CHAPTER 68
Family Feeling
By the middle of July, Fitzwilliam Darcy had learned that an estate could be injured by competence almost as effectively as by neglect.
John Wickham had not been a bad steward. That was the trouble. A bad steward would have left obvious disorder behind him: unpaid men, angry tenants, broken fences, leases forgotten, accounts so confused that any sensible master must have looked twice. John Wickham had left no such convenient ruin.
Pemberley ran.
Its rents came in. Its fields were worked.
Its tenants knew where to send their questions.
Its tradesmen knew whose word opened credit.
Its servants knew which requests passed from house to estate and which died before reaching the master.
For years, all those answers had passed through John Wickham.
Now John Wickham was gone, and the estate had to discover that habit was not authority.
The fraud had ceased to be discovery and had become continuity.
Mr. Latham’s clerks still worked over the old accounts, separating theft from custom, custom from negligence, and negligence from the ordinary confusion of a large estate.
But Fitzwilliam’s daily labour had altered.
He was less often naming past wrongs than answering present questions.
Which payments could Bell approve? Which tenant indulgences were justice, and which merely Wickham’s convenience?
What required his father’s signature, and what could be done in the name of uninterrupted management?
Pemberley did not need rescuing from collapse.
It needed to be taught that John Wickham was no longer the road by which everything moved.
The estate was alive under July. The fields stood high beneath a hard blue sky.
Grass lay cut in long pale sweeps, and the smell of it entered the house whether the windows were open or not.
Carts crossed the yard with the grave importance of carts in harvest weather.
Men came to the side door with hats in their hands and matters too urgent to wait until morning, though most of them had been waiting since May.
Pemberley had ceased to feel like an invalid’s house.
It had not become peaceful.
Fitzwilliam had once believed that concealment required secrecy. He now understood that a respectable household could know a fact in perfect union while every member of it remained apparently innocent.
No one had been told.
That was the phrase by which the fiction was preserved.
No one had been told; therefore Mrs. Reynolds opened the cooler sitting rooms by accident.
No one had been told; therefore Cook sent up plain dishes at times when Elizabeth had not asked for them.
No one had been told; therefore Evans altered a morning gown with the composed expression of a woman repairing a cuff, and Mrs. Doddridge occupied chairs beside Elizabeth just when visitors, accounts, or Georgiana’s anxious gratitude threatened to keep her standing too long.
Mr. Grant, who certainly had not been told, had begun inquiring after Mrs. Darcy’s general fatigue in a manner so bland that Fitzwilliam longed to dislike him for it.
Even Kitty Bennet, who knew nothing and suspected everything with equal uncertainty, had taken to offering Elizabeth fans as if they were improvements in conversation.
Georgiana was different. She looked at Elizabeth sometimes with a softness that made Fitzwilliam’s chest ache.
She did not ask. She had learned, too young, that safety could be lost by forcing a truth before it was ready.
But she brought Elizabeth music instead of questions, and she no longer looked frightened when Elizabeth left a room.
That, Fitzwilliam thought, was one of Pemberley’s few recent victories.
Elizabeth bore the conspiracy badly.
She disliked being managed even when no one admitted to managing her.
She resented chairs set too conveniently, windows opened too early, trays altered too silently, and husbands who removed estate men before she had consented to be preserved from them.
Her displeasure might have been more convincing if she had not been tired by noon and warmer than the room by eleven.
He did not tell her that.
A husband might be devoted and still wish to live.
The express came on a morning when he had just sent Bell away with instructions concerning two hay payments, three routine repairs, and one tenant petition which Bell believed Mr. Wickham would have answered without reference to anyone.
“He may have done,” Fitzwilliam had said. “That is no longer useful.”
Bell had looked as if he approved the principle and regretted the day.
Elizabeth sat near the open window, a letter from Jane in her lap and a glass of water untouched beside her. The light made her look both more herself and more altered: bright-eyed, impatient, too warm, and determined to prove by posture what colour and fatigue had already contradicted.
Mrs. Reynolds entered with the note.
“For you, sir.”
Richard’s hand was on the direction.
