CHAPTER 10
Peace Was Not to Be Expected
Mr. Darcy went to chambers the morning after the rescue with the firm intention of being ordinary again.
He had, by daylight and after sleep, reduced the previous afternoon to what seemed its manageable proportions: a London accident, a disagreeable little dog, a grateful young gentlewoman of singular manners, a cup of very good tea, and one card left behind through a combination of civility and surprise which need never be repeated.
The thing had been odd, certainly. It had also, he assured himself while turning into the lane, been concluded.
This was the first error of the day.
The second was believing that professional life, by being professional, possessed any power at all to defend itself against Miss Elizabeth Bennet.
Chambers had the ordinary aspect upon his arrival: clerks already at work, papers laid out in waiting order, one client expected and another hoped not to appear, dust nowhere visible except in moral quantities, and the air of labour properly begun before pleasure had any right to intrude itself.
Darcy found this immediately soothing. Men were at desks.
Ink existed. Nothing in law, he thought, if treated with sufficient attention, could possibly result in a basket.
He was in the middle of correcting a copy — and a bad copy at that — when his clerk, Mr. Jenkins, knocked with an expression which at once displeased him.
“What is it?”
“A delivery, sir.”
“Then let it be delivered.”
“Yes, sir. It already has been.”
There was a slight pause.
Darcy looked up.
Jenkins, a man of very correct habits and a naturally expressionless face, was not by constitution equal to mystery. Something had nevertheless disturbed the line of his mouth into the faintest movement of suppressed astonishment.
“What sort of delivery?”
Jenkins shifted.
“A basket, sir.”
Darcy set down the paper.
“A basket.”
“Yes, sir.”
There are some repetitions by which a man hopes reality may improve under restatement. This was not one of them.
“For whom?”
“For you, sir.”
Another pause.
Jenkins then added, because the thing had perhaps seemed incomplete without context, “From a lady.”
Darcy did not move for a moment.
Then, with a calm he did not feel, he said, “Bring it in.”
Jenkins obeyed.
The basket, when it appeared, was not merely a basket.
It was a statement. It was generous, orderly, substantial, and of such excellent household origin that it managed to look both practical and alarming.
There were biscuits, preserves, a small round of cheese, tea of a quality no man sent casually to another, fruit, little savoury pies, and other comforts too well chosen to be accidental.
It did not resemble flirtation.
Flirtation would have been easier to refuse.
It resembled female administration: food, humour, gratitude, and the quiet assumption that he might be cared for without being asked whether he wanted it.
This, Darcy thought, was somehow worse.
There was a note.
He knew, before opening it, whose hand it must be. Not because he had seen it before, but because no other writer seemed equal to the tone already implied by the contents of the basket.
He unfolded it.
Miss Bennet has been informed upon excellent authority that gentlemen are always hungry, particularly after exertions on behalf of the undeserving. Lord Pomington remains alive, warm, unrepentant, and under instructions not to pursue rats again for at least a fortnight.
Darcy read it twice.
He was aware, while doing so, that Jenkins had not yet quite withdrawn and that one of the junior clerks beyond the half-open door had become invested in a ledger with a degree of concentration no ledger had ever naturally inspired.
“Thank the servant,” said Darcy, still looking at the note, “and see that he is properly dealt with.”
“Yes, sir.”
Jenkins went.
The junior clerk bent lower over the ledger.
Darcy remained where he was.
He had, the previous day, rescued a dog. He had not expected to become beneficiary to its gratitude in edible form.
Nor had he expected the gratitude to be phrased like that.
He looked again at the line concerning gentlemen always being hungry, and though he did not smile, he was uncomfortably near it. The note had that same quality she herself possessed: directness, wit, and an alarming conviction that ordinary forms existed only so long as they served use.
He folded it carefully and set it aside, not because it deserved care, but because it plainly belonged to a species of correspondence that resisted casual handling.
He then did the only thing left to a rational man.
He tried to work.
For almost an hour he succeeded.
The basket was removed to a side table. Jenkins, once restored to duties less involving female mystery, returned to his proper level of usefulness. Two letters were answered. One appointment was survived. The thing remained, undoubtedly singular, but not fatal to the profession.
At noon, Darcy looked at the basket again.
This was unwise, but he had not yet admitted it.
“The savoury pies may be taken to the clerks,” he said.
