Chapter Twelve
Elizabeth next found herself in Mr Darcy’s company on a promenade which had been suggested by Mr Bingley, with all his customary uncomplicated enthusiasm.
The morning was dry, if not precisely warm, and the grounds at Netherfield had a kind of spare, structural beauty even without the ornamentation of leaves and flowers which a more generous time of year would have provided.
Mr Bingley led with Jane, a circumstance which left Elizabeth smiling, if unsurprised.
Miss Darcy remained inside with Mrs Annesley, pleading a need to practice the pianoforte when no one would be disturbed by long stretches of scales and arpeggios.
Miss Bingley protested the need to walk out on so cold a day until, overruled by her brother’s enthusiasm, she could hardly have joined them, and the Hursts mutually declared their disinclination for exercise.
This left Elizabeth and Mr Darcy to fall into step at the rear of the small procession.
With dull surprise, Elizabeth realised that walking with Mr Darcy had already become familiar to her.
Once a stranger, and one whose manners she could not like, he had already become something else to her.
Even as she could not quite define what that might be, she felt the difference.
For a time, they walked in comfortable silence.
That, too, was a relatively recent development.
Silence in Mr Darcy’s company had not always been comfortable.
In the first, shocked days of their unwanted engagement, it had been the silence of two people managing their proximity with care, each conscious of the other and the watchful eyes of society.
Now it was something else. Not intimacy, perhaps, but a quiet familiarity.
“It appears,” Elizabeth said at last, “that we have grown quite respectable in our habits.”
Darcy glanced at her. “Respectable?”
“Yes. Regular promenades. Civil conversation. An absence of scandalous disagreements. I begin to suspect we are becoming dull.”
He chuckled. “I should regret that exceedingly.”
“You surprise me.”
“Do I?”
“Indeed. I had always imagined you a great admirer of dullness.”
Mr Darcy raised an eyebrow. “You mistake me, Miss Elizabeth. I admire order, not dullness.”
“And you believe the two are entirely distinct?”
“Perfectly.”
Elizabeth smiled a challenge at him. “Then perhaps you may instruct me in the difference.”
Mr Darcy considered this with an air of seriousness that edged into jest, an expression of humour she would not have looked for in him. “Order is when matters proceed with intention,” he said at last. “Dullness is when they proceed without imagination.”
“Then I fear I must plead guilty to promoting disorder. Imagination is rarely obedient,” Elizabeth said.
“I have noticed.”
She glanced at him with mock suspicion. “Have you?”
“Yes. You possess a talent for improving situations that might otherwise pass from order into insignificance.”
Elizabeth laughed lightly. “If by improvement you mean interference, I shall not deny it.”
“I did not say interference.”
“You thought it.”
“I merely observed it,” Mr Darcy protested with a smile.
They continued walking. Elizabeth found herself thinking that conversation with him required surprisingly little effort. He responded to wit with wit, not wounded pride. It was curiously agreeable.
Mr Bingley’s good-natured chuckle carried back to them from the front of the party, followed by Jane’s gentle laughter in response. Elizabeth glanced toward them, feeling her heart lift with a simple, uncomplicated hope.
“They are well matched,” Mr Darcy said quietly.
“I believe so,” Elizabeth replied. “I should like to see Jane matched to a gentleman as sensible and principled as she is herself. And the more I come to see of Mr Bingley, the more I think him everything that might make her truly happy. However such happiness has come to pass.”
Elizabeth had not intended to say the last part. She bit her lip at what she had betrayed, but it was already too late. Mr Darcy had heard and understood it, though he responded instead to the larger substance of her remark.
“I am glad of it also,” Mr Darcy said. “Bingley deserves someone who sees him clearly. Many people see only the agreeableness.”
“And miss the substance underneath.”
“Yes.”
She considered this, and his ready acceptance of it. “Do you find that often? That people are seen only by their surface?”
He glanced at her. “I find it common enough to be unremarkable.”
“And do you include yourself in that?”
The gravel crunched underfoot, and the barren tree limbs reached across the drive. Somewhere in the middle distance, a wood pigeon made its repetitive complaint.
“I think that the surface I present is not always an accurate representation of what is underneath it. Whether that is my fault or the observer’s is a question I have not entirely resolved,” Mr Darcy said thoughtfully.
It was the most direct thing he had said to her in weeks, possibly ever, and she turned it over with the attention it deserved.
Elizabeth had been thinking about this, in fact, since the supper at Netherfield Park when he had silenced Mrs Pearce.
It was the latest vignette in her collection of him, fitting alongside the way he spoke to his sister, his steadiness in the study, and the things he said when he was not being careful.
What she had assembled was a picture that differed from her original sketch in almost every respect.
She had thought Mr Darcy proud. She still thought him proud, in the way that people who care deeply about doing right are sometimes proud.
But what she had taken for contempt, she now understood was something else.
He moved through social situations with the tension of a man who is perpetually aware of how things can go wrong, who is watching the angles, accounting for the consequences, always mindful of potential damage.
