for him, which was to choose him knowing, not him finding out at some hour I had not arranged, which would have been worse.”
Jane closed her eyes. “You talk as though you have done him a kindness.”
“I have not pretended to myself it was a kindness, Jane. I called it the only choice I had.”
“No, Lizzy. You have made him the accessory of a woman he has had the misfortune to love.“
Her hears heated. “Love! Jane…”
“Oh, stop pretending, Lizzy. You let him love you without the information he required to protect himself from the consequences of doing so. And you, who should not even be out of your bed yet, have been on your feet for weeks now without telling me. But he knew, did he not? You should have left, Lizzy. Got a carriage and left. A kinder woman would have gone back to Longbourn in the first week and borne what she had earned, and left that man with his house and his sister and his good name.”
Elizabeth stared at her sister in horror. “Jane!”
Jane waved her off and looked away, putting her fist to her mouth.
“Jane.”
“Oh, what is it, Lizzy?” she snapped.
“How long have you cared for him?”
The silence that followed was the longest of the exchange.
“Jane.”
“I do not know what you mean by it.” Her eyes had gone to the workbox. Her hands had gone to her sleeve. “It is unkind of you to ask such a thing, Lizzy. I had thought we were past unkindness.”
“Jane —”
“You will not press me on this. Not tonight.”
“I think I must.”
“There is nothing to press upon.” She had half risen, and had not finished the motion.
The hand on her sleeve had begun to work at a thread that was not loose.
“Mr Darcy has been our host. He has been everything that is gentlemanly. I do not know what you suspect me of believing about him, but I assure you it has not crossed my mind, and I had rather not have it crossed for me at this hour.”
“Jane. Look at me.”
“I am perfectly composed!”
“Not by half.”
“I am—I have been—I am tired. The day has been long and I have been with Georgiana the better part of it, and you are asking me a question that you have not the right to ask, Lizzy, and I do not propose to answer it.”
When Jane answered, at last, she did not answer the question that had been asked.
“He has been the only decent man in this house since November. He has been kind to me. He has been courteous in a way I had forgotten men could be to widows who have ceased to be interesting. I sat across from him at supper for six weeks of the winter and I did not imagine anything you are imagining. If you are asking me whether I was going to survive my widowhood by believing a gentleman of great property was going to interest himself in me, the answer is no, Lizzy, I was not. I had enough sense left for that. But I did not believe, either, that he was going to be undone under my nose by my own sister.”
“Undone—”
“You did not deserve him!”
Elizabeth swallowed. “No. And I have not pretended otherwise to him or to myself.”
“And I am going to have to watch you be loved by him, am I not?”
“Jane —”
“Because he is a just man, and he will not abandon you, and he will spend whatever of himself he has to spend to make this right, and he will do it with the grave sure face he has never worn toward any other woman. I have watched him this evening, from the stair. He has not been to bed. He is at the window of the study as if the window held him up. He has sent a rider to Derby at a pace that will lame the horse. And you have done that to him, Lizzy, and you will go on doing it, and he will let you, because that is the sort of man he is.”
She lifted her chin. “Mr Darcy is his own man. I did not ask him to do any of that, but if he has done it for me, I shall live with what that makes me.”
“You are such a fool, Lizzy. I wish I had left this house a month ago!”
“Jane—”
“I am not leaving it now. Do not be afraid of that. I have given this family too much already to leave when it is at its lowest. But do not look to me, Lizzy, for the warmth you were used to getting from me. I have not any warmth to spare this morning, and I do not know when I shall.”
At the door she stopped but did not turn.
“If he comes for you before breakfast—and he will—he will have a question for you that you will wish to answer. I would rather not know what answer you give him. I do not wish to hear what else you are putting upon him before the household is up.”
She went out, and closed the door behind her.