CHAPTER 74
The Nursery Bell
By the first week of October, Pemberley had taken on autumn in earnest.
Damp leaves scented the outer passages whenever a door was opened.
The fires were lit earlier, not yet for severity, but against the chill that gathered in stone and old wood before dinner.
In the mornings, mist lay low over the park, and by afternoon the beeches had begun to turn a dull gold against the wet green of the grass.
The western apartments were finished first by smell.
Fresh paper, beeswax, aired linen, cleaned chimney-stone, and the faint ghost of paint met Darcy at the door before Mrs. Reynolds had said a word. The rooms no longer smelled of shut curtains and old decisions. They smelled of work completed in haste by people who did not intend haste to show.
Mrs. Reynolds stood beside him with her keys at her waist and an expression of restrained victory.
“We have kept the fires small these three days, sir, to draw the damp without overheating the paper. The bedchamber chimney draws cleanly now. Mr. Grant said the room must be warm, but not close.”
“Has Mrs. Doddridge disputed him?”
“No, sir.”
“Then he may consider himself fortunate.”
Mrs. Reynolds lowered her eyes, but not before Darcy saw the small satisfaction in them.
The western apartments were not merely opened now, but claimed.
Bedchamber and dressing rooms, sitting room and writing table, nursery rooms and the chamber set aside for a nurse had all been cleaned, warmed, argued over, and made obedient to winter.
The nursery was not the whole work. It was only the newest proof of it.
The sitting room had been arranged with the greatest care to appear not arranged at all.
A chair stood where Elizabeth might have light without glare and company without being placed on display.
A small writing table occupied one side of the window, because no one who knew his wife could imagine her passing a winter without paper within reach.
A work-table had already been surrendered to folded linen, pins, and a little heap of white cambric that had the innocent air of having invaded under Jane’s protection.
Beyond it, the bedchamber was ready. Curtains hung in a warm sober stuff that Elizabeth had chosen because it did not apologise to the walls.
The bed had been moved by several inches after Mrs. Doddridge pronounced it too near the draught, and Mrs. Reynolds, without any visible concession to imagination, had permitted the adjustment.
A screen stood near the hearth. The bell-pull had been newly fitted. The carpet was down.
Darcy had waited for rooms before. Chambers.
Lodgings. The small London parlour in which he had learned how little furniture was needed if one meant never to be at ease.
His old rooms at Pemberley, endured since their arrival because haste and illness had given no one time to do better.
Even at Portman Square, where Elizabeth had made him so unexpectedly welcome, the rooms had been prepared out of her inheritance, her courage, her household’s competence.
These rooms were different.
They were not his past accepted, nor his exile softened, nor his wife’s charity extended. They were Pemberley making space for his marriage.
He could not look at them too long.
Mrs. Reynolds led him on: through the dressing room where Elizabeth’s shawls had already acquired a drawer, past the chamber prepared for a nurse, and finally to the nursery door.
The room had not been made pretty in the manner of a lady’s fancy.
Elizabeth had objected to prettiness where cleanliness, warmth, access, and sound were the first requirements.
The October air made her arguments better than any speech could have done.
The curtains could be drawn close against draughts.
The cradle, not yet uncovered, stood away from the window and not too near the fire.
A guard had been fixed before the swept hearth.
A linen press stood open, smelling faintly of lavender and heat.
The bell-pull hung near the door, and another had been contrived close enough to the low chair beside the hearth.
In that chair sat Elizabeth.
Not installed. No one would have survived calling it that in her hearing. But seated, undeniably, with a footstool at her feet, a small table beside her, Mrs. Reynolds’s papers within reach, and one hand resting low where the child made every arrangement in the room less theoretical.
She looked up as Darcy entered, and for one moment he did not hear Mrs. Reynolds’s explanation of the linen press or the second bell-pull. He saw only Elizabeth in their rooms at Pemberley.
He had trained himself, in London, not to imagine rooms like this.
Home, wife, child: such words had belonged either to other men or to a future too costly to picture.
Yet here they had been made practical before he had made himself ready for wonder — curtains drawn against October, a chair placed near the hearth, Elizabeth seated with his child beneath her hand, and his name waiting to be made new by someone who had not yet drawn breath.
The room did not look miraculous. That was what undid him. It looked orderly.
