Chapter Twenty-Two
Mr Darcy arrived early at Longbourn the following morning.
Elizabeth knew the identity of their visitor at once, simply from the sound of Mr Darcy’s horse on the gravel.
Without meaning to, she had become familiar with so many small details of the man, from the difference between a social smile and one felt truly, to the quality of his step and the sound of his horse.
There was no reason to believe this visit different from any other, yet her heart was pounding and her mouth was dry.
Even without reason, she believed it was.
When Mrs Hill showed him in, Elizabeth was carefully arranged in the drawing room with her embroidery in her lap, though she could not remember the last time she had taken a stitch.
Her mother was there, and Kitty by the window, and Mary at the pianoforte, working through a passage that had been resisting her for a week; the picture of a morning at Longbourn.
Mr Darcy came in and greeted them with his usual composure, but he looked at Elizabeth first. Elizabeth felt her breath catch upon seeing the difference in that look.
There was something in it she could not immediately classify.
The urgency with which he spoke, however, was not difficult to identify at all.
Though her judgement was sometimes flawed, no one could have criticised Mrs Bennet’s social instincts, and still less her quickness for forwarding a union between any of her daughters and an eligible gentleman. She read the room with keen accuracy.
“Kitty,” she said, rising from her chair with decisive energy and less subtlety, perhaps, than she imagined. “I believe I heard your father call for you.”
“I did not hear anything,” Kitty protested.
“Mary, the pianoforte wants tuning. You must speak to your father about it. Come.”
“It does not want —”
Mrs Bennet would hear no argument. “Now, if you please.” She bustled the girls out of the room with swift determination, brooking no disagreement. Elizabeth watched her do it, feeling an odd mix of mortification for the obviousness of her mother’s designs and gratitude for their results.
Mrs Bennet closed the door behind her with a tact she would never receive full credit for, and the sound of her shepherding Kitty and Mary toward the stairs diminished and was gone.
Suddenly, the room was empty of everyone except Elizabeth and Mr Darcy.
The parlour settled into quiet. Grey winter light filtered weakly through the window.
The embroidery in Elizabeth’s lap lay still, until, with a sudden, impatient gesture, she picked it up and set it hastily down on the side table.
Mr Darcy had remained standing, surely a sign that he did not intend to conduct the visit in the ordinary way. Elizabeth waited in silence. Come what may, she would allow him the first word; she must.
“All night,” he said at last, “I have been trying to determine the correct way to say what I have come to say. I have not found it, but I am here anyway.”
“I should not have thought you so uncertain,” Elizabeth said softly. Her mouth felt strangely dry. “It is a significant departure from your usual manner.”
“It is.” He looked at her with an intensity she had never seen from him before. “My usual manner has not served either of us especially well.”
Elizabeth looked up at him, rapt and speechless.
“Forgive me. I should have said this to you before. And I ask you now to let me say everything before you respond. I have an unfortunate tendency, when I am uncertain of my reception, to stop before I have finished.” He paused and took a breath to steady himself.
“I am fairly uncertain of my reception.”
“I will hear you,” Elizabeth said. “Please.”
He paused a moment longer. “We must have the truth, I think. This engagement was made to protect honour, yours and mine. That much cannot be denied. But there is another, deeper truth, and that is that honour ceased to form the larger part of my reasons for wishing this marriage some time ago.”
Despite her best intentions to let him speak uninterrupted, Elizabeth could not help letting out a small gasp. It seemed impossible that he could intend the meaning she hoped for most, and yet equally impossible that his words could have another interpretation.
“I ought to have told you before,” Mr Darcy went on.
“But I thought it was my duty to protect you from the weight of my feelings. From the obligation they might create. I have maintained a distance I told myself was consideration. I think it was also cowardice dressed in better clothes.” He grimaced at his own words.
Elizabeth studied him. Mr Darcy was watching her with the expression she had come to know as his most unguarded. Gone were the careful control and composure. In their place was an expression she suspected to be entirely sincere.
“I believed you were eager to escape it,” Elizabeth murmured.
“I know,” he said. “I understood that too late. And I understood also that I had given you considerable reason to think so. It was the form my care for you took, mistaken as it was.”
He moved to the chair across from her and sat, looking deeply into her eyes. “Tell me what you believed,” he said. “All of it. I would rather have the accurate version than the comfortable one.”
Elizabeth clasped her hands together and considered this.
“I believed that the engagement was an obligation you were discharging with more grace than I had any right to expect. That the consideration you showed me was what was due to your honour, not due to any more personal feeling.” She paused.
“I heard you speaking to Mr Bingley at Netherfield. I did not intend to overhear you, and I heard more than was fair to either of us.”
Mr Darcy nodded, looking pained. “What did you hear?”
“You spoke of forced smiles, of duty.” Elizabeth spoke as steadily as she could, feeling it was better to say it firmly. “I believed you to be concerned for my sense of obligation. As well as feeling trapped by your own.”
“I was concerned — for you,” he said, leaning forward in the chair. “I believed you regretted the engagement, despite its social utility. Despite the risk.” He looked at her. “Do you regret it?”
Elizabeth looked at the fire for a moment, giving herself a moment to be truly honest with herself. With him. “No,” she said, turning back to him. “Not then. Not for some time before then, if I am honest, which I appear to be this morning.”
