Chapter 37 #2
“What confidence?”
“Lady Catherine, in my hearing, asked him for the second time at tea about his trouble with the Bennet cousins. I confess I had not, by Tuesday afternoon, made the connection.”
“And he answered her.”
“He answered her at very considerable length. He spoke of his late cousin’s daughter, of her refusal of him, of an irregularity in the estate accounts that had come to light upon his entering on the property, of certain forged papers he had with great pain of conscience uncovered, of his Christian duty in the matter, of the unfortunate flight of the young women out of his protection, of his fear that they were now in want and possibly under improper influence.
He spoke her name. He spoke the elder’s also.
He spoke her uncle’s. He spoke her sister Mrs Marsden’s by her widowed name without knowing he had spoken her, because he did not, on Tuesday last, know that Mrs Marsden was at Northmere. ”
“And our aunt?”
“She must know by now, Darcy. Anyone with leisure to put it together will. The road runs from Pemberley to Rosings as freely as from Rosings to Pemberley, and our aunt has servants who write to servants. Within a fortnight, perhaps within a week, she will know that the woman who shamed her clergyman is the woman you have brought into a Darcy house and propose to put on a Darcy marriage book. She will take it personally, and she will exert herself.”
“Let her exert herself.”
“You speak as if exertion on her part were an inconvenience and not a danger. It is both, Darcy. She has tenants who will believe what she tells them. She has connections in the church. She has more particularly the cousin who has been forging papers under her nose, and she has now the inducement to defend him, because to abandon him would be to admit she had appointed a fool. She will not admit it. She will instead pour resources into him, and through him into the legal pursuit of the matter we have been most particularly retaining a solicitor in Derby to forestall. She is going to be the second front of this engagement.”
“I have already had that thought.”
“Have you?”
“I have.”
“Then you know that the woman you have asked to be your wife is going to have, in addition to a clergyman, an attorney, a magistrate, and a steward of the Northmere accounts arrayed against her, a great-aunt of Pemberley who will spend the next two years making the matter the burden of every drawing room from here to Margate. And you intend to marry her anyway.”
“I intend to marry her this week if she will have me.”
“This week?”
“If a special licence can be brought up from London.”
Fitzwilliam was silent for some yards. “I shall write to my father this afternoon.”
“Wainwright has not yet replied.”
“He will reply by tomorrow’s post if he is what you have said he is.”
“He is what I have said he is.”
“Then we wait.”
The path, where it took the second bend above the dairy, gave them sight of the eastern half of the lower meadow and the smoke rising from Hadley’s cottage, very thin and very white in the cold.
The cottage was a quarter mile off across the open ground.
Darcy could make out the back of the kitchen garden and the shape of the byre. There was no person in the yard.
He looked at the smoke and did not speak for a while. “Fitzwilliam, how does Mrs Marsden this morning?”
“I do not know how she does this morning. The letter she sent up by Mrs Hadley was given to Miss Bennet half an hour ago. You and I were both in the study. I have not been back across the meadow since I left there last evening.”
“Mrs Hadley must have sent word when she brought the letter? neI cannot believe she would not have.”
“She only affirmed that Mrs Marsden had slept well in the night. That she had eaten her breakfast. That she had asked, twice, whether her sister had passed a tolerable night, and would not be answered with less than the truth. Mrs Hadley gave her the truth.”
“What truth?”
“That her sister had not passed a tolerable night, but had passed a survivable one.”
“That was honest.”
“That was Mrs Hadley.”
They walked a little further. What Darcy had next to say was harder to say than he had been prepared for.
“I want her brought back.”
“Darcy.”
“Today, if she can be brought. Tomorrow at the latest. Elizabeth needs her sister, Fitzwilliam.”
“Darcy, you cannot—”
“I shall send the carriage down for her at one o’clock. I shall send Mrs Hadley with the carriage. If Mrs Marsden will not come to it, Mrs Hadley will hand her up. I shall not press my own person on her. I shall ride to Lambton on some pretext and be out of the house when she comes in.”
“Darcy, listen to me!”
He stopped with a hiss. “What is it, Fitzwilliam?”
“Have you any conception at all of what that woman requires this morning?”
He turned to look at his cousin. His cousin’s tone made no sense to him.