Jenkins, who had come in with a file and found himself unexpectedly addressed upon matters of food, paused.
“Yes, sir.”
“Not all of them.”
“No, sir.”
“And the biscuits.”
“All the biscuits, sir?”
Darcy looked at him.
Jenkins bowed slightly. “No, sir.”
The arrangement was made. It was, Darcy told himself, a practical solution. A basket of such magnitude could not sit untouched in chambers without becoming ridiculous, and if Miss Bennet’s household had intended nourishment, nourishment might as well be distributed where it would do good.
He kept the tea.
He was not certain why.
That evening, in his rooms, he opened the basket again with more curiosity than principle and sampled, first, the biscuits he had not sent out, and then one of the preserves.
The tea, too, was excellent. He sat for some moments in the quiet little room, with the note beside him, and admitted at last that Miss Bennet’s household possessed a very good palate.
This was an unfair advantage in any woman conducting an irregular campaign.
The next morning he returned to chambers with the relief of a man who has survived one singularity and need not, by all ordinary rules, be made to survive it twice.
This was a fresh error.
It was near noon when Jenkins knocked again.
Darcy, who had now learned caution, did not immediately invite whatever had come in. He laid down his pen with deliberation before saying, “Yes?”
“There are two gentlemen to see you, sir.”
“Then they may be shown in when I am free.”
“Yes, sir. They are Mr. Hartwood and Mr. Beaker.”
That altered it.
Darcy knew the names at once.
Not personally, but by professional reputation.
They belonged to that older, steadier world of respectability which does not advertise itself because it has no need.
Men trusted by families of standing. Men who did not involve themselves lightly in nonsense.
Men whose appearance at his chambers could not be dismissed as accident.
“Show them in now,” said Darcy.
Jenkins did so.
Mr. Beaker was long, thin, black-coated, and so entirely shaped by exact habit that he seemed less to enter a room than to align with it.
Mr. Hartwood, shorter and rounder, brought with him the warmer gravity of a man more visibly human but no less secure in business for being so.
Darcy received them with the degree of civility due to their years, standing, and unexplained presence.
After the first formalities had been exchanged, Hartwood looked round the room.
Not rudely. That would have been easier to resent.
His glance moved, with apparent idleness, from the shelves to the clerk’s desk, from Jenkins’s manner to the tied papers and the clean sill beneath the window.
Beaker looked less idly and missed less.
He observed the labels on the bundles, the separation of correspondence from drafts, the inkstand placed where the hand expected it, the client chairs not new but sound, the carpet plain enough not to boast and sound enough not to apologize.
The chambers were not handsome, and no one who knew the cost of independence expected them to be.
They were modest, clean, and intelligently kept.
The furniture had been chosen, or at least preserved, by a man who understood that economy need not become meanness. Nothing boasted. Nothing apologized.
Darcy had the sensation, not uncommon before certain judges, of being examined in parts: office, clerks, coat, temper, paper, prospects.
It was not an insulting examination.
That made it worse.
“You keep a quiet office,” said Hartwood.
“I prefer one.”
“So do clients who mean business.”
Beaker touched one finger to the edge of a labelled bundle, not moving it.
“Your own system?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
It was not praise. It was worse: evidence received. Darcy found, to his annoyance, that he was not indifferent to it.
Hartwood smiled faintly, as if he had seen all the irritation and approved of that too.
“Mr. Darcy,” said he, “we will not steal more of your time than may be useful to all parties.”
“That is already a relief,” said Darcy.
Hartwood’s smile deepened by the smallest degree. Beaker’s did not.
The younger clerk in the outer office, who had no business listening and therefore certainly was, dropped something very small and metallic.
Beaker spoke.
“You were with Brentwood.”
“I was.”
“And are now in practice independently.”
“Yes.”
“Recently,” said Beaker.
“Recently enough that I am not yet tired of being asked whether I regret it.”
Hartwood gave a low laugh.
“And do you?”
“No.”
“Excellent,” said Hartwood. “Regret is a poor clerk.”
Beaker did not appear to have come for aphorisms.
“Brentwood spoke well of you.”
Darcy said nothing.
Praise from Brentwood, arriving posthumously by men like these, was not something to be met by false modesty. Nor did he yet know where the conversation was leading.
“Miss Bennet has mentioned your name,” said Hartwood.
“So I had supposed.”