CHAPTER 68 #2
“It is always among a son’s defects,” said his father. “His father is merely too polite to name it daily.”
The dryness almost made it ordinary. That was unsettling.
His father turned his face toward the window. “Mr. Latham has set the papers right. Not the entail. That required no repentance from me. The rest.”
Fitzwilliam stilled.
“Your allowance,” his father said. “The sums that should have stood to your use as my son and heir. The provision due to you while I live. What I withdrew, I have restored. In full.”
The words struck him harder than he expected.
It was what he had once needed and had learned to live without. To receive it now was not simple gratitude. It was relief arriving after the need had passed, and therefore half pain.
“Thank you,” he said.
His father’s mouth tightened. “Do not make a scene of it.”
Fitzwilliam almost smiled. “I shall endeavour not to.”
“The will is corrected also, so far as it can matter,” his father added. “But the living provision was the injury still in my hand. It is restored.”
Not undone, Fitzwilliam thought. Not entirely. But repaired where repair was still possible.
He bowed his head once.
His father’s hand moved on the chair arm. “And Mrs. Darcy?”
“Sir?”
“Her articles. Her provision as your wife. I do not know what was done when you married.”
That was one way of saying he knew Pemberley had done nothing.
“Her trustees were prepared to make provision for me,” Fitzwilliam said. “As her husband. I refused it.”
His father turned his head. “For you.”
“Yes.”
There was a pause.
“Good God,” said his father.
“Mrs. Darcy’s fortune is her own. Her trustees were exact.”
“But Pemberley should settle something proper upon her.”
“She would value the gesture. She does not require it.”
His father’s gaze sharpened. “How little does she require it?”
Fitzwilliam looked down at Richard’s letter. “If Mrs. Darcy wished to display her fortune, Pemberley might find the comparison unflattering.”
His father stared at him.
“How unflattering?”
“Sufficiently.”
His father leaned back. “And her trustees offered to provide for you.”
“They did.”
“You refused.”
“I did.”
“Of course you did.”
It was not quite criticism. It was not quite approval. It was, perhaps, the nearest thing to understanding they could manage before noon.
After a silence, his father said, “Then we must be more careful, not less. Want is not the only measure of what is owed.”
Fitzwilliam looked up.
“She should be made more comfortable here,” his father continued. “I am better than I was. She need not order her life around my sickroom or Mr. Wickham’s accounts. If there is any person she would wish to have with her — mother, sister, aunt, friend — send for them.”
“I shall tell her.”
“See that she believes it. Miss Bennet is here for Georgiana. That is well. It is not the same thing.”
No. It was not.
Kitty Bennet had done more good than many wiser people might have managed.
She chattered when Georgiana could bear chatter, drew badly enough to make improvement safe, and did not ask to be admired for being useful.
But she was young, unmarried, and in need of guidance herself.
She could make a frightened girl’s day less long.
She could not be the woman Elizabeth might want when her own body became strange to her.
His father’s eyes returned to the window. “Pemberley has made enough use of her. See that it offers comfort in return.”
The words were plain, almost clumsy. They disturbed Fitzwilliam more than eloquence would have done.
“Yes, sir.”
Another pause.
Then his father said, “Pemberley is the Darcy family home.”
Fitzwilliam did not move.
“A child should not learn such a place by visits.”
Not command. Not apology. Not even a full request. But Fitzwilliam understood it.
“I understand.”
“Do not answer now,” said his father. “I have not asked anything.”
Fitzwilliam left the room with the letter still in his hand and his father’s words moving beneath it like another text.
He did not repeat them all to Elizabeth that afternoon.
He told her of the restored provisions. That belonged to their marriage. He told her also that Mr. Latham might review what Pemberley could properly settle upon her as Mrs. Darcy.
She deserved the choice of how to receive it.
She chose, after a silence, to be all three.
“Pemberley is very late,” she said.
“Yes.”
“But not unwelcome.”
“No.”
“And did you tell your father that my trustees once attempted to provide for you?”
“I did.”
Her eyes warmed with mischief despite the heat. “Did he survive the intelligence?”
“With effort.”
“That must have been a consolation to you.”
“Several consolations were present.”
She looked at him more closely.
He did not tell her what his father had said of Pemberley’s next generation.
She had enough to bear: Richard’s warning; the opening of rooms; instructions to Mrs. Reynolds; Georgiana’s careful courage when told only that Colonel Fitzwilliam sent affection and might come; Kitty’s anxious attempt to look unconcerned; the heat; and the fact that she had cried, privately and furiously, because a ribbon would not lie as Evans wished it to lie.
