Chapter 46
Chapter Forty-Six
Pemberley—July
The post came up to the breakfast room a little after nine, on the salver Mrs Reynolds had been bringing in to two generations of Darcys at the same hour with the same air she had attended all her morning offices for one and forty years.
Mrs Reynolds set the salver at Darcy’s elbow and the smaller correspondence tray at Elizabeth’s.
Elizabeth took up her sister’s letter and looked at the smear of red wax at the seal.
“Jane has held her wax to the candle too long again. I have told her that the wax wants the flame for the count of three and not the count of six. She has, over the course of at least a dozen years, ignored me on all occasions.”
“It is not for you to instruct your sister in the management of her seals.”
“It is for me to instruct her in anything she shall presently require to manage. The Merebank seal is at present the worst in Derbyshire, and on the present trajectory shall achieve a reputation by Michaelmas.”
“There are worse seals in Derbyshire.”
“Indeed! Your cousin Fitzwilliam’s. I believe he has been learning from Jane.”
“My cousin puts his seal on with a deliberate carelessness intended to convey to his correspondent that he had a great many more important things to do than seal a letter properly. Your sister’s seals are the result of genuine effort honestly applied. They are therefore worse.”
Elizabeth laughed fondly. “That is a fine distinction, Mr Darcy.”
“It is the distinction your good sister deserves.” Darcy was opening his second letter as she said this. The seal was black. He stopped with the seal half broken.
She put down Jane’s letter. “Black wax. From whom?”
He did not at once answer her. He broke the seal the rest of the way and unfolded the letter and read the first lines, and looked up at her. “My uncle has written.”
“And the death is —?”
“Lady Catherine. Ten days ago. An apoplectic seizure at Rosings.”
She did not at once answer him. No words seemed sufficient to the moment. “You had not better break that to me at a distance of seventeen feet, Fitzwilliam. Come down to my end of the table.”
He came to stand beside her with the letter still in his hand. He read it through once and then went back to particular passages to summarize them for her.
“The seizure was on Monday last. My uncle had not written until he had something to write. He has written now because he has directed Mr Stanley at Doctors’ Commons to seal the chest under the date of her death and to hold it against any call short of his own executor’s.
That is the chest containing every letter her ladyship had written to Mr Collins last autumn on the subject of the paper, and every further letter of February in the same urgent vein after Mr Collins had signed at Northmere.
My uncle observes—and the observation is, I shall warn you, not delicate—that the chest is in itself a sufficiency against any of the late principal’s subordinates who should be tempted to act on her behalf. ”
“He is enjoying this letter.”
“He is. He has been waiting since a long time to write a letter on this subject and was not disappointed when the occasion came. The second of the three has gone to Mr Collins at Longbourn by the same morning’s post, conveying the news and remarking that the arrangements of March stand, that the paper at Mr Ellison’s office stands, that my uncle is now in the further capacity of executor in a position to ensure both continue to do so; and that he shall regard any communication from Longbourn beyond the conventional condolence as an occasion for the originator’s full apology.
The letter would have arrived at Longbourn already.
Mr Collins did not, I should think, take the news with any pleasure. ”
“The third has gone to the chief magistrate of the county in which Longbourn lies, informing that gentleman that the affair of the ￡140 paper last autumn had been examined by my uncle as a private connection of the family and was found to have been at all times concluded; that the late Lady Catherine’s interest in the matter had been a personal grievance pressed upon Mr Collins, in whom such legal standing as the matter possessed had rested; that Mr Collins had signed an instrument in my study at Northmere in March acknowledging the duress under which Mrs Darcy had acted; and that any communication upon the subject from any quarter is to be referred to my uncle’s offices before any further office takes notice of it. ”
“Then the matter is closed.”
“It was closed before her death. It is more closed now. And by ten this morning, when my uncle’s three letters arrive at their offices, it shall be closed in three places at once, with no room for any party to take a different view of it.”
“I had prepared the small civility of the genuine sorrow for the news whenever it should come. I have given it. That is the whole of what she shall have of me. I shall not count her death among the things I owe to anyone, because to count it so should grant her, in the after, an office she did not hold in the before—that of having been required for my safety.”
“You shall not grant it her. I had been about to say the same and had not found the form. You have given it the better form.”
She did not at once answer him. She put her hand on Jane’s letter—the letter she had set down a quarter hour earlier and had not, in the news her husband had been giving her, taken up again. She picked it up now, broke the smeared seal, and read it through in silence. He waited.
“Jane writes that the mere woke on Monday last week.
“Woke? What does that mean?”
Elizabeth lifted a shoulder and showed him the word in the letter.
“That is what she says. Half past nine in the morning, the bars came up at the southern reeds and stayed an hour together, and the water went to the pewter and pearl of March, and at half past ten went back to its summer blue as though nothing had happened. Mrs Pemberton’s hands felt like a girl’s for it by dinner.
Mr Hadley walked down to the bank that evening and would not be drawn until Wednesday morning, at which point he told Jane the matter should be put to me by the next post.”
He sat down on the chair next to hers and took her hand.
