CHAPTER 39 #2
This time she did smile. A little.
“I have always thought so.”
He smiled too, then grew more serious. “Richard must know.”
“Yes. He must.”
“And my uncle.”
“The judge.”
“My father’s younger brother. Edward Darcy. He stood by me when others would not. I cannot let him hear of this by report.”
“No. Of course not.”
There was no hesitation in her answer. She made room for his loyalties as naturally as she arranged tea.
“And any other?” she asked.
He considered.
There were professional men to whom he owed gratitude; an old mentor whose steadiness had kept him from making solitude into bitterness; acquaintances who had helped him with less ceremony than kindness.
But those belonged to a second circle. Judge Darcy first. Richard first. The rest later, when the fact could be given without begging for belief.
“Not immediately,” he said. “There are others I shall write to in time. But my uncle and Richard first.”
“Then we are agreed.”
So simply. As if agreement were not one of the rarest luxuries he had known.
Elizabeth picked up her cup with her free hand, drank, and set it down again.
“There is another matter.”
He had begun to understand that every time Elizabeth said this, his life was about to be rearranged.
“Yes?”
“Your work in my affairs.”
He had expected the subject. That did not make it easier.
“I have been thinking of it,” he said.
“I feared you might.”
He looked at her.
She gave him a look of complete innocence, which he had learned to distrust.
“I must not,” he said carefully, “be placed in a position where it may appear that I entered your confidence professionally and then converted it into personal advantage.”
“No.”
The agreement was immediate.
He paused, almost surprised.
“No?”
“No. You must not. It would be improper, and worse, tiresome.”
“Tiresome?”
“Very. One would have to answer it. I dislike answering nonsense, particularly when it has been made plausible by carelessness.”
He could not help it; he laughed.
She looked pleased, but the levity faded quickly.
“But we must not repair one error by inventing another,” she said. “You have not governed my trust.”
“I have advised upon your leases.”
“You have made certain leases less foolish. That is not nothing. But neither is it my fortune.”
Darcy accepted the correction, though not wholly the comfort.
“Mr. Hartwood governs the law,” she said.
“Mr. Beaker governs the money. Mr. Terling is learning to govern the daily properties under the structure you helped put in place. You have not touched my settlements, capital, investments, or accounts except where a household bill had grown impertinent and I wished for your second judgment.”
“That is still more than enough to be misrepresented.”
“Everything is enough to be misrepresented.”
“Then—”
“Then we shall be clear. The trust business remains with me and my trustees. You will not take it over, enter it, advise upon my settlements, or govern what was arranged to protect my independence.”
“No.”
“But I do not mean to become helpless because I am married. Nor do I mean to pretend that a husband’s judgment is unwelcome merely because it is a husband’s. You may assist me with day-to-day management when I ask it.”
“When you ask it,” he repeated.
“Yes.”
She looked down at their joined hands. Her thumb moved once against his.
“Leases. Reports. Repairs. Mr. Terling’s discoveries. Tradesmen’s bills when they develop ambitions beyond their station. That sort of thing.”
He regarded her for a moment, moved despite himself by the fairness of it.
She was not surrendering power.
She was offering partnership.
There was a difference, and she had made sure he saw it.
“Then I shall help where I am asked,” he said, “and not presume where I am not.”
Elizabeth sat back with visible satisfaction.
“That is an excellent beginning for a husband.”
The word touched him differently every time she used it.
A husband.
Not a visitor. Not adviser. Not a man admitted by necessity and dismissed by propriety. Husband.
“I am relieved to have begun well.”
“You have had several uneven attempts already. Improvement was necessary.”
“I shall endeavour to be grateful for correction.”
“You will have opportunities.”
He looked at her beside him and thought, with a force that almost silenced him, that he wanted every one of them.
Correction. Shared vexation. Reports. Household bills. Sunday calls. Monday trustees. All the small machinery by which a life ceased to be an idea and became a practice.
“And the marriage itself?” she said.
He was not ready for the words, though they had been all around them.
“The marriage itself,” he repeated.
“How soon may it be done without appearing desperate?”
