Chapter Thirty-Nine #2
The question had been wrong each time. What he had seen had been wrong.
What he had remembered had been wrong. The error had not been in any of the questions, his father had taught him to understand; the error had been in himself.
Darcy had at length stopped asking. By nineteen his father had pronounced him a young man of admirable sense.
But he had learned to question his own judgment. So thoroughly did he question himself that he could not be sure of the last time he had stood confidently on truth.
He had been at school with Wickham, who had broken the windows of the master’s lodge and forged the master’s hand on a leave-note, and Darcy had taken the punishments for both.
He had told himself it was loyalty. It had been the same deceit, the same blind trust, this time on Wickham’s behalf and against his own.
He had been two-and-twenty when he had discovered that the steward at Pemberley had been taking from him, and six months had passed before he had brought himself to dismiss the man. He had known by the second month. He had told himself he was being fair. He had been afraid to act on what he knew.
And this house. He had taken it on from a cousin who had broken it past saving by any rational reckoning, and his own first walk of the property had told him so within an afternoon.
He had not sold it. He had, instead brought Georgiana with him and tried to make a home of the place.
The judgment had been his own—which, his father’s lessons had taught him, was reason to set it aside.
What looked like ruin must be a softness in him; what looked impossible, a want of discrimination in him.
He had stayed. He had carried on. He had been waiting for his perception to come round.
Elizabeth’s eyes were on him. She had been there through it all—she had not turned away, and she had not asked.
He said it. He did not speak loudly. The mere had asked it of him.
“I have been deceived. I could not believe my own eye. The eye was made the offence in me before I was old enough to defend it.”
The confession went into the air between them and was not answered. The mere did not break around him. The water at his thighs lay as it had lain before he had spoken.
He had supposed the confession would be enough—that the mere, or she, or some kindness of the morning would relieve him of the rest. None did. The rest fell to him.
But one thing he had credited. One thing the mistrust had never undone.
He had carried it out of the mere on a January afternoon with her blood on his coat, and he had carried it up the stair of this house every morning since, and through every interval of every day, and through the dryness of her tongue in the chamber, and the wit she had been able to speak even half conscious, and the silence she had kept about what was in her bag, and the morning at his study door when she had brought him an answer and taken it away again.
He had not put a word to it. He had let it walk beside him in silence.
He had let it walk beside him because he had not, in twenty years, trusted any perception of his own well enough to put a word to it.
This morning he would have to put the word to it. The water was not going to do that for him.
He had proposed to her two afternoons ago because he had not been able any longer to be in a room with her without speaking it.
He had let the Colonel, and his aunt, and her own deferral interrupt what should not have admitted any interruption.
He had spent the night and the morning since on the other side of every door she had stood at.
He had told himself it was discipline—that, having proposed, he would not press.
It had not been discipline. It had been the older instruction, working in him still: that his own perception of what she was, and of what they were to one another, was not to be trusted against the louder voices in the house.
He brought his eyes up to her face with the deliberation his life had not allowed him in any matter that mattered.
“Elizabeth. Tell me I am right about you. Tell me that what I have carried since the bank in January is the truth of you, and that there is no version of the case in which I have been deceived about it. I cannot, this morning, take the chance of having been wrong. If you are not what I have carried, there is nothing in me strong enough to bear another correction.”
She had not moved her hand from his face. She had not moved her other hand from his coat above his heart.
“You are not wrong. But I have not been the person I ought, and I will no longer try to hide that. I have hurt my sister and called it kindness. I have broken the law and called it protection for a family who hardly know where I am. I have teased you and leaned on you and hidden my face from you and called it harmless. The amends are mine to make, and I have not begun them. But the water does not lie. Look down, Mr Darcy. It has shown me. It will show you.”
He looked down. The water gave him both their faces, set close, the cold of the morning around them and the breath between them moving the surface in small folds.
He saw his own face without his father’s correction over it for the first time in twenty years.
He saw hers beside it. And he saw, in the two of them set together against the grey, what neither could have alone—a healing that had been waiting in him for her, and in her for him.
The mere broke.
It broke not in ripples—there were none—but in the surface giving up the unnatural flatness it had insisted on while he had been speaking.
The grey water, which had refused to register him through the whole of his wading, registered him now, and her, and the place at his palms where the cold had been only cold and was instead a cold that was nearly warmth, and then was the warmth itself, moving up the wet of his sleeves into his shoulders and down the line of him to where his feet stood firm on the uneven bottom.
Her hand on his face took the same change.
He brought his forehead to hers. His hands, where they had hung in the water beside his coat, took something the water gave them—a prickling first, then a small heat rising from the water into his palms, up his wrists, staying.
Her other hand had risen to the side of his face, and he had no memory, in the rising, of her hand having travelled.His arms were around her before he had ordered them. She put her face into the wet of his coat above his heart.
“I love you,” she said into the wool. “I have. I should have said it some weeks ago.”
What came up in him then had no word in his vocabulary.
Joy was the word, but joy was thin—joy made multiple by every year he had not allowed himself to know he was waiting for it.
He took her face out of the wool of his coat in both his hands and kissed her, without method, without restraint, without any care for whether he was the man he had been raised to be.
The mere brightened.
Not as morning brightens into noon—this was a brightening particular to itself, beginning at the edges where the late snow had been crusted along the bank, the snow rising from the bank in a soundless steam, the brightness moving across the surface inward to where they stood.
The grey lifted. The bottom showed clear, the stones at depth visible as plain as in August water.
He could no longer find their faces in the surface. The brightness had taken them.
She cried out and the world stopped. The sound went up into his coat where her face was, a sound he had not heard her make since the morning at Lambton, when the woman who had made it had been bleeding out at the leg on a bank he could not yet reach. Not her, not now, not in his arms!
Her body went rigid against him. She would have gone under, but he caught her.
Good God, the bone had opened. The bone had opened in the cold, on a leg that had only been mending, after he had let her stand in cold water for the better part of an hour.
The morning had been the lie. What he had taken for healing had been the bone giving way under cold and weight, by inches, while he had stood with her in it.
“Elizabeth, no…” His hands were already on her, already gathering her up out of the water, already arranging the wet of her cloak so it would not drag.
He would carry her up the path as he had carried her down it.
The doctor would be at Northmere before evening if Hadley had to ride all night for him.
“My leg!” she said. “Mr Darcy—my… my leg —”
She was laughing. He understood that an instant before he understood the laugh. Her hands had come up under his arms and were turning him, holding him in place against what he had been about to do.
“Look,” she said. “Look at it. Look!”
He looked. She had set both feet flat on the bottom of the mere—the bad foot too, weight on it, weight she had not given the bad foot in eleven weeks.
Then she stamped. She stamped the bad foot into the water as if she were daring it to ring.
It rang. She stamped again, and laughed at how it rang, and put her free hand against his coat over his heart again as if to keep herself upright through the laughter, and stamped a third time.
“It is well,” she said. “It is well, Mr Darcy. The leg is well!”
She looked up at him with the colour high in her cheeks and the wet of his coat on her chin and the laughter coming and going in her beyond her control. Her body was no longer broken.
Neither, this morning, was he. The eye he had been taught for twenty years to disbelieve was the eye that had carried her to him, and the woman it had carried was the woman in his arms with the laughter still on her, and they were both, this morning, where they had been meant to be all along.