CHAPTER 29 #3
“Excellent. Continue not proposing it.”
Despite everything, Darcy laughed once, shortly.
Richard smiled, but the smile faded quickly. “Tell her enough, Darcy. Not all at once, perhaps. But enough.”
“I will.”
Richard nodded, satisfied for the moment, and left him.
The room after his departure seemed sharper, as if the air had been cut and not mended. Darcy stood for some time without moving. Then he took Miss Bennet’s invitation and placed it inside his coat, where no clerk, client, cousin, or accidental wind could disturb it.
He did not return easily to work.
The next day brought rain, then a pale, uneasy clearing toward evening.
Darcy went through his obligations with the discipline of long practice.
He corrected two agreements, answered a question about a boundary wall, refused an absurd clause, and listened while Jenkins reported that Mr. Terling had sent a note regarding Manchester Square, a tenant’s awning, and one tradesman who had discovered new enthusiasm for overcharging now that repairs were regular.
These matters should have steadied him.
They did not.
At his rooms that night, Mrs. Naylor had left his linen aired and his coat brushed with the silent competence of a woman who never asked questions she could answer by observation.
Darcy found the coat laid out, his gloves set beside it, his cravat cloths folded, his shoes polished to a severity that suggested Mrs. Naylor had formed opinions about the occasion and had chosen to express them in leather.
He stood before the small looking glass and regarded himself with no great satisfaction.
The coat would do. It was well cut, though not new. The linen was good. The gloves were clean. His watch was plain. His hair, at least, could be made to obey for the first hour of the evening, after which weather, heat, or Miss Bennet’s conversation might reasonably be blamed for any failure.
He was not ashamed of economy. He had lived too long by exactness to despise it.
But he was conscious of every sign by which another man might read him.
Miss Bennet’s house did not display wealth crudely.
It did not need to. Its power lay in order: servants who knew what they were doing, rooms made ready before need declared itself, fires at the proper hour, linen without apology, a carriage that arrived because it had been summoned, not begged.
The old Marwood fortune did not shout from the walls.
It was worse than that. It stood everywhere with quiet confidence.
Darcy had no fear of appearing poor.
He feared appearing eager.
There were men who entered a rich woman’s house and began, at once, to take comfort in its abundance. Wickham did it as naturally as breathing. Whatever could be used became, in Wickham’s hands, proof that it had been meant for him.
Darcy would not resemble him in that.
Not in substance. Not in appearance. Not in the smallest careless gesture.
He laid the invitation on the narrow table, but it was the added line that returned to him.
The room has been persuaded into hospitality.
He remembered her in the dining room, one hand upon the back of a chair, looking at him with mischief first and then with that stillness which stripped him of more defence than any question could have done.
He remembered saying, I did not speak of your friends.
He remembered the instant after, when he had understood what he had admitted.
He remembered her studying him.
Not triumphantly. Not coyly. Carefully.
Miss Bennet’s attention was a formidable thing. It did not flatter. It made cowardice difficult.
The following afternoon, before dressing, he took out a sheet of paper and began a note that he did not finish.
Miss Bennet—
No.
Madam—
Worse.
He set the pen down.
What warning could be trusted to paper when paper had already ruined him once? A letter might be intercepted, misread, preserved, produced. Ink was patient in the service of malice. Speech, at least, could answer her questions — and stop when it began to injure.
He would speak to her soon.
Not before her guests. Not in a hurried corner like a man smuggling scandal into her house. But soon.
Friendship required that much. Love required more. He was not permitted love, and so he would begin with the debt he was allowed to pay.
By six, the rain had ceased. The streets shone under the lamps, black and silver in the ruts, with the wheels of passing carriages sending up a wet sound that seemed louder than usual.
Darcy dressed carefully. He refused to hurry.
He refused, with less success, to think of claret silk, though he had no reason to know what Miss Bennet would wear.
At half past six, he left his rooms.
The drive to Portman Square was not long. It had never felt shorter, nor less merciful.
London passed in fragments: lamps, wet stone, a woman stepping over a puddle with her skirt lifted, a boy calling papers, the glow from a pastry cook’s window, the dull roll of wheels ahead. Ordinary life persisted with its usual indifference to private extremity.
Darcy sat with one gloved hand closed over the other and considered, not for the first time, that self-command was a much-praised virtue by people who had never needed it badly.
The carriage turned into Portman Square.
There was light in Miss Bennet’s windows.
Not too much. Nothing gaudy. But enough to make the house look awake in a way it had not on the day he first crossed its threshold with a trembling dog and wet gloves.
Then it had been warm, but quiet; governed, but half-suspended; a house still arranged around absence.
Tonight it stood ready to receive whatever world Elizabeth Bennet had chosen to admit.
He did not know whom she had invited.
Mrs. Bingley, perhaps, if she and her husband were in town; the sister for whom bluebells and silver had been chosen could hardly be absent from Elizabeth’s first dinner if London made it possible.
The Gardiners might be there. Miss Hall, or some part of that severe and intelligent circle which had belonged first to Mrs. Marwood and now, by degrees, to Miss Bennet.
Hartwood and Beaker had dined before on business.
Mr. Terling might be included if the evening leaned toward property, though Darcy suspected this dinner was meant to lean toward life.
Whoever came, he understood the significance.
Miss Bennet had not asked him into an errand, an inspection, or a consultation. She had asked him to dinner.
The carriage stopped.
For one moment he remained seated.
He thought of Wickham: gaming rooms, borrowed consequence, Darcy House and Pemberley spent as if they were his natural purse.
He thought of Mrs. Wickham’s letter moving through old blood toward Lord Matlock, softening ambition into maternal anxiety.
He thought of Wickham Senior in the steward’s office, of his father alive and still believing the men who had taught him how to disbelieve his son.
He thought of every false thing that had once been made plausible because the right people had wished to believe it.
Then he thought of Miss Bennet’s dining room, persuaded at last into hospitality.
He stepped down.
At the foot of the stairs, with the lamps lit above him and the sound of voices already warm beyond the door, Darcy understood that entering her house was not the difficult part.
The difficult part was deserving the welcome.
He lifted his hand and knocked.