“Monday last week was the morning of her seizure. She stood up at half past nine to ring for the tea-pot and fell before she had reached the bell. The mere read the seizure as it happened. The two clocks are within a quarter hour of each other on the meridian; the mere was at most ten minutes off.”
“Then Northmere knew before anyone else did.”
“Northmere always knows first.”
“Then Jane and the colonel know first as well. Or Jane did—the colonel was at Mr Ellison’s office in Lambton that morning on lease business.
Jane shall have walked back from the bank in her muslin and her boots in the wet grass, and explained the mere to her husband over dinner that evening, and the colonel shall have understood not one word of it, and shall have nodded at her as he always nods at her when she explains a matter he does not understand, which is some three times a day. ”
“He would have understood enough. He has been tired of our aunt’s business for years, and I wager he was relieved by the news from Kent. No doubt the earl wrote to him as well.”
“Jane wrote me last week that the Hadley cottages have come up by twelve shillings a quarter on the strength of the meadow drainage, and that the south fields have let to a Mr Yates at a sum she had not, in any letter, been able to bring herself to repeat. The colonel has been talking, by Jane’s report, of investments in such Lambton sundries as he had not, in fourteen years of being his father’s third son, ever supposed he should be in a position to invest in.
He is enjoying being a man with rents. Jane is enjoying being a woman whose husband has rents.
And I daresay the mere has been profiting by it. ”
“The mere and the entire estate has had an excellent quarter.”
“It has. We shall write to them tomorrow. The day after, when we have had Jane’s reply, we should go down to Northmere before the harvest.”
Darcy pulled her hand from the table and into his. “I would like that very much. I believe Georgiana is eager to see Nan again, too.”
“Then we shall go in August.”
“We shall go in August. I shall write to Richard by the noon post asking him to make up the parlour for us again.”
“Oh! Jane will be very put out to lose the use of her parlour just as she had put it to order.”
Darcy chuckled. “Then Richard will have to direct his attention once more to the repairs needed to put the south wing back into service. Come, my love, we shall be doing your sister a favour. He has been far too occupied with Hadley to mind the house repairs before winter.”
“And I am certain she will express that when I write to her!” She rose from the chairs and put it on his face beneath his jaw. “Walk with me to the lake before you go to your study. The day is too good for letters before the afternoon.”
They went out by the south door. The morning was the morning of any other Tuesday in July, by the small evidence of the weather, the gravel, and the gardeners at the south border with their hats off.
He had her hand through his arm. She did not lean on the arm any further as they walked down than she had been leaning for the four months of the marriage.
They went out by the south door. He had her hand through his arm. They walked down the gravel toward the lake, and at the top of the slope she slipped her hand from his arm.
“Race me to the water, Fitzwilliam.”
He stiffened and his hand stayed rigid in hers. “Race! I shall do no such thing.”
“Then you will be left behind. Come along!”
She had already begun running. He stood at the top of the slope and watched her go some seconds, and then went after her. She had put her hand in the water before he had reached the bank.
She was laughing when he came up to her, with her hand still in the lake.
“You have not, in the four months of our marriage, given up a single chance to put yourself near a body of water. I have, in the same four months, pulled you out of one and walked you away from a dozen. I am beginning to think it is a thing in your constitution.”
She did not at once answer him. She kept her hand in the water and looked at the surface and the sky in it.
“It is a thing in my constitution. I am happiest, Fitzwilliam, when I am at the edge of some piece of water in the sun, watching the light on the surface and asking nothing of myself or the day but to look at it. The mere cleared for me once at Northmere, and no water has, in the time since, cleared for me on the same terms, and shall not. I have stood at three lakes since and they have held the sky and given me nothing else. It was once. It is not to be again. I am at peace with that.”
He sat down on the bank next to her and put his hand at the small of her back. “And yet you stand at every water you can find.”
“And yet I stand at every water I can find. I cannot help it, Fitzwilliam. Whenever my hand touches water, my bones know it. I felt it just now in the lake. I feel it every morning at the basin in my dressing-room. Some piece of the mere is still in me, and it is glad to be brought back to water. I think it will not leave me. I do not want it to. You will think me foolish. I have not told anyone—not even you. I was afraid I would sound like a madwoman. But it has not gone away. It is on my hand now.”
“I have thought you enchanted since that morning at Northmere. I did not say so because I thought you would not want to hear it. I am saying it now because you have said it first. There is nothing wrong with you, Elizabeth. The valley has been kind to you. It will go on being kind.”
She did not at once answer him. Her hand was still wet from the lake. She brought it up to his face. The water was on his skin under her palm.
“If I am a sort of charm for the valley, Fitzwilliam, then you are mine—and a great deal more so. The water came up for me once. You have come up for me every day since. I will keep you.”
He covered her wet hand with his. “Keep me.”
She stood on her toes and laced her hands behind his neck.
“Just see if I let you out of my sight. I should like to be kissed by my husband at the bank of the lake at half past nine in the morning, in the sight of any gardener who happens to be looking, on the strength of having walked the south lawn on a leg that does not, this morning, hurt.”
He took her chin in his hand, and then he kissed her.