A Portrait of Mr. Darcy’s Love (Sweet Mr. Darcy Pride and Prejudice Variations)

Chapter 1

THE WOMAN IN THE FRAME

"The difficulty, Mr. Bingley, is your chin."

Bingley's hand flew up to guard the feature in question. "What is wrong with my chin?"

"Nothing in the world. It is an amiable chin. A very friendly chin." The artist, Thomas Ashford circled his easel with a stick of charcoal held aloft like a fencing foil. "But it will not stay where I put it. You have been talking for three quarters of an hour."

"I have not." Bingley appealed to the corner of the studio, where Darcy stood among stacked frames and rolled canvas. "Darcy. Have I been talking?"

"Without pause."

"There, you see? My own friend—"

"Your own friend agrees with me," Ashford said. "Chin up. Eyes to the window. Think of something dignified."

Bingley assembled an expression of such tremendous solemnity, such crushing gravity, such statesmanship, that Darcy turned away to examine a shelf of pigment jars rather than laugh aloud.

The expression survived four seconds. Then it cracked down the middle like spring ice, and Bingley was grinning again.

"I cannot do it. Dignity does not suit me. You must paint me smiling, Mr. Ashford, or paint somebody else."

Ashford lowered his charcoal and sighed the sigh of a man who had drawn three generations of English gentlemen and liked perhaps four of his subjects in total. "Smiling, then. Heaven forbid posterity should mistake you for a serious person. We shall rest. Walk about. Touch nothing wet."

Bingley sprang from the chair as though released from sentencing. Darcy consulted his watch. They had been promised one hour of the painter's time. They had so far spent it learning the many enemies of Bingley's chin.

Darcy had agreed to come because Bingley asked, and because the alternative was his own empty house.

Georgiana was settled in town with Mrs. Annesley until Christmas.

Her letters arrived cheerful and brief and careful, the letters of a girl writing to reassure her guardian rather than to confide in her brother.

After the summer, he had no right to expect more.

He read each one three times anyway, hunting the sentences for whatever she had decided to spare him.

So. Better a painter's studio than his own library, where the quiet had developed opinions.

While Bingley interrogated Ashford about whether a man might be painted with his own horse, Darcy drifted along the workbench at the rear of the studio.

Finished canvases leaned six deep against the wall.

A portfolio of studies lay open beside a jar of brushes, and he turned the leaves idly, the way a man turns the pages of someone else's newspaper.

The leaves gave him a bishop with a mouth like a buttonhole, a hound with mournful eyes, and twin boys in identical blue coats, one plainly about to strike the other. Ashford was good. Better than good. Each face carried its owner's private weather.

Darcy turned the next leaf and stopped.

A young woman looked out of the paper at him.

Looked past him, rather, at something over his shoulder, something amusing she had no intention of explaining.

Dark eyes, a half-smile only beginning, her head turned as though a moment earlier someone had said a foolish thing and she was assembling her answer to it.

The painter had caught her mid-thought. Whatever she meant to say next would be clever, and Darcy stood in a cluttered studio on Brook Street and waited, absurdly, to hear it.

He did not move for some time.

It was not beauty, or not beauty alone. London assembled beauty by the ballroom-full every season, and Darcy had survived nine seasons of it without once forgetting how to breathe.

It was the expression. Painted ladies gazed out of their frames with the serene vacancy of women who had been told to hold still and think of nothing.

This one was thinking. The thought was visible, and it was at somebody's expense.

His grandmother hung in the long gallery at Pemberley between two of her sisters, all three serene, all three vacant, none of them in any danger of saying anything clever ever again.

His parents hung there too. The wedding portrait.

His mother smiling beside his father's shoulder, his father's hand resting on a globe, both of them composed for eternity in attitudes of perfect contentment.

For thirty years the portrait had gone on smiling.

The marriage had done otherwise, though Darcy had never found the moment the change occurred, no matter how often he searched his childhood for it.