The quiet that followed was not the edged silence of recent weeks, but something different. It had the quality of a room in which two people have spoken with complete honesty, doing away with all pretense or navigating around the other, and now must reconcile what lay before them.
“You thought me indifferent,” Mr Darcy said gently.
“I did,” Elizabeth admitted. “I believed you to be a man of honour, attending to all the proper forms of respect, in direct opposition to his own feelings.”
“Anything but that.” He looked at her with the directness that she had, somewhere along the way, stopped finding difficult to receive.
“The proper forms have their own value, but they ceased to be my primary motivation some time ago… I am not entirely certain when I began to feel something for you. Some version of it was present before I had any reason to call it by its correct name.”
Elizabeth thought about the study. The hairpin and the cold floor and his jacket around her shoulders.
The way he had positioned himself between her and the door, not because it would help, but because it was the thing to do.
She thought about all the things she had accumulated and called by other names.
“And if you were to say when it began?” Elizabeth asked softly.
Come what may, she would hear it from his own lips.
Mr Darcy looked down for a moment, hesitating. Then, suddenly, he looked up and met her eyes, and a smile flashed across his lips, at once rueful and glad. “Since the study, if I must own the truth. Or possibly even earlier.”
Elizabeth’s heart raced at such a confession.
It was a long moment before she could steady her breathing enough to reply.
“I cannot claim that my own feelings are of such long duration,” she said at last. “Then, I did not know you. Not truly. But it has been many weeks now since I have known you for the man you are. A man whose honour and judgement have won my deepest admiration.”
Mr Darcy leaned forward slightly. “Elizabeth.”
It was the first time he had addressed her with such familiarity. With such intimacy. Elizabeth felt her cheeks grow warm.
“I would do anything for you,” he said. “That is not merely words for me. If you wished to dissolve the engagement, if you sat here today and told me that was what you wanted, I would find a way to make it as painless as I could. Nothing is without consequences, but if you wished to be free, I believe we could find a way.”
He held her gaze with an earnestness he rarely permitted himself to show. “But you must know that my own wishes are entirely the reverse. I do not now consider our engagement to be an unfortunate accident, nor do I wish it dissolved. I consider it rather as the luckiest chance of my life.”
Elizabeth thought about all the words she had arranged and rearranged over the past weeks into shapes that did not quite say what she meant, and decided that the shapes had cost her enough. “So do I,” she said.
“Then we are,” Mr Darcy said slowly, “perhaps in agreement.”
“We appear to be. It is a somewhat more straightforward position than the one we have been occupying.”
“Considerably.” Something crossed his face that was close to an almost-smile, but arrived, this time, completely. “I should have come to speak with you in October.”
“You had not, in October, spent a sufficient number of evenings watching me be uncharitable about locks.”
“No,” he said. “That was a significant factor.”
Elizabeth felt something loosen in her chest that she understood, in its loosening, had been there for months. Relief quietly replaced her fear and everything else she had been holding.
The morning had moved on without them, the house around them going about its business.
Somewhere upstairs, Lydia could be heard in conversation with Kitty, its volume sufficient to pierce through the walls.
The ordinary noise of Longbourn, indifferent to the fact that the parlour had just become a different room than it had been an hour ago.
Mr Darcy stood. Elizabeth rose with him, and they faced each other across the hearthrug, each overcome with an irresistible smile. Each feeling the weight and the lightness of the truth.
“I believe our private audience cannot last much longer,” Mr Darcy said reluctantly. “Though I confess myself most unwilling to bring our time together to an end.”
“Then perhaps you ought to visit me again tomorrow,” Elizabeth suggested.
Upon making the suggestion, her heart dropped a little, remembering another obligation.
Surely it was only right that Mr Darcy should know all the truth — and that included knowing who was truly responsible for their situation.
With their hearts truly open to one another, it would not do to keep a secret of such importance.
“Tomorrow,” Mr Darcy agreed. “And I will take my leave, for I imagine your family’s patience is growing short.” They laughed together for a long moment, in relief at many weeks of tension eased as much as amusement.
“I should let you know,” Elizabeth said before he turned to leave, “that my mother will require a full account of this visit within approximately two minutes of your departure.”
“What will you tell her?”
She considered. “That we had a very productive conversation about the hymn for the wedding.”
Mr Darcy shook his head, amused. “That will not satisfy her.”
“No. But it will give me a few minutes of peace.”
He smiled fully at her once again. Elizabeth had seen the brilliance of his full smile rarely enough that it still surprised her. She rather thought she might like to see it more often.
“I will call again tomorrow,” he said.
“I will be here tomorrow,” she replied.
She inclined her head, and Mr Darcy bowed and was gone. Elizabeth stood in the parlour with the fire and the grey light and the embroidery she had not touched.
Her mother was in the room within the predicted two minutes. “Well?” Mrs Bennet said, clutching a hand over her heart.
“We discussed the hymn,” Elizabeth said simply.
Her mother looked at her with an assessing eye that resolved, suddenly and surprisingly, into a smile. “You look,” Mrs Bennet said finally, “rather better than you have in some weeks.”
“I am well, Mama,” Elizabeth said. “I am quite well now.”
This time, it was entirely true.