Chapter Forty-Two
The carriage came up the south drive at half past three of the fourth afternoon since the wade, and Hadley brought word to the study.
“Mr Ellison, sir. Just stepping down.”
Darcy went down to the hall. Ellison was coming up the steps, the brown leather bag strapped close at his side. “Mr Darcy.”
“Come in. Hadley, send Mrs Reeves with tea.”
In the study Ellison sat down, undid the strap of the bag, and lifted out three letters tied with tape—and beneath them a paper folded twice and sealed with a heavier wax than any letter wore.
“This first, sir.” He set the heavier paper apart on the long table, within Darcy’s reach, and took his hand off it.
A common license. He had been preparing himself for this paper since he had come back from the mere on Elizabeth’s arm, but all his preparing had not been the same thing as the arrival of it.
“Was there much difficulty?”
“Less than I had expected, sir. Mr Pearce, the surrogate at Lichfield, took your sworn affidavit from Derby without question. He sat the Quarter Sessions with your uncle of Pemberley for the better part of fifteen years, as I believe you knew.”
“He did. Go on.”
“He set his seal upon the licence inside the hour. The longer business was the bishop’s clerk, who keeps the calendar of seals and had a particular rule about parties not attending in their own persons.
Mr Pearce had his own view of the rule. It was set aside for the afternoon.
The licence was issued before evening yesterday, and I came up by post in the night. ”
“You went down to Lichfield yourself?”
“I did, sir. Mr Wainwright thought the matter would not bear sending under post, and I should not myself have wished to put it under post.”
“Quite right. And the form of it?”
“Marriage within the Diocese of Lichfield, at any church or chapel of the diocese, at any canonical hour, by any clergyman with licensed faculty. The vicar at Northmere village has undertaken to be ready at whatever hour you should fix. He has put down tomorrow morning at eleven, or the morning after at the same hour, to give you the choice.”
Darcy picked up the paper. He did not break the seal. He went to the window with it. The mere held the late February light off the bottom of the western reeds where, in November, it had held nothing at all.
“Tomorrow at eleven.”
“Sir.”
“And the rest of the bag?”
Ellison undid the tape and laid the three letters on the long table beside the licence.
“From Mr Wainwright, sir, with materials behind it.” He passed the first across.
“Mr Collins has retained a London attorney. Mr Wainwright has copies of the preliminary writ, which is for the present being held back from filing. The opposing attorney has served notice that he means to file within seven days unless a private settlement is reached. The terms proposed are the removal of Miss Bennet from Northmere and her placement either at the Magdalen Hospital in London, or at another house of correction acceptable to Lady Catherine.”
“And the second?”
“From a Mr Stanley at the office of the Faculty in Doctors’ Commons, whom Mr Wainwright has put on to make particular enquiries.
Within the last week Lady Catherine has put in an application of her own—not a marriage faculty this time, but the conveyance of the patronage at Hunsford to a person other than herself, in trust, inter vivos.
Mr Wainwright has marked the bottom in his own hand. ”
Darcy read Wainwright’s hand without taking the letter from the table. She is making her papers transferable.
He understood the note at once. If Lady Catherine were taken ill, or if she chose to remove to Bath for the season, her instruments against the family would not be lost. Collins would have a second authority over him.
“And the third?”
“From Mr Gardiner, sir. He is up at his wife’s cousin’s house in Lambton; Mrs Gardiner came up to him two days ago. He is at your disposal whenever a carriage is sent. He writes that he could be at Northmere by tea-time of the following day.”
Darcy did not answer at once.
“Then we shall have them up to-morrow. He shall give her. The Colonel shall stand for me. Mrs Reeves shall lay the breakfast at the house. We shall not, in this season, contemplate the long table at the church. Mr Hadley and his wife shall stand at the church; Mrs Reeves shall ask Mrs Hadley this evening. And, Mr Ellison, I shall see to it that you are well settled at the inn in Bakewell until the morning following. I would have preferred to offer you a room here, but with the south wing as it is, I am afraid we have no extra rooms. I shall see to a carriage for you to Bakewell.”
Ellison’s eyes widened. “That is very kind, sir. I had not looked for any special consideration.”
“You deserve it, Ellison. You have done very well for me.”
“I have done, sir, what I was set to do.”
Darcy did not contradict him. He took the licence to his own writing-table behind the long one, picked up his pen, and dipped it.
“Half an hour, Mr Ellison. I will go to Miss Bennet now to talk of the arrangements for tomorrow.”
Her hand went through his arm at the top of the church step before she had given any direction to it. The cane was at the house in Mrs Reeves’s keeping, against some return to need she did not, this morning, intend.
“Mrs Darcy.”
He had been saying it under his breath through the vicar’s homily, and once, very softly, at the rail when the vicar had paused for the responses, and was by now in the matter of saying it not so much with words as with his arm under her hand.
He had said it now properly because they were on the church step and the company was coming out behind them, and he might say a thing aloud to his wife on a church step that he might not on the inside of a church.
them there. The family she had to run from to keep them safe, and Mr Darcy’s protection and love and care has made it possible to try to restore them to her. She doesn’t know how it’s all going to work. But this valley heals, and here is the proof.
She did not at first answer.
Of the things she had supposed in November to have been taken finally out of her hand—the use of her own foot upon a gravel path, the use of her own name in plain hearing, the use of any arm but a paid attendant’s anywhere—there had been none she had given more nights to than the second; and the second was the thing he had given her in two words on the church step in the cold of February.
She turned her head.
Her aunt and uncle Gardiner were three persons behind her at the door of the church, her aunt’s hand in her uncle’s arm where it had been these twenty-eight years.
They had been at the breakfast table of Lambton at six o’clock.
