Chapter 5
FIVE
She waited for the house to retire that night, which happily occurred as early as it ever did.
Mr Collins was first, going heavy-footed from his book-room to his bedchamber above, and Charlotte soon followed.
Maria was dozing in a chair and Elizabeth went to her, gently shaking her shoulder and urging her to go and find her bed.
Maria gave her a bleary smile and quit the room, leaving her alone with Mr Darcy.
Her heart went immediately into her throat such that she thought it might choke her.
“I had a letter from Fitzwilliam this afternoon,” he said. “He reports that Georgiana is feeling much better.”
“Some good news,” she said with a relieved exhale. “I am so pleased to hear it.”
“And more than just that. He has learnt that Hargrove was apprehended. There may be some justice there after all.”
“Better and better.” She came to sit in the chair nearest him, folding her hands in her lap, and finding that all the words she had arranged so carefully on the walk home had rather inconveniently abandoned her.
“And…” he drew the word out. “I learnt a new trick today.”
She watched while he, with some effort, slid his injured leg off the footstool and rose, somewhat unsteadily, to his feet. “Oh!” She clapped her hands together. “How good that must feel!”
“In truth, it feels rather shaky,” he said. “But it is very excellent to see progress.”
“It is,” she agreed. “Very good at that.”
Was all of this because she spoke to Grace? No, that was nonsense. Pure coincidence, was all.
He was trying to sit again, and she rose to aid him in that, re-settling him where he had been. “You seem as if you have something you wish to say,” he remarked as the brief grimace of pain that his actions had cost him subsided.
“I spoke with the woman today in the village. Evidently her name is Grace, and she is, or was, um, the town’s…” She gave a half-wincing smile.
“Ah yes. I believe my uncle knew her well,” he said causing her to sputter a laugh.
“Lady Catherine’s husband? Sir Lewis?”
Mr Darcy nodded, suppressed mirth causing a very handsome dimple to appear in his cheek. “The family legend has it that Lady Catherine discovered it and killed him for his unfaithfulness, although the official story is that he fell from his horse and broke his neck.”
“Grace did not mention any of that to me,” Elizabeth said lightly. “Although in truth, she said very little. Only one sentence.”
“What was the sentence?” His voice was entirely neutral.
“What the storm releases, the calm must gather.” Elizabeth looked at him steadily. “I have been turning it over, and I believe I understand it.”
He waited patiently. He was very good at waiting, she had learnt. He would give her all the time in the world and not attempt to press or urge it from her; it was among the things she had been slowly, quietly learning to love about him.
“I formed for myself a shield of prejudice against you,” she admitted. “From the very beginning. I told Charlotte once that you had a very satirical eye and that, were I not decidedly impertinent to you, then I would likely grow afraid of you.”
“Afraid of me!” He chuckled. “Not you, surely.”
“Me,” she said with a little nod. “And if I am being honest, I am frightened of you still. Perhaps even more so in these weeks.”
“Why?”
“Because what the storm released were all those things I believed I knew about you. The same things I said to you that night.”
“Selfish,” he said “Arrogant. Conceited. Ungentlemanlike.”
It was now her turn to grimace, but behind it came a genuine smile. “Imagine my consternation when I discovered that I was entirely incorrect about all of that.”
“Thank you,” said he very simply. “I do appreciate that.”
“So that, I believe, is what was released. Not evil but…but something good.” She raised her eyes to his. “Because the storm released your letter into that well, and with it, all the ignorance and prepossession of our past.”
“If you are not careful, Miss Bennet,” said he with that same teasing twinkle she had witnessed on other, albeit rare occasions, “I may begin to think you like me a little. And with that may come an unfortunate upwelling of my vanity which will, alas, reverse your opinion quite handily.”
She resisted the impulse to tease him in reply; instead she reached out and laid her hand atop his.
“I do like you. I like you…very much. And in fact I believe…I believe that my feelings have undergone so material a change that if your affections and wishes were unchanged, I would very much like it if you…”
He appeared not to understand her, his eyes searching her countenance.
“I confess that if you are not inclined, I should entirely understand it, and would not blame you in the least, for I have surely?—”
“My dearest, darling girl.”
His words brought hers to a halt.
“Since the morning I was brought into this parlour with a broken leg and found you avoiding me so determinedly, I have been in a state of…”
He paused, seeming to search for the word.
“Of hope. A hope I considered entirely irrational, entirely at odds with everything you had told me of yourself and your feelings, and yet quite utterly unshakeable. I could not rid myself of it. I did not want to. I shall not say I did not care about the misfortunes which have arisen, because I did and I do. But they could not pierce the quiet joy that the woman I love so very dearly just might be one day able to love me back.”
“I do,” she said with no little difficulty. “I do love you back.”
“My affections and wishes, it goes without saying, are unchanged. I want to marry you.”
She hardly knew how to answer and, without much thought, did something she had never done before. She rose and leant over him, offering a rapid kiss on his lips, a kiss which he received with too much surprise to react.
“Come back,” he ordered when she tried to draw away and so she did, taking great care to avoid his injured leg and concentrate her efforts on his surprisingly soft lips.
When he did at last release her, as she began to return to her seat, she noticed something had fallen behind the sofa. “Oh,” she said, leaning over once again to retrieve it. “I believe this is your book, is it not?”
Afterwards, Elizabeth went to her bedchamber and sat in the dark for quite a long time, replaying the whole of the conversation in her mind with an attention to detail that would have done credit to Mr Darcy himself, and feeling the warmth of it spread outward from her chest until it occupied her entirely.
Engaged to Mr Darcy. How peculiar it was, and yet how right it felt.
In the morning came a letter from his sister.
Darcy read it with his face very still and his jaw tight in the way she now knew was not coldness, but the effortful composure of a man who feels a great deal and has spent a lifetime learning to conceal it.
When he looked up, she was right beside him, and he reached out and caught her hand.
The bad fortune, she thought, will never be completely gone.
Into every life comes vexations and grief, but now he has someone to be with him through it.
“Georgiana,” he told her, “is about to run mad from the dullness of being forced to remain in bed, and insists that I write to Fitzwilliam, who has been, by her report, quite officious and stupidly ignorant to how much improved she is.”
Elizabeth laughed. “I quite like her already. She has spirit.”
The remaining days at Hunsford were not quite the penance she might have imagined.
Lady Catherine, upon learning of the engagement from her nephew—for he insisted on telling her himself—exclaimed immediately that Miss Bennet had turned her parsonage into a brothel.
That made Elizabeth laugh, even as her betrothed’s face darkened into fury.
“I assure you, ma’am,” she said. “There is nothing untoward in any of this. You need not worry that the shades of the parsonage have been polluted.”
With a sniff and a gimlet eye, Lady Catherine launched into a speech of considerable length about the inadvisability of the match and the injustice done to her daughter.
They both bore it in a silence that Lady Catherine mistook for respect, until at length she settled into a grumbling acceptance, on the grounds that at least Miss Bennet was a gentleman’s daughter with a tolerable appearance and sufficient wit to hold an intelligent man’s attention.
Elizabeth considered this no small concession and liked Lady Catherine rather better for it.
Mr Collins was inarticulate with the conflicting pressures of his toadying admiration of Mr Darcy and his astonishment that his cousin had secured such a prize, and ultimately managed only to wring Darcy's hand repeatedly and say ‘well, well, well’ in rapidly ascending notes of wonder.
He thenceforth began to address Mr Darcy as ‘Cousin Darcy’ which only made Darcy wince occasionally.
Charlotte’s reply to the news was to give her a tight embrace. She then said, very quietly into her ear, “I always thought you two were more well suited than you were willing to admit.”