A life, made practical before he could recover from its wonder.
“There you are,” Elizabeth said. “You are just in time to be useful.”
“I hope that is not my only attraction.”
“No,” she said. “Only the most immediately required one.”
Mrs. Reynolds placed another paper upon the table. “This is Mrs. Tate’s second character, madam. It speaks well of her in the nursery, and better of her in a sickroom.”
Elizabeth took it and lowered the list enough for Darcy to see the names. “I have not hired half a household without you, though I confess I have been tempted.”
Mrs. Reynolds’s expression suggested that temptation had gone further than confession.
Mrs. Doddridge sat near the linen press with a folded sheet in her lap and her basket at her feet. She had been watching the room in her usual fashion, as if it were not necessary to appear interested in a thing in order to know everything about it.
“We must separate the employments,” Elizabeth said. “A monthly nurse for the lying-in is not the same question as a wet nurse, and neither is the same question as a nursery maid.”
“No, ma’am,” said Mrs. Doddridge.
Darcy came nearer. The paper bore Elizabeth’s hand in several neat lines.
Mrs. Tate might do for the lying-in, if Mr. Grant approved her experience and Mrs. Reynolds was satisfied that she would not quarrel with whoever attended the confinement.
Mrs. Reynolds had collected the names of women who might be available nearer December, should a wet nurse be wanted.
A young woman from Bakewell had been marked as suitable for nursery service if more could be learned of her temper.
Elizabeth tapped Mrs. Tate’s character. “She has attended three confinements in respectable houses and once where the mother was slow to recover. That recommends her more than any number of general compliments.”
“And the wet nurse?” Darcy asked.
“Not chosen. Only names gathered. I would rather not make such a decision before necessity requires it, but I will not have necessity arrive and find us dependent upon the first woman who presents herself with a recommendation.”
Mrs. Doddridge folded the sheet in her lap.
Elizabeth glanced at her. “You think I am anticipating trouble.”
“I think you have been there an hour, ma’am.”
Elizabeth’s mouth curved despite herself. “That was not my question.”
“No, ma’am.”
Mrs. Doddridge returned to the linen.
Mrs. Reynolds took up the narrower sheet. “The young woman from Bakewell is clean, quiet, and accustomed to children, though not to a house of this size.”
“A large house may be learned,” Elizabeth said. “Discretion is harder to teach.”
Darcy looked down at the questions written beneath each name.
Who recommended her? Had she served in a nursery?
Could she keep a room warm without turning it oppressive?
Would she report faithfully, even when what she reported displeased?
Did she gossip? Would she admit a visitor because the visitor was grand?
Would she refuse a grandmother, aunt, cousin, or old servant if instructed?
His eye stopped there.
Elizabeth’s voice softened, but only a little. “The child will not remember whether the curtains were well chosen. The child may suffer very much if the door is ill kept.”
Mrs. Reynolds’s gaze moved briefly to Darcy’s face, then away.
Once, he might have thought such caution severe for a nursery. Now he knew better. A nursery was not a sentimental room. It was an exposed one.
“You are right,” he said.
“Of course I am. But you may tell me again if you find it useful.”
A faint sound of laughter came through the partly open door, followed by Kitty’s voice protesting that the spool had attacked her foot and Mary replying that inanimate objects rarely formed plans.
Mrs. Reynolds excused herself to retrieve the fallen enemy and the remaining references. Mrs. Doddridge rose with the folded sheet.
“I shall see whether the second press is aired enough, ma’am.”
Elizabeth nodded. “Thank you.”
Mrs. Doddridge left them.
Darcy and Elizabeth were alone.
Elizabeth looked down at her papers with great attention.
A moment passed.
Then another.
At last she said, with dignity too carefully arranged to be natural, “Fitzwilliam.”
He came nearer at once. “What is it?”
“Nothing alarming.”
That did not reassure him as much as she seemed to think it ought.
She looked down at her lap, then back at him, and a colour rose in her face which had nothing to do with illness. “I have been sitting here with great dignity for some time.”
He understood then, and the tenderness of it struck him so sharply that he had to be still a moment before he trusted himself to move.
Elizabeth saw too much. She always did.
“If you laugh,” she warned, “I shall make you interview every nurse yourself.”
“I would not dare.”