They had come down to Northmere in time for the vicar’s first words. They were here.
She had been at a distance from her uncle since the autumn, as she had been at a distance from every other party of her family.
He would not have been a danger to her. She would have been a danger to him; and she had laid the distance between them deliberately, by no post, no acknowledgment, no word sent her aunt that her aunt could have answered without bringing the lender’s clerk to her own door.
She had not known then that there should be such a man as Mr Darcy in the world, by whose care alone the restoration of her uncle to her should have been made possible—possible at the price of a chaise from Lambton in the cold of a March morning, and the giving of her, in his Cheapside voice and on the strict form, to a man who should not by any conduct of his own dishonour her in a course of years.
She had not known there should be such a valley either, that should heal a leg and a name and an aunt and an uncle and give them all back to her on a church step in the same hour.
She did not yet know how the rest of it should work. The valley healed, however; and her aunt and her uncle on the church step in the late March sun were the proof of it.
“Shall we walk the lane?”
Elizabeth turned back to the man beside her. “I shall walk the lane, sir, on the arm of my husband. There is no part of that arrangement, sir, that three months ago I should have had any business supposing. I shall require some considerable practice before I have made myself a mistress of it.”
“I shall bear with you, madam, for some considerable period.”
“I had hoped you might.”
The leg held her down off the church onto the gravel of the path in one step.
She had set her foot on the gravel as easily as she might have set it upon the carpet at the top of the south passage.
Darcy’s arm was under her hand, and it was his name that was now hers.
There were so many small and not-so-small miracles in the matter of that one step, and she had no breath this morning to give to more than one of them at a time, and the third she set aside, for now, for the lane.
Behind them by some paces Mrs Gardiner’s voice came up, in the carrying London tone she used when she had been brought to a country prospect she was determined to admire.
“It is the most extraordinary water, Mrs Hadley. I had thought from my niece—Mrs Darcy, I must learn to say—that the mere was a darkish sort of pond. It is not. It is the colour of weak tea on the surface, and where the sun is on it, of new-cut silver below. I do not think I have ever seen a body of water of just that character in any county I have travelled in.”
“It is not a pond, ma’am.”
“No, I see it is not. I had got the impression from the descriptions, but the descriptions had not—”
“It is not a lake either, ma’am, by your leave. It is the mere.”
Elizabeth had heard, at Mrs Darcy, her aunt’s voice catch in a manner her aunt herself had not heard; and her aunt was already speaking of the colour of the water again.
“Forgive me, Mrs Hadley. The smell, however, I shall confess to. It is something between a sulphur spring and a—well. I shall not draw a comparison the gentlemen would think me genteel for drawing. I shall say only that it is something my husband does not appear to mind, but which I am not, this fortnight, in any disposition to bottle.”
“It is the iron, ma’am. And a little of the lime. It is good for the lambs.”
“For the lambs?”
“Mr Hadley has had eleven this lambing, ma’am, and not one weak.
He had three out of twenty-three the year before.
And there is Mrs Pemberton in the village, who could not open her hand in November without crying, and who has baked three batches a week these last three weeks.
The Reverend’s gout has gone down, of which the Reverend will not speak in his own person.
The smell, ma’am, is the smell of the waters.
The waters have been particular this year. ”
“I see.”
“They have been particular, ma’am, for Mr Darcy and his lady too in their own time. I should not, by your leave, discuss it in the lane, but I should say—”
“You shall, Mrs Hadley, say whatever you please.”
“The waters are not, ma’am, the sort of waters one bottles.”
Elizabeth walked on her husband’s arm up the lane.
The lane in February had the dry hedge on either hand and the sun coming clean down between the bare branches and a smell of cold ground and old smoke from a kitchen chimney somewhere off behind the wood.
The leg held her at every step. The leg, if anyone should have asked her, had not been a part of her at all in November.
The leg this morning, if anyone should have asked her, was a part of her she had not consented to surrender at any hour of the last six months and would not consent to surrender at any further hour for the rest of her life.
The Colonel’s voice came up next, somewhere behind Mrs Gardiner’s, in the dry quick tone she had come to know on him.
Mrs Marsden was on his left arm. Miss Darcy was on his right.
Georgiana was laughing at something Jane had said.
Jane was, perhaps, laughing at something Georgiana had said back.
Behind them, Mr Hadley and her uncle Gardiner had got onto the question of the eastern gate, and Mr Ellison brought up the rear with the bag strapped to his arm.
The word came up under her hand on her husband’s coat before she had words for it being the word that came up.
The word was safe. She had not, in the last six months, had the word in her possession.
She had been carrying its absence under everything she did, and under everything she said, and under everything she had not said to her sister or her aunt or her uncle or to the man who walked her up the lane this morning; and the carrying had been so habitual that she had not, until this morning, had occasion to put the carrying down.
She put it down. She walked on her husband’s arm with her sister and her sister-by-marriage and her aunt and her uncle and the Hadleys and Mr Ellison behind her, and there was no one in the world this hour who had reach upon her that the company behind her could not put between her and the reach.
The lane bent.
Merebank came up at the bend, with its gables of yellow stone in the late February sun and the south windows giving back the brightness of the mere across the lawn. Mrs Reeves had set the door open. There was a wreath of winter green on it, of Mrs Reeves’s making.
There was also a carriage drawn up on the gravel under the south gable.
It was not a carriage Elizabeth knew. It was a hired post-chaise.
The boy of the chaise was at the head of his off horse.
The door of the chaise was open. On the step of the chaise stood a man in a black coat.
He had risen at the sound of the wedding-party in the lane.
He had spent the morning on the road north.
He had no intention of taking the afternoon to recover from the road.
Mr Collins had arrived.