Chapter 37
Chapter Thirty-Seven
She had come down the passage on the stick at ten o’clock. The parlour had had no further use for her past nine, and the long night had finished, at some hour before light, work which she had not been able, in the autumn or the early winter, to finish for herself.
She had got it sentence by sentence in the dark—by six it had taken its shape, by eight there had been nothing further she could add to it—and by ten the only piece of work the day had left her was to walk into the room he was in and say it.
The voices inside the study door stopped her three paces short of the latch.
Darcy’s voice first—the voice which had been at her bedside in November and December through fevers and the small black hours of the morning, the voice which had said Drink this, Elizabeth.
A little more, until the fever had broken or she had gone back into sleep—and through the door she could mostly make out the words it carried; the care in it she could make out entire.
“And the letter to Miss Bennet's uncle, Mr Gardiner is to go separate cover, before the post bag is taken out of Lambton.”
“It will.”
“Pemberton’s lad to take it. Directly to the post. Not by way of the smithy.”
“Pemberton’s lad. Directly to the post. Not by way of the smithy.”
“Do not parrot me, Fitzwilliam.”
“I parrot you, Darcy, because you have given me the same instruction four times since seven. There may yet be a fifth. I should like to be word-perfect.”
A half-laugh of her own caught in her throat; she pressed her hand harder against the door frame to keep it there. She wanted to spend the rest of her life being spoken to in that voice, teasing him back even as his cousin was teasing him now.
“You are an impertinent man.”
“I am the man who has been awake with you the whole of one night and most of the morning of another. I am unfortunately the man you have at your disposal. If you wanted a man who writes down what you say without saying anything back, you should have applied elsewhere.”
“I shall remember that.”
“Apply to your London man.”
“My London man is in London.”
“You have me, then.”
There was a small silence in the room. She heard the sound of papers being taken up and set down again on the table, and then the cousin spoke once more, with something in his tone that was not the same.
“You have written to Wainwright. You have written to Gardiner. You have written, I gather, twice to your London man. You have not written to your aunt.”
“No.”
“Are you keeping that letter for after the wedding, or are you keeping it for never?”
“For never.”
“Sound.”
Then the colonel’s voice altered.
“Darcy. You have not heard the worst of what you are taking on, and I will not let you walk into it without having said it aloud. Pemberley is going to be tied, by your hand on a marriage book and by every paper that goes down to Derby this morning, to a woman the county will not call by any honourable word for a year and more if the matter is got out. Your sister will be received with whispers. Your tenants will read of it in the papers and pretend they have not. Our aunt will write you the longest letter of her life. My father will not write at all, which is worse. The girls Georgiana might have known will have their mothers’ decisions made for them six months before she meets any of them.
I am not asking you to reconsider. I am asking you to know. ”
“I do know, Fitzwilliam.”
“Yes.”
“I have known since I rode through the village yesterday afternoon. I know every piece of what you have said and a great deal besides. I have known, and I have made my decision, and I am not opening it again. Not this morning. Not next week. Not ever. If you cannot stand for me at it I shall ask my uncle’s vicar.
If my aunt writes, I shall not read the letter.
If my sister is whispered at, I shall remove her where she is not whispered at.
I have not asked your view, Fitzwilliam, and I am telling you only because of the family you are. ”
“Very well, Darcy.”
“Thank you.”
“For God’s sake, man, do not thank me. I am not consenting. I am only no longer arguing.”
“That was my meaning.”
She held to the door frame.
In the quarter of an hour she had been standing at it she had heard a man take up every cost his cousin could lay before him and choose her anyway.
She had come down the passage to give him her answer, but she could not now give him that.
Every cost his cousin had laid out would walk with her up the aisle and stand at his side on the marriage book under the eyes of his sister, his county, and his name; and her name being the cause of it, she could not put it there.
The tears that had been waiting since before light came; she did not wipe them. Her leg, which had stood the quarter of an hour for the sake of an answer she had now to keep back, gave under her. The stick slid a half inch on the boards. She got the door frame harder.
She had not meant to put her shoulder to the door. It gave a small creak under her.