Darcy choked on tea.
Only a little.
Elizabeth’s expression did not alter, but her eyes betrayed her.
“Forgive me,” he said when he had recovered. “I had not expected the matter to be put quite so directly.”
“You must grow accustomed to disappointment.”
“I had hoped to be disappointed less often after acceptance.”
“That was optimistic.”
“It was.”
She smiled, but it softened almost at once.
“A long engagement,” he said slowly, “would give Wickham time.”
It was true.
It was also convenient.
Wickham might speculate, insinuate, turn the tea incident into partiality, Darcy’s visits into pursuit, Elizabeth’s fortune into motive. These were respectable reasons for haste, and Darcy would present them with perfect sincerity.
They were not, unfortunately, the first reasons which had occurred to him.
The first was Elizabeth’s hand in his.
The second was the warmth of her shoulder near his arm.
The third was that she had said our home, and delay had at once become an affront no rational man should be expected to endure.
If Wickham had not been so thoroughly despised, Darcy might almost have thanked him.
“You look very severe,” said Elizabeth.
“I am attempting to think only honourable thoughts.”
Her eyes warmed.
“Are they cooperating?”
“No.”
She looked down at their joined hands.
“Then we had better marry clearly, and quickly.”
His heart gave a hard, glad stroke.
“Clearly, and quickly,” he said.
“Yes. Papers first. Blessings where they can be had. Necessary people told. Then marriage before my mother has time to mistake the arrangements for a public festival.”
“That is a danger?”
“A certainty, if she is given sufficient notice.”
“Then we must not give her sufficient notice.”
Elizabeth’s mouth curved, but the smile did not scatter the feeling between them. If anything, it deepened it, because she looked at him as if she too had begun to understand the strange relief of arranging a future with someone who listened.
He hesitated. “And where—”
She looked at him.
He stopped, though not in time to conceal the question.
“Where?” she asked.
“Where you would wish to live.”
“Here.”
The answer came at once.
He had known it, perhaps. But knowledge did not soften the force of hearing it.
“Elizabeth,” he said carefully, “this is your house.”
She looked at him as if the correction were almost too plain to require speech.
“It will be our home.”
The word struck him in a place too old for speech.
Home.
Not house. Not property. Not rooms. Not shelter granted under conditions. Home.
For years he had possessed rooms: chambers, lodgings, carefully maintained spaces in which a man might work, sleep, and avoid being pitied.
Pemberley had become a wound with walls.
His father’s house had ceased to be a place he could enter without becoming again the son disbelieved and cast out.
Even the rooms he occupied now were only sufficient because he had trained himself to require nothing more.
And Elizabeth, with one sentence, had made room in the world as if it were the most practical arrangement imaginable.
He could not answer.
She saw that too.
Her own face changed, the teasing brightness giving way to something much gentler, though she did not move closer. Perhaps she understood that if she touched him more tenderly just then, Mrs. Doddridge could not be expected to receive a second catastrophe in one evening.
“Portman Square is not merely large enough,” she said, with deliberate lightness.
“It is a properly large London townhouse. Which is to say, it was designed to contain more people, more noise, more visitors, more servants, more inconvenience, and considerably more life than I have lately required of it.”
“It is a very great house.”
“It is an underemployed one.”
His laugh was unsteady.
“I have been using perhaps half of it,” she continued, “and that with a want of imagination Mrs. Marwood would have called wasteful if she had not been responsible for it herself.”
“It may still be said—”
“It will be said whatever we do.”
That silenced him, because it was true.
“I do not mean to despise your chambers,” she added, more gently. “They have done their duty by you. I am grateful to them for that. But you cannot expect me to give up this house to live in your chambers.”
“I would never ask it.”
“Good. For I should refuse you, and it would be tedious to begin married life by correcting you so violently.”
His mouth moved.
“Nor can you expect me to accept that my husband should go on living separately, like a gentleman who is admitted here by appointment and dismissed before dinner.”
His hand tightened.
“No,” he said. “I cannot expect that.”
“Good. I have no intention of marrying you at a distance.”
The words undid him more quietly than a kiss.