The breakfasts of his boyhood, his mother bright and quick and teasing, his father almost laughing into his coffee.

Then later breakfasts, his mother studying the window, his father studying the estate ledgers, the silence between them as polished and habitual as the silver.

There was no quarrel he could remember, and no cruelty he could name. It had been only a slow cooling, as a room cools when the fire is let die, until what remained at the table was civility, which resembles affection the way a portrait resembles a person.

Perhaps the boy had invented it. Perhaps every marriage settled into silence and ledgers, and a child measured the loss wrongly because the earlier warmth had seemed the whole of the world.

He had never found anyone he could ask. But he had carried the lesson out of Pemberley all the same: the world admires the picture of a marriage, and the picture is the least true thing about it.

He looked at the woman in the portfolio, who was about to say something clever and had been about to say it, presumably, for months.

"You have found her, then."

Darcy did not start, because he never permitted himself to start, but his hand closed the corner of the leaf as though caught at a keyhole. Ashford stood at his elbow, wiping charcoal from his fingers with a rag.

"Your work is very fine," Darcy said. "Who is she?"

"A gentleman's daughter." Ashford took the portfolio and angled it toward the window with a craftsman's small vanity.

"I made a tour of the southern counties, spring before last. Sussex, Surrey, Kent.

Painted half the gentry south of London.

Her father sat the whole family in turn, as I recall, and haggled like a horse trader, and quoted poetry at me while I worked.

" He smiled at the memory. "The formal portrait went home with the family.

This was a study I made for my own use, the first afternoon, before she had learned to sit still for me.

I keep the ones where the subject forgot to pose. "

"What is her name?"

"Mr. Darcy, I painted forty faces on a tour of five counties, and I slept in inns I should not wish on a debtor.

I remember the family kept a vicious little spaniel with a taste for easel legs.

I remember the lady herself laughed at my expense within an hour of my arrival, and I remember it was deserved.

Her name I could not give you under oath.

" Ashford shrugged. "A gentleman's daughter, somewhere south of London.

It is written in a ledger somewhere, if the ledger survived the spaniel. "

Somewhere south of London. A county the size of a kingdom, populated entirely by strangers.

"You see why I kept the study," Ashford said. "In the finished portrait she looks like every other young lady in England. Her mother insisted on the posture. In this one she looks like herself."

"And which did the family prefer?"

"The wrong one." Ashford closed the portfolio with the tenderness other men reserved for their children. "Families always do."

"There is something I have been meaning to tell you," Bingley said, in the voice of a man who has been bursting with news for a fortnight and congratulating himself hourly on his discretion. "I have taken a house. An estate, rather. You are looking at a man of property."

They had quit the studio for the pavement of Brook Street, where Bingley's news could enjoy a wider audience. Darcy retrieved his gloves. "You have viewed it, I hope, before taking it."

"Viewed it! I walked the whole of the principal floor.

Handsome hall, good light in the drawing room, and the agent assures me the chimneys draw.

" Bingley counted these virtues on his fingers as though they were references of character.

"Netherfield Park, it is called. In Hertfordshire.

I take possession at Michaelmas, and you, my friend, are coming with me. "

"Am I."

"You are. Do not put on your refusing face.

You have inspected the chimneys of every house I have ever admired and found them all wanting, and if I am to be a landed gentleman I require somebody at hand who knows what land is for.

" Bingley's grin softened into something younger.

"Come, Darcy. It is months until Christmas.

You cannot mean to rattle around town alone until then.

Come and tell me everything I have done wrong, and stay until you are tired of me. "

It was generously meant, and it was also, Darcy admitted privately, correct.

The town house was quiet. Pemberley was quieter.

Georgiana's careful letters would arrive wherever he slept, and he would read them three times wherever he slept, and a man could do his worrying in Hertfordshire as well as anywhere.

"I shall come," he said. "Somebody must keep you from buying a horse to be painted with."

Bingley laughed and wrung his hand and went off down Brook Street with the particular bounce of a man who means to spend the afternoon telling everyone he has chimneys that draw.

