Chapter 13
PEMBERLEY
The house arrived as windows. They came out of the dark trees, and there it was across the water: three long rows of lit windows, more of them than Longbourn had panes. Elizabeth had spent three days resolving to be unimpressed. She lost the resolution on the bridge.
The staff were assembled in the hall. There were more of them than had attended her wedding.
"Mrs. Reynolds," Darcy said, "Mrs. Darcy."
The housekeeper was sixty or near it, gray under her cap, with quick eyes.
They went over Elizabeth once, kindly. She had run one house since before the master came into it.
She meant to know what had come to live in it now.
She curtsied, and the line of servants curtsied and bowed behind her like a field going over in wind.
"Welcome home, ma'am," said Mrs. Reynolds.
Home. Elizabeth said something gracious to it, and to the cook, and to a footman called Thomas, and to another footman also called Thomas.
She lost count of the names around the fourth housemaid.
Beside her, Darcy gave her every name without hurrying, as if the hour were nothing and the hall were warm.
He was doing it on purpose, so she would have to perform only one greeting at a time. She filed the kindness with the others.
Her rooms were on the east front, a bedchamber and a sitting room with a fire already high. Someone had put flowers on the table. In December. She stood looking at them while her new maid undressed her. She did not ask who had thought of it. Only one person at Pemberley knew her at all.
She slept twelve hours in the largest bed she had ever seen. She would have denied it if anyone had asked.
In the morning she went to the window and met her own situation.
The water lay below in a long sheet, and the woods rose behind it.
The hills went up white at their tops. A herd of deer moved across the slope like a cloud's shadow.
The window itself was taller than her father.
All of it, the water and the woods and the deer and the ground under them for ten miles round, belonged to her husband.
The county would say it belonged to her.
She was mistress of Pemberley. Somewhere there was a version of this morning in which that sentence was the happiest in England.
Girls in novels fainted toward it. Her own mother had wept it at the wedding breakfast, twice.
Elizabeth stood in the cold light and turned the sentence over.
The other meaning sat under it, patient as Wickham.
A sentence was also what a judge handed down.
Mistress of all this. She had been carried to the finest prison in Derbyshire, and the worst of it was the view.
She dressed and went down to learn her jail, and was ambushed by liking it.
Mrs. Reynolds gave her the house room by room.
The house refused, room after room, to be what Elizabeth had packed for.
She had expected gilt and chill, state rooms built to make visitors feel small, the architecture of ten thousand a year.
What she got was light: tall windows, clean lines, and furniture chosen by someone who meant to sit in it.
The grandeur was there, but it stood aside, like a well-trained footman.
"The late Mr. Darcy did the south front," Mrs. Reynolds said. "But the library and the music room are the present master's, and the succession houses, and most of what you will actually like, if you will forgive me saying so, ma'am."
"You have known him long, Mrs. Reynolds?"
"Since he was four years old, ma'am, four-and-twenty years come spring. I will tell you what I tell everyone: there is not a better master in Derbyshire, nor a better brother in England, and I am too old to say it for wages."
"You are not obliged to say it to me at all," Elizabeth said. "I am only the wife. The inspection is over. He has already married me."
Mrs. Reynolds laughed before she could decide whether she ought to, and looked at her with new interest. Elizabeth had been adopted.
"Some in the county call him proud," Mrs. Reynolds said, leading on.
"I never could see it. He does not rattle, that is all.
His late father, now, his father could charm a market town between church and dinner.
Old Mr. Darcy was charming to the county, ma'am, and Mr. Fitzwilliam is kind to the house, and if a person must choose between the two," she opened the door to the music room, "take kind. "
Elizabeth walked through ahead of her and let her face do its work where the housekeeper could not see it.
A pianoforte stood by the windows, new, its cover folded back, sheet music already on the stand.
"For Miss Georgiana, when she comes at Christmas," Mrs. Reynolds said.
"He had it sent up from town the week of his marriage.
He thinks of everything a person could want, ma'am, and he thinks of it beforehand, which I have always held is the difference between kindness and apology. "
"And does he play?"
"Bless you, no. He sits and listens. Always has." Mrs. Reynolds straightened a candlestick with one finger. "He used to sit on the stairs outside this room, when Miss Georgiana was small and shy of an audience. I caught him at it for years. I never said."
Elizabeth looked at the pianoforte for a while.
"Is there somewhere I might walk of a morning?" she asked. "I keep early hours. I had my walks at home, and I mean to keep them."
"You will be spoiled for choice, ma'am. There is the lake path, and the high wood, and the master's own way, down the beech avenue his mother planted, though you will have to rise early indeed to have that one to yourself.
He is out before the house is dressed, every morning God sends.
" Mrs. Reynolds smiled at it, fond as a mother.
"You will have the whole park between you, if you want it. "
"The whole park," Elizabeth agreed, in a voice that satisfied the housekeeper and told the truth sideways. They went on to the gallery.
The gallery ran the length of the upper floor, and the Darcys ran the length of the gallery.
Men in armor hung at the far end, then men in ruffs, then men in wigs.
The swords gave way to scrolls, and the scrolls to riding crops.
Every face was composed for eternity, and none of them looked as if eternity were going well.
The women wore court gowns and the expression that comes with holding still for forty sittings.
Elizabeth walked down two hundred years of her new name and found it heavy going.
"I will leave you to them, ma'am," Mrs. Reynolds said. "The fish man comes at eleven and he is a bandit." And she went off to defend the kitchens, and Elizabeth was alone with the family.
The late Mr. Darcy and Lady Anne hung midway, in one frame, the wedding portrait. His hand rested on a globe. Her hand rested on his arm. Both smiled the public smile of a match the world approved. It was the picture of a happy family. It told her nothing, and she walked on.
She found the boy at the far end, hung low, in a frame plainer than the rest.
He was eight years old, perhaps. He sat with a wolfhound puppy asleep against his knee.
He had been told to hold still, and he was holding still, and the obedience was the whole painting.
He had dark eyes and a soft mouth firmly governed.
A child sat carefully in his own house and his own portrait, hand on his own dog, looking out at the painter the way one looks at weather that may turn.
He was being careful with his face. He was eight years old, and he had already learned it.
Elizabeth stood in front of the boy for a long time.
She knew that expression. She had seen it close over, at an assembly, in a doorway, across a parlor.
She had married it. She had spent three months calling it pride.
Here it was at eight years old, sitting still, guarding itself, while its parents smiled at each other in public oils twenty feet away.
The opinion she had carried north was of a cold man, master of everything, author or at least profiteer of her ruin.
It had come north already cracked. The housekeeper said kind and meant it.
The names had come slowly in the hall, for her sake.
The flowers stood in her rooms, the pianoforte had come up from town in the week of his own grim wedding, and the man had sat for years on the dark stairs outside the music room door.
And at the end of the gallery, hung low and plain where the family's glory would not be troubled by it, waited a careful little boy whom nobody, in two hundred years of portraits, had thought to paint laughing.
She dined with the original that evening, at a table scaled for thirty and laid for two.
He stood when she came in. He asked whether Mrs. Reynolds had shown her everything she wished, whether her rooms were warm, and whether she would tell him if they were not.
Then he ran out of questions he could afford, and they ate to the sound of silver.
He watched her the whole meal, in the old way, with one difference.
When she caught him at it now, he did not look away.
Hiding it had been his lifelong habit. He had given the habit up, for her, in plain sight.
She went up early, the length of a cold corridor, past the gallery door. She did not go in.
The boy would keep. So, something unhelpful in her observed, would the man.