Inside, the voices stopped.
She knew the footsteps in the room before the latch lifted. The door opened.
“Elizabeth. You have been standing too long. Let me bring you a chair.”
She shook her head, drew breath against the stick, and looked past his shoulder into the room at his cousin; his face she could not, at this nearness, yet afford to look at.
“Colonel Fitzwilliam. Have you any further word from my sister this morning?”
The Colonel rose at once. “I have, Miss Bennet. She sent up a note by Mrs Hadley not half an hour ago. It is not long, and it is not—confiding. But it is in her own hand, and she says she is well.”
He took a folded paper from inside his waistcoat and brought it to her. “With my compliments, ma’am.”
She took it. The paper, when it came into her hand, was still warm from him; Mrs Hadley would not have surrendered it to a servant, and so he had carried it on his person until it could be given.
“Thank you, sir.”
“Yes.”
She allowed herself to look at Darcy for the count of a single breath; a second breath she could not, in the passage, afford.
“I shall read this in the parlour, Mr Darcy. I shall not be long.”
“Take what time you need.”
She turned. She went back down the passage to the parlour with the note in her hand, and with all the thinking she had finished in the night to do over again.
He had not been able to remain in the study after the door closed on her.
Fitzwilliam, who had been standing at the table putting the morning’s papers back into the leather case, took his own coat down from the peg when Darcy took his, and went with him out by the side door without remark. Norton would in the course of an hour find the study empty and infer the rest.
The path Darcy chose was the upper path along the rise above the lower meadow.
It was a path he had taken with Hadley a hundred times since November when there had been some piece of land to be looked at.
He did not at this hour intend to walk to its end.
He had taken it because it was the path on the estate furthest from the parlour, and the parlour, at this hour, was the room in the house he was least able to enter.
The cold of the morning had not lifted. The cloud had moved off the western shoulder of the hill since yesterday but not the eastern.
The mere lay below them with the eastern half still dark and the western a poor sort of pewter.
Hadley’s report of the water’s drawing truer was a matter of inches.
There were further inches the water had yet to draw.
“I have not yet given you the half of what I came north to tell you, Darcy. The greater part of what I rode for you cannot have heard, because you have not asked, and because the parts you have asked for required answering first.”
“Tell me now.”
“I shall. I had thought to keep some of it until tomorrow.”
“Today is sufficient.”
“I came north out of Rosings, Darcy, by way of Matlock. I stopped at Rosings four nights, between the last day of the winter assize and the morning I rode to my father. I had not meant to stop more than one. Lady Catherine kept me three further.”
“For what reason?”
“For the reason she keeps anyone three further. She required an audience.”
“Yes.”
“She had a plan, Darcy. She had a plan for the spring. She had a plan for Anne. She had a plan, I take it, that you have known of in some form since we were not yet of age, but the plan had advanced very considerably since I had last had it from her. She intended Anne to be brought to Northmere by Easter for the waters. She intended Anne to be married out of the chapel here, and to be brought home in the carriage as Mrs Darcy. She had the parson chosen. She had the gown made. The gown is in two crates at Rosings now.”
Darcy walked four paces without answering, then walked three more.
“I had not heard of the crates.”
“There were no crates when I was last at Rosings in the summer. There are now. I saw them. I asked her what they contained. She told me with the air of a woman who imagined I should be congratulating her on her foresight.”
“In May?”
“In May. She had reckoned the journey at four days inside a closed carriage. She had reckoned the marriage at within ten days of the journey’s end. She had reckoned the return at three weeks, if the weather held; six, if it did not. She is a woman of estimates.”
“She is a woman of estimates who has had a wrong estimate for fourteen years.”
“There is more,” Fitzwilliam said. “I met Collins at Rosings.
I had not met him before. He had come from Hertfordshire, he said, on 'business" with Lady Catherine. He came up to the house on the Sunday morning, the Tuesday morning, and the Tuesday afternoon at tea. I had no interest in him beyond the interest one takes in any man who has been spoken of one too many times at a luncheon. By Tuesday I had taken his measure. On the Tuesday afternoon I had occasion to take his confidence.”