Darcy did not follow at once. He stood on the pavement, and the autumn crowd went around him.

Hertfordshire lay north of London. He was aware of holding this fact up and turning it over, the way a man checks a coin he already knows is sound.

Sussex, Surrey, Kent, the painter had said.

South. The opposite direction entirely. Whatever whisper had stirred at the words an estate in the country could lie down again, because no road through Hertfordshire passed anywhere near a laughing gentleman's daughter in a ledger eaten by a spaniel.

The whisper did not entirely lie down. He chose not to examine why he had consulted the map at all.

He went back inside on the pretext of his umbrella, which he had left leaning by the door with deliberate carelessness, the way other men misplace nothing.

Ashford had returned to Bingley's canvas and was roughing in the amiable chin. He glanced over without surprise. "The portfolio is where it was, Mr. Darcy."

"I came for my umbrella."

"Of course you did."

Darcy collected the umbrella. Then, because the painter had already turned away to his work, and because pride is a currency a man cannot spend in an empty room, he opened the portfolio again.

She was still mid-thought. Still about to speak.

He studied the line of her jaw, and the dark coil of hair coming loose at the temple where a proper artist would have tidied it.

He studied the beginning of the smile, one corner of her mouth a fraction higher than the other, as if wit weighed something and she carried it on one side.

He gave particular attention to her eyes, fixing the exact distance between candor and laughter where the painter had placed them, and he committed the whole to memory with the thoroughness he ordinarily reserved for contracts.

He could buy it. The thought presented itself in a reasonable coat. Ashford kept studies and studies were sold every day, and the price would mean nothing to him. The portfolio would be lighter by one leaf, and a stranger's unfinished thought would hang where he could visit it.

And there the reasonable coat fell open, and what stood underneath was not reasonable at all.

He would be a man who had purchased the face of a woman he had never met, hung her where he took his coffee, and waited each morning for the end of a sentence begun in another county.

He could not name what such a man was, but he knew no name for it was good.

He closed the portfolio.

"The study is not for sale in any case," Ashford said to his canvas, in the tone of a man answering a question nobody had asked aloud. "I keep my best."

"I had not inquired."

"No. You had remarkable self-command, for a man asking nothing.

" The painter's charcoal went on scratching.

"Shall I tell you the curious thing about her, since you do not ask that either?

The family wanted the posed one because the posed one behaves.

It hangs where it is hung and it flatters the wall.

A true likeness is less obliging. Whatever she was about to say, sir, she has been about to say it in my portfolio for a year and a half, and some days I would give the price of the frame to hear the end of it. "

"And other days?"

"Other days I thank Providence she cannot finish it. A man my age wants peace." Ashford stood away from the canvas and squinted at the amiable chin. "Good day, Mr. Darcy. Mind the wet frames as you go."

The carriage took him through streets the color of pewter, and Darcy sat with his umbrella across his knees and conducted the closing argument.

It was an excellent painting. That was the whole of it. He admired the craft, the way he admired a well-made bridge or a clean line of accounts, and the proof of his disinterest was the ease with which he would now think of something else.

He arranged the journey to Hertfordshire instead.

His valet, the heavy trunk, which horses.

Whether Bingley's chimneys drew, whatever the agent swore.

The picture of the journey assembled itself obediently.

At the end of it, at a window of the unseen house, the woman from the portfolio stood waiting with her answer ready.

Darcy pinched the bridge of his nose. Enough.

A painting was a safe thing to admire, he told himself, safest of all the things a man could fix his eye on.

It asked nothing. It risked nothing. It would never lose its brightness over thirty years of breakfasts, never study the window while a husband studied his ledgers.

It would never look at him the way his mother had looked at the long gallery in the last winter of her life, as though the smiling woman in the wedding portrait were someone she had known long ago and could no longer receive.

A painting could not dim. A painting could not leave.

He watched London go by and did not think of her, with great concentration, the rest of the way home.