CHAPTER 39
A Proper Order of Happiness
Fresh tea had improved the room without restoring it to innocence.
Darcy sat with a new cup in his hand and a composure so newly assembled that he could not trust it not to show the joins.
The old cup, cold and neglected, had been removed.
Bread and butter had reappeared. Mrs. Doddridge had received the intelligence of their engagement with no more disturbance than if Elizabeth had announced a change in the fish-course, and then withdrawn, leaving the future properly acknowledged and entirely unassisted.
Elizabeth did not return to the chair opposite him.
She sat beside him.
Not improperly. Not in any way Mrs. Doddridge could not have regularised by entering with more bread and butter.
But near enough that the space between them had ceased to be a defence, and Darcy found himself in the alarming position of being required to drink tea while her sleeve almost touched his.
Her colour had not wholly faded.
Neither, he suspected, had his.
She poured for herself with admirable steadiness, as if her mouth had not been beneath his only minutes before; as if he had not, with every intention of caution, discovered that caution became a very poor instrument once Elizabeth Bennet gave permission.
He took a mouthful of tea because she looked at him.
“There,” said she softly. “You are capable of obedience.”
“To you,” he said, before he had considered whether the answer was safe.
Her fingers paused on the saucer.
“Then I must be careful what I command.”
His hand tightened once on the cup.
He had thought happiness, if it ever came, would be light. Instead it possessed weight, warmth, astonishment, and an alarming tendency to make him wish to take her hand whenever she looked down.
Her hand lay on the sofa between them.
He looked at it once too long.
Elizabeth, without turning her head, moved her fingers the smallest possible distance.
Darcy took them.
After that, the business of marriage became both easier and very much worse.
The room had altered because she had accepted him. Nothing else had changed. The same fire burned; the same furniture stood in its proper order; the same windows held the last of the afternoon light, now lowering toward evening. Yet the room no longer contained possibility.
It contained fact.
Elizabeth Bennet had agreed to marry him.
Darcy held her hand and tried to remember that a man might be grateful without immediately becoming foolish.
Elizabeth watched him for a moment with a softness that would have undone him entirely had not a gleam of practical purpose entered her eye.
“We must decide who is to be told.”
He looked up.
“Now?”
“If we delay until I am less happy, I may become less efficient.”
“Then we must not delay.”
She looked at him quickly.
“For the sake of efficiency?”
“For mine.”
The answer altered her. Not greatly; she was still Elizabeth, still composed enough to pour tea and order a future. But her fingers shifted within his, and for one moment she looked less like a woman making arrangements than one who had been overtaken by them.
“Then,” she said, more quietly, “we shall preserve us both.”
The words were not large. They did not need to be.
“The engagement must not be generally known yet,” she continued.
“No.”
The answer came too quickly. She heard it.
“Not because it is to be hidden.”
“No. Because it must be protected.”
That pleased her; he saw it in the slight inclination of her head.
“Exactly. Truth should travel in a proper order. If it begins in the wrong drawing room, it may arrive everywhere else dressed as nonsense.”
“Or malice,” he said.
Her fingers shifted in his.
“Yes. Mr. Wickham has already been given reason to dislike me.”
“He needed very little.”
“He chose the wrong tea.”
“He chose the wrong woman.”
The words came out more directly than he had intended. Elizabeth’s lashes lowered for one moment, then rose.
“You say that as if you are pleased with me.”
“I am more than pleased.”
She looked down, and for once did not answer quickly.
That silence did more to unsettle him than wit could have done. He could feel her hand in his, warm and living, and the quiet between them seemed to acknowledge everything they were still not saying because saying it would make the evening impossible to survive.
Then Elizabeth drew breath, as if she too had remembered that happiness required a shape before it could safely be borne.
“Mr. Hartwood and Mr. Beaker must be seen first,” she said. “Not tomorrow, unfortunately, because tomorrow is Sunday, and even happiness must respect office hours. But Monday.”
“Monday,” he repeated.
“My father’s consent is not, strictly speaking, necessary.”
Darcy stilled.
She said it plainly, but not lightly. He understood at once that the sentence had been polished by long acquaintance with its own consequences.
“No?”
“No. Mrs. Marwood was my legal guardian, and her will left trustees to stand where caution was still required. My father has not governed my person, fortune, or household since I was six years old. I am not yet one-and-twenty, so the trustees must be satisfied; but Longbourn is not the legal gate.”
