Chapter 11
THE RECKONING
"Ten thousand a year!" Mrs. Bennet had been saying it since breakfast, to her daughters, to Hill, to the window. "Ten thousand a year, and a house in town, and Lizzy to be mistress of Pemberley! Oh, I knew how it would be. Did I not always say he admired her?"
She had called him a horrid proud man for two months. No one reminded her.
Elizabeth sat at the breakfast table and let the noise break over her.
The story had come up the lane at nine, by way of aunt Phillips, who had it from Mrs. Long, who had it from the Netherfield kitchen by way of a footman with a cousin in the village.
By ten it had been to Lucas Lodge and come home again.
It wore details no one at the cottage would have recognized.
In the version Meryton preferred, there had been an embrace.
Her father had heard the true version the night before, from Elizabeth, in his library, with the door shut.
The note, the solicitor's name, Wickham, the blank paper, the coat.
He had listened without one joke, which frightened her.
At the end he had taken off his spectacles and sat looking at the cold grate.
The note he kept. He read it twice, folded it into his desk drawer, and turned the key. He offered no explanation for doing any of it.
As to the debts, he had answered her plainly, being past anything else that night: real, and small. A wine merchant and some old tailor's bills, settled through Selwyn for quiet's sake, not concealment. The hook had been baited with that much truth and no more.
"He used this house," Mr. Bennet had said at last. "He sat at my sister Phillips's table and milked my youngest daughter like a dairy, and I was in this room, reading." That was all. He had not laughed once.
There was no road out and they both knew it.
The note could not be proven. Wickham had been seen by no one but her.
What the county had was Caroline Bingley's account, polished hourly.
A gentleman in his shirtsleeves and a lady in his coat, alone, in an empty cottage.
The county needed nothing else. Two futures hung on it now.
Mr. Bingley would not marry into a scandal his own sisters were carrying, whatever his heart said.
Jane never spoke of it. That was the worst part.
Mr. Darcy called at noon and asked for her father first.
Mr. Bennet had spent the night arranging his sentences.
He had a reputation to keep, even bankrupt.
Something dry about the price of cottages.
Something about the convenience of compromising a man with ten thousand a year rather than a lieutenant with debts.
The sentences were ready when Darcy came in.
He did not use them.
The young man stood in the middle of the library like a man before a magistrate and said, "Mr. Bennet, I will not insult you by asking your permission. Circumstance has taken that office from us both, and I am sorry for it. I have come to ask you something else."
"Ask it."
"You have known her twenty years. I am to be her husband on Thursday, and she believes me either a villain or a fool. How does a man earn your daughter's respect?"
Mr. Bennet looked at him for a long time.
He had laughed at the militia. He had laughed at the lace, and the officers, and his wife's nerves, and his own daughters.
He had made the laughing into a library and lived in it.
And somewhere in all that laughing, a man had sat at a card table a mile from this room.
He had bought Elizabeth's mornings from a fifteen-year-old for the price of a compliment.
The man asking him questions now was the one who had been watching instead.
It was not a comfortable thought. None of his thoughts since midnight had been comfortable.
"I do not know," Mr. Bennet said.
Darcy waited.
"You misunderstand me. That is the honest answer.
I have held her respect for twenty years, Mr. Darcy, and I cannot tell you that I ever earned it.
Ask me again when you have done something I have not.
" He put his spectacles on, which was how he ended interviews.
At the door, he said one thing more, to his own surprise.
"She reads faces, sir. Whatever you are, be it where she can see you. "
Elizabeth received Mr. Darcy in the small parlor, alone, by her own arrangement. Her mother had wanted the good parlor, flowers, and three sisters listening at the door. Elizabeth had wanted witnesses removed. One of them was owed plain speech, and she no longer cared which.
He stood when she came in. She did not sit, so he remained standing, and they faced each other across the worn carpet like opposing counsel.
"Before you speak," she said, "you should know what I know.
The law gives you the right to ignore every word I am about to say.
A wife has no claim her husband does not allow her.
Whatever I ask for this morning, you may grant it on Thursday and remove it on Friday, and no court in England will hear me.
I say my terms anyway. I would have them said in this room, where you chose to listen. "
"Say them."
"I will not be a decorative wife. I will keep my correspondence, unread by anyone.
I will visit my family when I choose, and receive them when I choose.
I will have my mornings." Her voice caught on it, and she let it catch rather than soften.
"My walks were taken from me once, sir, by men who studied them.
I am taking them back. And I will not be hung up at Pemberley like a painting in a gallery, brought down for dinners.
If you want a portrait of a wife, the county is full of women who sit beautifully. I am not one of them."
"Yes," Darcy said. "To all of it."
She had prepared for negotiation. She had prepared, somewhere lower, for refusal.
She had even hoped for it, because refusal would have fit the man she had decided he was.
He gave her neither. He stood in her mother's small parlor and agreed to every term without weighing one of them.
What was on his face while he did it was relief. She knew relief when she saw it.
