Chapter 35 #2
That was Darcy’s footstep in the hall. She knew it at three paces.
He had been crossing that hall toward her parlour for many nights of her recovery, and he was so plainly Mr Darcy on the bare boards that the second set of footsteps was halfway down the stair before she understood she was hearing a second set of footsteps at all.
Darcy’s step had not gone three paces in the hall before a second step came down the stair behind it; she had known it for Jane’s at the second tread, and for what it meant by the third—Jane had not been able to lie in her bed; Jane had come down to head her off; Jane was on her way to this room and would not be turned out of it.
By the time the two steps reached the parlour door together, Elizabeth had given up the morning she had been preparing for, and was waiting for whatever was about to come into her room instead.
Darcy was first at the latch. He opened the door and was in the room before he had marked the step behind him—dressed for the morning he had prepared at his desk through the night, with his coat on, the lines of the night still in his face, and his eyes meeting hers as if he had been keeping a piece of his own attention in this room for some hours.
“Miss Bennet,” he said. “Forgive me the hour. I would have come sooner if —”
Jane was at his shoulder before the if. She had pushed in close enough behind him that the door had not yet closed; her shawl was half off her shoulder, her hair had been pinned in haste, and the colour was very far out of her face.
Darcy heard her at last and turned.
“Mr Darcy.” Her voice was not Jane’s. It came out scraped and small and not quite under her, and Elizabeth saw her draw a breath against it and try the next sentence at a register she could trust.
“Mr Darcy. You cannot stand in this room alone with my sister at this hour.”
Her voice was small. The shame of having come down at all was audible in the smallness of it, and Elizabeth understood, before Jane drew her next breath, that the discipline Jane had been keeping since November was about to come undone here, in front of her, with no preparation given any of them.
“Mrs Marsden. I had thought you in your bed.”
“So I gather.”
Darcy turned to her properly then. Elizabeth could not see his face. She saw the set of his shoulder. “Please—sit down.”
“I have not come in to sit, sir.” Jane did not look at him.
She looked at Elizabeth. “Lizzy. I lay in my bed half the night and walked the landing the other half, and I did not know whether I should hear officers in the hall or only the wind. And I could not come down, because I had told you last night I would not. So I lay there.”
“I did not know either, Jane.”
“No. You sat in this room and did not know, and I lay upstairs and did not know, and the only man in this house who knew shut himself into his study and did not put a word out the door.”
The shawl had slipped further from her shoulder. She did not catch it.
“And the man in your study, Mr Darcy—the man who has been in this house since the small hours, on whatever business he has brought—you have not been to her door with one piece of information, in those hours, that might have told her whether to expect to be in this room by morning, or in a carriage.”
“Mrs Marsden —”
Jane’s voice lifted at last.
“I have been with your sister and mine, sir, every day of these two months. And you cannot tell me, this morning—you cannot tell me—whether the man in the next room is here for my sister’s keeping? Or you will not tell me.”
The door of the parlour opened behind her, and a man Elizabeth had not seen before came two steps into the room and stopped.
He was in shirtsleeves and a waistcoat. His coat was over his arm. He had come in from the study at the lifting of voices; he stopped just inside the door at what was happening in the room.
He bowed.
“Forgive the intrusion. I —” He looked at Darcy. “I heard voices.”
Darcy’s face—Elizabeth could see it now, because Darcy had turned—went through three things at once and arrived, with what he had left of him, at a kind of formality. “Mrs Marsden. Miss Bennet. My cousin, Colonel Fitzwilliam. He came to me overnight from Matlock.”
The Colonel made his bow to each of the ladies.
“Mrs Marsden. Miss Bennet. Forgive the intrusion. I am at my cousin’s service this morning.”
Cousin… not a magistrate. Not a constable. Not…
The relief Elizabeth had begun to allow herself at the word cousin checked itself almost at once.
Darcy’s cousin was, by the same arithmetic, Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s nephew; and whatever was now to happen in this parlour was to happen in front of a man whose family had a stake in his marriage, well-attested.
Jane drew breath—short, and not Jane’s—and turned again to Darcy. She set both hands hard to the back of the chair beside her and stood for some seconds with her head down. Elizabeth could see only the part in her hair and the white of her knuckles on the chair-back.
When Jane lifted her face she did not look at the Colonel. She looked at Darcy. “You should not be in this room with her, sir. Not at this hour. Not with the door closed. Not with your cousin standing in it as a witness to what you mean to do.”
“Mrs Marsden,” Darcy protested.
She drew breath. “I know what you mean to do, sir. I have known it some days. I told her last night I had known it. I told her also that I would not be present for it, and I find this morning that I have not the character to keep my word. Forgive me. I have come down. Here I am.”
Darcy did not move. Elizabeth could not. The Colonel did not so much as breathe.
Jane drew breath. It did not entirely come.
“I cannot stay here, sir. I cannot stand in this room with you and her and a man who has come overnight on business none of us has been told the name of, and pretend it is decent. It is not decent. None of it has been decent. And I am afraid—I am afraid of what I shall say next if I am made to stand here another minute, and afraid of what I shall do, and afraid of myself for being afraid of it. Please let me go.”
“Jane —”
“No, Lizzy. You have not the right to ask me this morning.”
Elizabeth tried to stand. The leg protested instantly. Darcy moved without thought. So did Jane. The Colonel put out a hand toward the back of a chair.
In that single ugly instant—the three turning together at her pain, Darcy’s hand out, Jane’s face changed by alarm before resentment returned, the Colonel a step nearer than he had been—everything Jane had said was proved again.
Jane made a sound almost a laugh and almost a sob. “You see? You need not argue the point. The room argues it for you.”
Darcy said, “Mrs Marsden—if my being in this room makes it harder for you, I will go. I beg you to stay with your sister. The morning has not gone as I had intended.”
Jane shook her head.
“It is not your being in the room, sir. It is the room. It is the house. It is what I am in it. I cannot answer for myself another quarter hour.”
“Where will you go?” Elizabeth said, and the word was very nearly a sob. “It is just past dawn. You have no carriage —”
“I shall walk. The Hadleys will take me in. I have known them since November, and they will not turn me out for being early.” She turned toward the door.
“Jane —”
Jane stopped with her hand on the latch but did not look back.
“I love you,” Elizabeth said. “Whatever I have done badly, do not forget that.”
Jane bowed her head once. “I know.”
Then she went out.
“Wait… Mrs Marsden? Come back!” The Colonel went out after her. Elizabeth heard him take his coat from the hall—the small sound of cloth lifted from a peg—and then the outer door, and then the cold air for the second it took for the door to be closed against it.
The door closed after the Colonel.
Darcy did not move from the threshold. He looked at her, and looked at her, and said nothing.
The tears were down her face before she had marked their beginning.
The hands on the chair-arm gave up the chair-arm at last and went to her face.
Her sister had walked out into the cold to go two fields off because the room she had been keeping for four months had at last broken her, and there was no piece of what had broken Jane that did not belong, by one road or another, to Elizabeth.
She heard him take half a step into the room toward her. She heard him stop.
“Forgive me,” he said. “I—forgive me. I shall not press you this morning.”
She did not lift her face. She had no use for the sight of his face making the apology, and he had not the words for it either. She heard him at the door. She heard the latch tried, and held, and tried again, and let go of until he was gone.