She did not need to be asked, even indirectly, to decide whether Pemberley was to become the home of their children.
Not yet.
For the next week, the house waited.
It did not wait idly. Pemberley had never possessed that talent.
The clerks continued their dull and damning arithmetic.
Bell took more authority each day and looked more alarmed by it.
Mr. Latham drafted notices which would cut John Wickham from Pemberley’s name with all the civility the law could give to disgrace.
Mr. Grant increased his father’s permitted time out of bed and decreased, with less success, the number of subjects upon which his father might hold an opinion.
Elizabeth ordered rooms, refused rooms, accepted chairs, rejected broth, wrote letters, soothed Georgiana, laughed at Kitty, and became, to Fitzwilliam’s eyes, more evidently altered with every day she insisted that nothing of importance had changed.
The household’s conspiracy deepened.
By the time Richard’s second note arrived — two lines only, from an inn on the road, announcing that the party would reach Pemberley before dinner the following day — Fitzwilliam had ceased to hope the visit might be prevented.
Lady Catherine was not a weather one prevented. She was weather one shuttered against.
They came in heat.
Two carriages, outriders, a quantity of luggage suitable for either a family call or a small occupation, and enough dust to mark the sweep before the house like evidence.
Fitzwilliam stood in the hall when the first carriage stopped.
Elizabeth was beside him because forbidding it would have produced more exertion than permitting it.
Mrs. Reynolds stood a little behind, formal as Pemberley stone.
Georgiana had not been brought down. Kitty had been dispatched to keep her company, a task she accepted with solemnity and only one backward glance of violent curiosity.
Richard descended before any servant had fully opened the second carriage door.
He looked tired, dusty, and reassuringly himself.
“Darcy,” Richard said.
“Richard.”
His cousin’s eyes moved once toward the stairs.
“Georgiana is upstairs with Miss Bennet,” Fitzwilliam said.
Richard’s expression eased only slightly. “Thank you.”
He bowed to Elizabeth with real warmth.
“Mrs. Darcy.”
“Colonel Fitzwilliam.”
Then Lady Catherine descended.
She did not so much alight as take possession of the ground by placing her foot upon it. The heat, the journey, and the dust had done nothing to diminish her conviction that every place she entered had erred before her arrival.
Behind her came Lord Matlock, grave and watchful, and Lady Matlock, pale from the road but composed, her eyes taking in the house, the servants, Elizabeth, Fitzwilliam, and Richard with a quietness more formidable than her sister’s displeasure.
Fitzwilliam bowed.
“Lord Matlock. Lady Matlock. Lady Catherine. Allow me to present my wife, Mrs. Darcy.”
Elizabeth curtseyed with perfect composure.
“My lord. Lady Matlock. Lady Catherine.”
Lord Matlock bowed. “Mrs. Darcy.”
Lady Matlock’s acknowledgement was gentler, though no less searching. “Mrs. Darcy.”
Lady Catherine looked from Elizabeth’s face to the careful fall of her gown, then back again.
“Mrs. Darcy,” Lady Catherine said, as if the title itself required evidence.
“Lady Catherine,” said Elizabeth.
No curtsey could have been more exact than Elizabeth’s. None could have offered less surrender.
Lord Matlock turned back to Fitzwilliam.
“You have had a difficult summer,” Lord Matlock said.
“Yes.”
“We are come in concern.”
Lady Catherine made a sound.
Lady Matlock said, “We are glad to hear my brother is improved.”
“Mr. Grant permits him part of the morning from his bed,” Fitzwilliam said. “He is stronger, but not restored.”
“Then it is very fortunate,” Lady Catherine said, “that we have come.”
Elizabeth’s smile was very small. “Mr. Grant may not have viewed it in precisely those terms.”
Lady Catherine’s attention returned to her at once.
“I have heard a great deal of Mr. Grant,” Lady Catherine said. “And of Mrs. Reynolds. And of the arrangements that have been made.”
“Then I hope you have heard accurately,” said Fitzwilliam.
“I have heard enough to be astonished.”
“Accuracy often has that effect when one has been denied it.”
Lady Catherine’s eyes sharpened. “I did not come to be insulted in my sister’s house.”
“No,” said Fitzwilliam. “You came to inquire whether I had usurped it.”
Lord Matlock’s expression tightened.
Lady Matlock looked briefly at Richard, who gave her nothing.
Lady Catherine drew herself up. “I came because an old and faithful connexion of this family has been turned out, refused access to a sick man whom she had long served, and treated as if blood and service were nothing. Mrs. Wickham is not some common dependent to be discarded at the pleasure of a new mistress.”