It did not fit. She put it with the other things from the cottage that did not fit. The shelf was getting crowded. A man who answered yes when a lie was there for the taking, a man frantic at a gate with the cold tearing his eyes, a coat given before she asked.
"You agree quickly," she said.
"You asked to remain yourself. I would be a fool to bargain that down, and a worse one to want to."
"And yet you followed my carriage home. I saw you from the window. Three fields back, the whole way to the gate."
"Wickham was still in the county."
"Is that protection, Mr. Darcy, or is it surveillance? I ask because I have had both this season, and from where I stood they looked alike."
He took the question like a blow he had been expecting. "From where you stood," he said, "they were alike. I know the difference. I have not yet earned the right to ask you to believe in it. I mean to."
She studied him for a long moment.
"Thursday, then," she said, and gave him her hand because the form required it, and his fingers closed around hers with great care, the way a person holds something that has already been broken once.
He reached town the next evening and had the license by eleven the following morning.
The lawyers had him for the rest of the day.
He sat in chambers while the settlements were drawn.
Her jointure, her pin money, portions for daughters if there were daughters.
He signed away, clause by clause, everything the law would have let him withhold from a wife.
The terms she had spoken in the small parlor carried no legal force. These did. He told no one that, either.
The errand he did not name to anyone took him to Brook Street the next afternoon.
Ashford was painting an admiral. He looked around the canvas at his visitor, and put down the brush.
"Mr. Darcy. You have come about the study."
"I am to be married Thursday. The lady is the subject of it."
Whatever Ashford had been going to say went back wherever paint-sellers keep their patter.
He walked to the rear of the studio without a word.
He came back with the portfolio and laid it open on the table.
She looked out of the page the way she had looked out of it in September.
Mid-thought, about to speak, the wit carried on one side of her mouth.
"Bennet," Ashford said. "The ledger survived the spaniel after all. I looked her up last month. I had a mind to write to the family and offer the study, trade being slow." He glanced up. "Does she know you saw it?"
"Not yet."
"Hm." Ashford looked at the portrait, and at Darcy, and something in his face was not for sale either.
"I told you I keep my best, and I meant it.
So I will not sell it to you. It is a wedding gift, and it comes with the only advice I own that is worth canvas: give it to her yourself, before she finds it.
A kept secret turns into a lie at the exact moment someone else tells it. "
He wrapped it in cloth and string, and at the door he said, "I painted forty faces that year, Mr. Darcy. Hers is the only one anybody ever came back for. Tell her that, when you are explaining yourself. It will not help, but it is true."
Mr. Bingley proposed to Jane on Wednesday, in the Longbourn garden, in the rain. He had started and could not wait for it to stop.
The house went up like a bonfire. Mrs. Bennet wept on Hill, on Kitty, and on a chair. Jane came to Elizabeth's room that night holding her happiness like a full cup. She stood in the doorway not drinking it.
"I told him we should wait," Jane said. "Until after. Until things are settled for you. He said—" She stopped. "Lizzy, I cannot be this happy while you—"
"You can." Elizabeth made room on the bed.
"You will. One of us is marrying for love, and it is the right one of us.
If you hold that cup until my affairs improve, it will go cold, and then I shall have ruined two marriages.
" Jane laughed and cried, and slept there, the way they had slept at eight years old, and Elizabeth lay awake doing sums.
Charlotte came the day before the wedding.
Elizabeth saw her from the window, walking up the lane in the cold. She was downstairs and at the door before Hill could reach it. They looked at each other on the step.
"You came."
"You are to be married tomorrow. Where else would I be?
" Charlotte came in, sat, and took off her gloves, and looked at Elizabeth the old way, with the ledger open.
"I will not stay long, and I am not here to be comfortable.
I am here to say one thing, since tomorrow you will be a married woman and it will no longer be my place. "
"Charlotte—"
"You are so determined to see the worst in this man that you have not once considered the possibility that you are wrong, Lizzy.
Not once. I have watched you do it." There was no ten thousand a year in it this time, no strategy, nothing of the pantry.
Her voice was only worried, and theirs. "You are the best judge of character I know, on every subject but the two men you judged first. You hung both portraits in one month, and one of them has already come off the wall.
Look at the other one tonight. That is all.
Look at it the way you would look at anyone else's work. "
Elizabeth sat with her hands in her lap, and the clock went, and the fire went.
"I wounded you," she said. "In the garden. I have not said so."
"You have now." Charlotte stood and put her gloves on. "Wish me joy in March, and I will wish you joy tomorrow, and we shall see which of us turns out to need it more."
That night Elizabeth lay in the dark with the shelf of things that did not fit. She took her own portrait of Mr. Darcy down and looked at it.
She had built her case in a morning, three months ago, in a ballroom.
Wickham had taken three weeks over his, and his had been the better made.
She turned her own work to the light, the speed of it, the certainty.
Then she lay a long time without sleeping.
She checked it, point by point, against everything the man had done since.
It did not survive the checking whole. That was as far as she could go, the night before she married him. It did not survive whole.