What he feared, she had concluded, was harm. Only, not to himself. That was the part she had missed entirely.
Elizabeth thought about the study, and how his first instinct had been to protect her reputation rather than manage his own.
She thought about the engagement, and the deliberate carefulness of everything he had offered her since.
She thought about Georgiana Darcy, watched over with a carefulness that could not be due to a guardian’s pride, but only to a brother’s love.
All things considered, it was the picture of someone exceedingly careful. She was not sure what to do with the revision of her opinion of him.
They had fallen slightly further behind Jane and Mr Bingley, who had rounded a bend in the path and were temporarily out of sight.
The path here ran along a low ridge with the park falling gently away to the left, the grass pale and stiff with the last of the frost that had not yet released itself to the morning.
It was quiet. The air was clean and cold.
Elizabeth had her hands in her muff and was feeling, with some surprise, that she did not want to be anywhere else.
She was watching him obliquely, in the way she had learned to watch people when she wanted to see them rather than the performance they were giving.
Mr Darcy was looking at the park, or at Mr Bingley and Jane visible now again at the path’s next turn, and his expression had the quality she occasionally caught in it when he thought himself unobserved.
He looked burdened, Elizabeth thought suddenly. He looked like someone carrying something that had been heavy for a long time. Someone who had stopped noticing the weight because it had become simply the condition of moving through the world.
She wanted suddenly to ask him what it was, but did not. Whatever surprising camaraderie might exist between them, Elizabeth did not think she had the right.
They turned along a narrower section of the path, where the gravel thinned beneath a scattering of fallen leaves.
Concealed beneath them was the edge of a tree root that had been edging its way to the surface for several winters.
Though it was now half a hand’s breadth through the gravel, it was almost impossible to spot, and Elizabeth did not.
Her boot caught it squarely, and she went forward with sudden, irreversible momentum.
Mr Darcy’s hand was at her arm before she had fully registered the stumble, and then she was upright, her balance restored, with his hand still on her arm and their faces, by the mechanics of the catch, closer than they had been since the study.
“Thank you,” she said, a little breathless.
“Are you hurt?”
“Only my dignity.”
He did not let go of her arm immediately. She felt his grip with the unhelpful acuity she had developed in recent weeks for any physical proximity between them. Elizabeth was very aware of the warmth of his fingers through the fabric of her sleeve.
Still, he did not release her. Instead, his grip shifted slightly as he helped her regain her footing fully. His hand slid down to hers, steadying her palm for just a moment longer than strict propriety required.
Elizabeth looked down. She could not help it. His hand was warm, strong, and very much still there.
Mr Darcy appeared suddenly aware of the same fact. He released her at once. “My apologies.”
“No apology is required.” She adjusted her muff, and they began walking again, carefully maintaining the space between them.
Elizabeth said nothing. Mr Darcy said nothing.
The path continued through the grounds, and the wood pigeon resumed its commentary.
Mr Bingley’s voice reached them from the front of the party, and Elizabeth looked at the bare trees and thought about what it meant that the engagement felt significantly less like a prison than it had when she had first agreed to become Mr Darcy’s wife.
A dangerous comfort. The phrase arrived unbidden in her mind, something at once true and inexplicable, and refused to leave.
She had not chosen this. The engagement had not been fairly made, and the question of what it was and what it might become was a question she was not yet equipped to answer.
But Elizabeth was aware, walking in the pale winter light with Mr Darcy’s footsteps beside hers, that the honest answer to the question of what she wanted was different now than it had been at the outset.
There was no more time to consider the notion, however. Only a few paces farther on, the path rejoined the main drive. Jane and Mr Bingley were waiting for them there with a remark about the cold, and they all agreed to return to the house.
They were back inside within twenty minutes, shedding coats in the entrance hall, and Elizabeth had her composure in order by the time they reached the drawing room.
Miss Bingley was by the window. She seemed to have been watching them, and she turned when the party came in with an air of bright inquisitiveness.
As they so often did, her eyes went first to Mr Darcy. Then to Elizabeth. Then back to Mr Darcy with a speed that the width of the room might have concealed from anyone who was not watching her watch them.
Elizabeth saw it, but was not sure what it might mean.
Whatever Miss Bingley found in the survey, she did not seem to like it. The brightness of her expression did not diminish. It was, if anything, fuller, more deliberate, in the way of something reinforced against pressure.
“I have you have all had a pleasant walk,” Miss Bingley said, her smile carefully charming. “But I confess I have been quite worried for you! Was it not dreadfully cold on the ridge?”
“Quite brisk,” said Mr Bingley happily, moving toward the fire.
“Yes, it was rather invigorating,” said Elizabeth. She unwound her scarf and crossed to where Jane was sitting to tell her about the view, and was aware without looking that Miss Bingley’s eyes followed her across the room.
She sat with Jane and talked about the park, and was warm, and was comfortable, and thought about nothing of significance with a determination she recognised, even as she practised it, as its own kind of answer.