Fitzwilliam broke the seal with the first true misgiving of the day.
He read it once, then again.
By the second reading, Elizabeth had set Jane’s letter aside. He gave her the sheet without being asked.
Richard had written in haste.
Darcy,
Mrs. Wickham has been active for several weeks.
She has called where she could in town, written where she could not be admitted, and wept where tears would answer better than particulars.
She has made a progress of injury: Matlock House, such cousins as still receive Fenwick claims with more feeling than judgment, and Rosings itself.
Lady Catherine has now taken her up as a wronged connexion of Lady Anne’s blood, which is to say of her own and my father’s also.
The story told is that you and Mrs. Darcy came to Pemberley during my uncle’s illness, took command of the house, removed old friends, barred Mrs. Wickham from the sickroom, and now govern everything while he is too poorly to resist. My father does not believe all of it; he is uneasy because he believes enough to wish it contradicted.
My mother sees that there is mischief but not yet where it lies.
Lady Catherine believes whatever gives her most to correct.
My parents were to go north next week. The plan is now Derbyshire first, under the proper language of concern for my uncle’s health. Lady Catherine means to join them or overtake them. I shall come too, since if artillery cannot be prevented, it may at least be stood beside.
I ask after Georgiana before all things.
Pray tell her only that I send my affection and hope to see her soon, if that may be said without troubling her.
Give my respectful regards to Mrs. Darcy.
I hope she continues to keep you in better temper than any of us managed, as you were much improved when last I saw you.
R.F.
Elizabeth read the letter once and returned it with ominous neatness.
“Your relations are very foolish,” she said.
Fitzwilliam took it back.
“Not Richard.”
“No. Richard is outnumbered. But the rest of them have let Mrs. Wickham put a bridle on family feeling and are now surprised to find themselves going where she pulls.”
He looked down at the letter.
When his father had stripped him of access, allowance, and standing, no carriage of offended relations had come north to inquire by what authority it had been done. Now that he had been asked to remain, everyone had discovered a reverence for form.
Elizabeth saw enough of the thought to soften, but not enough to pity him where he could not bear it.
“Your father should see it,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I shall speak to Mrs. Reynolds about the north rooms.”
That was all. She named the folly, saw the wound, and moved to meet the consequence.
He raised her hand and kissed it once.
“If you use tenderness to prevent me from being angry,” she said, “I shall detect it.”
“I had no such hope.”
“That is wise.”
He kissed her hand once more, less wisely, and went to his father.
His father was in the smaller sitting room adjoining his chamber.
He could sit there for part of each morning now, provided Mr. Grant’s instructions were observed, which they rarely were in spirit and generally were in letter.
The fire was unlit. The windows were opened to the shaded side.
A cane stood near his chair. A book lay open on the table beside him, less from occupation, Fitzwilliam suspected, than from resentment that illness had made reading a matter to be reported upon.
He looked better than he had two weeks before.
He remained altered.
His speech held longer before roughening.
His colour was steadier. His right hand could now grip the arm of the chair with more intention than tremor, but the tremor still came when fatigue or anger approached too quickly.
He walked the length of the room twice a day and submitted to being praised for it with all the graciousness of a man insulted by progress.
He looked up when Fitzwilliam entered.
“More papers?”
“A letter from Richard.”
His father’s face changed by a degree so small Fitzwilliam might have missed it once. He did not miss it now.
“Read it.”
Fitzwilliam did.
His father listened without interruption. At the mention of Rosings, his eyes closed briefly; not in weakness, but in recognition.
When Fitzwilliam finished, his father said, “At least Richard has not become a fool.”
“No.”
“That is something.”
“It has often been something.”
His father’s mouth moved faintly. “They will come.”
“Yes.”
“Then they will be disappointed to find everything in order.”
Fitzwilliam folded the letter. “You need not receive them if Mr. Grant advises against it.”
His father gave him a look withering enough to be a sign of health. “Do you wish them to remain here for months until they can say they have seen me? Do not be ridiculous.”
“I would rather be ridiculous than reckless.”
“That is because you are young.”
“I had not thought youth among my present defects.”