“I have a conception. She requires her sister.
She requires rest, distance, the absence of pressing demand, the absence of pity from a quarter she would refuse pity from, and the absence of the persons in the house most responsible for her present state.
She requires those things in some order I had hoped you would help me arrange.
I have proposed riding to the Hadley's precisely so that she might have the last of them.”
“That is well thought, Darcy. But it is not the half of what is required.”
He narrowed his eyes. “What is the half I have not thought of, Fitzwilliam?”
“You will not like it.”
“I have not liked anything for thirty-six hours. Tell me.”
“Darcy. You are a stupid blockhead. Will you ever in your life observe a woman in your own house who is not also Miss Elizabeth Bennet?”
“I…”
“Mrs Marsden is in love with you.”
Darcy walked four paces, slowed, did not turn. His back was to his cousin. He was watching the smoke at the Hadley chimney. “Impossible.”
“Darcy.”
“No, Fitzwilliam. No. You are mistaken in this. You have not been in the house above a day. You have seen Mrs Marsden at one supper and one breakfast. You have escorted her down a meadow in tears. You have not the standing to make such a claim about a woman in mourning whom you have known some twenty hours.”
“And you have, but you are still blind?”
He stared, then shook his head. “No, impossible. You are mistaken.”
“I am not mistaken, Darcy. I knew it inside a minute. I knew it across the room before you had even properly introduced her. I knew it before she had spoken three sentences. I knew it from how she said Mr Darcy when she asked you abide by her decision. It was as plain as the nose on her face.”
“No, no, no! You are wrong. Fitzwilliam. I have never. I have never given that woman one syllable that could have been taken in such a sense. I have spoken to her at table about her late husband’s hounds and her sister’s health and the price of coal. I have never led her on! Never. Once.”
“Darcy. Listen to me. Listen.”
“I am listening.”
“I do not say that you have given her one syllable or a glance. I do not say that you have made her any inducement, that you have crossed any line, that you have looked at her once except as a widow, a guest in your house. I say only—and only—that she has been two months in this house with you, with no man in it but a doctor who came twice a week and a drowner who never comes indoors. You have been kind to her in your way. You have put a roof over her, given her dignity and purpose, asked nothing of her in return. She has taken account of all of it, Darcy. She could not have helped taking account of it.”
“You make her sound desperate.”
“I make her sound human. I do not say she is desperate. I say she is two months a widow in your home and you are Darcy of Pemberley and you have not once spoken a sharp word to her. She did not require seduction. She required kindness, and you gave it.”
Darcy began to walk on, then stopped again. The smoke at Hadley’s chimney went on rising.
“She told you this.”
“She told me her story when I walked her down. It was enough.”
“And you concluded —”
“I concluded what eleven years in a regiment full of married soldiers and widowed sisters has taught me to conclude in such cases. I concluded that Mrs Marsden has, for some part of the winter, been quietly and very politely in love with you, and that the discovery yesterday morning that you intended to marry her sister broke her.”
“I—I have not—I cannot—I have not the faintest —”
He could not finish the sentence. He turned away from the smoke.
He turned back. He had nowhere to put what his cousin was telling him; it went, of itself, into the place yesterday morning had left empty in him—the parlour where the door had closed on Mrs Marsden as she walked out into the cold rather than stand in it a further minute.
“Ask Miss Elizabeth.”
“What?”
“Ask Miss Elizabeth. She has known it. She must have known it. She has been in this house with the two of you the whole autumn. If I saw it across a room, she has seen it across a season. You may rely on her to confirm what I am telling you.”
Darcy did not speak for some time.
“How could I have missed it? Two months… how could I have missed it for so long?”
His cousin closed the distance and took hold of his shoulder; he did not shake him, did not move him, only kept the hand there.
“You missed it because your eyes were elsewhere, Darcy. You have been looking past every other person in this house since January. You cannot see what you are not looking at.”
“That is no excuse.”
“It is not an excuse. It is the cause. You are too hard on yourself by half for missing a thing you were physically incapable of seeing. I am telling you so that you do not, in your kindness, do her the further injury of being kind to her this week as you have been kind to her all winter.”
“I shall not. I shall keep out of her way.”
“You shall. I will go to call on her this afternoon. I am rather more harmless than you.”