The legal gate.
How precisely she spoke when pain stood near and must be kept from taking up the whole room.
Darcy looked at her. He saw the woman beside him — rich, independent, composed, mistress of this house in every way that mattered — and behind her, impossibly, the child removed from Longbourn because another woman had seen that she needed room.
It was freedom.
It was also an abandonment arranged into law.
“I understand,” he said.
“I thought you would.”
He did. More than she could know, or perhaps not more; Elizabeth had an inconvenient talent for knowing precisely as much as one hoped to conceal.
The words that followed cost him some effort.
“Would you wish for his blessing, though?”
She did not answer at once.
That told him he had reached the right place.
The fire shifted softly. Somewhere beyond the room a servant passed, then all was quiet again. Elizabeth looked toward the tea tray as if the sugar basin had become an object of deep consideration.
“I do not know,” she said at last. “I should like him to wish me happy. I am not certain he knows how to do it without first being amused.”
Darcy’s chest tightened.
A careless father might wound by indifference almost as surely as a severe one by judgment. He had not considered that truth often enough. Perhaps he had not wished to consider any variety of paternal injury except his own.
“He may surprise you,” he said.
“He may.”
“You do not expect it.”
“No.”
Nor did he.
Yet he could not bear the thought of asking her to abandon even a hope so small.
“Then we shall ask it in such a way,” he said, “that gives him the opportunity to be kind, but not the power to injure.”
Elizabeth looked up.
For one instant her whole face changed. Not with laughter. Not with teasing. With an expression so open and grateful that he almost looked away.
Almost.
He did not. He was to marry her; cowardice before her feeling would be a poor beginning.
“That,” she said quietly, “is very well put.”
“I have had cause to distinguish between power and kindness.”
“Yes,” she said. “So have I.”
The words stood between them, not as sorrow, but as terms agreed upon.
Then Elizabeth returned, with visible effort, to the order of happiness.
“Jane must know soon,” she said. “I cannot keep such happiness from her longer than necessity requires.”
“No.”
“And Mr. Bingley will be happy because Jane is happy.”
“A sound principle with him.”
“One of his best.”
The small smile that passed between them did not disturb the tenderness of the matter. Jane was not merely the next name on a list. Darcy understood that. She was the sister of Elizabeth’s heart; the person to whom happiness must travel as soon as propriety allowed it.
“And Longbourn?” he asked.
“Later.”
The answer came without hesitation.
Darcy waited.
“My mother must not be told while there remains anything soft enough for her to seize. She will mean well at intervals, but intervals are not a foundation on which to build peace.”
“No.”
“My father will hear with her, unless I decide otherwise. I am not yet generous enough to separate them for his convenience.”
There was pain beneath that too, though held so neatly that another man might have mistaken it for wit alone.
“And the Gardiners?” he asked.
Elizabeth’s face altered again.
Not rejection. Not warmth. Something more careful.
“My aunt and uncle must be told,” she said. “But not first.”
He had expected them to stand high in the order. The hesitation caught him, and with it came memory: Mrs. Gardiner of Lambton; Derbyshire accounts; old reports moving quietly through affectionate caution.
“She warned you against me,” he said.
“She warned me of what she had heard.”
“That is not the same thing.”
“No,” said Elizabeth. “It is not. She meant to protect me. I know that. I am not angry with protection honestly given. But neither do I feel inclined to place my happiness immediately beneath the same examination.”
The sentence struck him with a strange force.
“You need not protect me from your relations.”
“I know.”
“Elizabeth—”
“I know,” she repeated, and this time there was such calm certainty in it that he stopped. “But I may choose not to make you stand trial before them on the first day of our engagement.”
His hand closed more tightly around hers.
It had been years since anyone had thought first of what he should not be made to endure.
“Not today,” she said. “Today I should like to be glad of you before I am required to defend being glad.”
For a moment he could not answer.
“Thank you,” he said at last.
She seemed dissatisfied with the smallness of the phrase but allowed it to stand.
“Other friends may be told later,” she continued. “Miss Hall, Mrs. Hall, Mrs. Belwick, Mrs. Pratt — all those who have an interest in me and a better claim than curiosity. But not until the first business is settled.”
“That is wise.”
“It is also less exhausting.”
“A superior consideration.”