Chapter 14
SILENT CONVERSATIONS
The first book appeared on the library table four days into her marriage.
Elizabeth had claimed the library. She was there every morning after her walk, in the deep chair by the south window.
The staff had learned to leave the fire built and the door shut.
Her husband used the room in the afternoons.
They had worked this out without one word, as they now worked out everything.
Meals ran at two ends of habit, and walks kept to separate paths.
The marriage was an arrangement of silences neither of them had been rude enough to break.
The book was Gilbert White, on the natural history of a parish she had never seen.
It lay where she would find it and nowhere a servant would have left it.
She read it in two days. She put it on the table when she finished, and said nothing.
The next morning it was gone, and another book lay in its place.
She declined to mention it. He declined to mention it.
The books went on appearing: a treatise on the Peak rivers, a volume of Cowper, essays she had been wanting for two years without knowing they existed.
If he meant to court her by stealth, he had chosen well.
She could refuse the method only by giving up reading.
It was not fair play, and she suspected he knew it.
The third week, a book came with pencil in the margins.
It was his own copy, read and marked, and she put it down twice and picked it up three times.
The notes were not for her. That was their power.
Beside a passage on duty he had written, years ago by the fading, or fear in better clothes.
She sat with that one for a long time. The text she finished in a day.
The margins she read like correspondence.
Her body, meanwhile, conducted its separate treason.
She passed him in the gallery corridor and caught the smell of cold air and horse on his coat.
The pillow scene at Longbourn arrived entire, uninvited, and she walked on with her face composed and her pulse misbehaving.
In the evenings he read across from her, and she watched his hands turn the pages, and her own waist remembered a ballroom.
She was angry at him, or had been, or was trying to remain so for safety's sake.
The body had not agreed to any of it. It had been keeping score since Lucas Lodge, and it did not care who had written what note.
One morning on the lake path she saw him far off on his mother's avenue, a dark figure under the bare beeches. He saw her. Neither of them raised a hand. They walked their separate banks of the morning. At breakfast neither said a word about it, and the silence sat at the table with them.
Christmas came on a Friday that year.
They went to church in the village and performed Mr. and Mrs. Darcy for two hundred interested parishioners. They dined alone at four, at the small table she had asked for, the goose excellent. She complimented the goose silently, since conversation had to go somewhere.
After dinner he gave her a parcel, wrapped plainly.
It was a traveling writing desk, rosewood, fitted: paper, wax, a place for letters received, a place for letters owed.
It was the exact thing. He had heard her father at the carriage door, and remembered, and gone and had this made.
It was the present a man gives a woman whose letters home matter more than anything in his house.
"I have nothing for you," she said. It came out stiff, because it was true in more ways than she had planned to say aloud.
"You came down to dinner on Christmas Day," he said. "I had no further list."
They stepped back from that, he to his book, she to her new desk. She wrote to her father, the truth, not the weather, and found the truth had grown complicated in the writing.
Darcy had asked the library, since he could not ask her.
Her mornings left a record: Hume put down spine-up, the natural histories gone through like meals, poetry only if it kept its sentiment buttoned.
He read what she read and chose what she might want, and the choosing took him longer than his correspondence.
It was the only conversation she allowed him.
He conducted it with the care of a man writing to someone behind a border.
The margins had been an accident. He had pulled the Cowper from his own shelf without thinking.
He remembered the pencil only after the book had vanished from the table.
For one bad evening he considered asking for it back.
Then it returned to the table without a word.
The next morning she left a book for him, the first of the marriage: a worn Cowper of her father's, carried from Longbourn, annotated in a quick light hand.
He knew the hand from one register and one terrible recitation of terms.
He read her margins until the candle died. He slept better than he had since the wedding, and was ashamed of how little it had taken.
To Georgiana he had written: Come for the holidays.
You will find us quiet. You need never speak of the summer, to her or to anyone, now or ever.
That door is yours alone. Georgiana had answered in her careful hand that she would come after Christmas, when the roads cleared.
She hoped her new sister liked music. The letter had three false starts folded in behind it, packed by mistake.
He did not tell her that. He kept all four.
Three days after Christmas, in the gray afternoon, Georgiana arrived, wrapped to the eyes.
She got down from the carriage and curtsied to Elizabeth in the hall, white-faced. She was a tall child of sixteen, performing courage with her hands locked in front of her. Her eyes went once to her brother and back. The whole house seemed to hold its arrangements still.
"Mrs. Darcy," Georgiana managed.
"Your brother warned me about you," Elizabeth said gravely. "He told me you would be afraid of me for a week, perhaps two. He promised it was not personal. I am holding him to one week, because I am told I am frightening, and I refuse to do it for a fortnight."
Georgiana looked at her, startled. The laugh escaped before the shyness could catch it, a small sound, gone at once, with both hands rising too late to stop it.
Past her shoulder, Darcy stood by the carriage door doing something with his face.
Elizabeth saw it and put it on the shelf with everything else.
The week that followed went by inches, and then by feet.
Georgiana was shy the way a bruise is shy.
She startled at warmth and then followed it.
She showed Elizabeth the music room as if presenting a confession, and played correctly, and apologized twice for nothing.
Elizabeth learned to sit half-turned away with needlework, audience without being audience, and by the fourth day the playing changed.
The correct pieces gave way to the loved ones.
Some of them came with wrong notes, and the wrong notes came oftener when the music mattered.
Elizabeth, who knew what wrong notes meant in this family, kept her eyes on her sewing. She counted each one as a trust.
They talked over the pianoforte the way other people talk over cards: books, Bath, and the puppy in the gallery portrait, Hector, who had lived to fourteen and been mourned by the whole staff. None of it mattered, and all of it built the road for what would.
On Twelfth Night eve the house was quiet and the candles were down to their last hour. Georgiana played a slow air twice through, and then spoke to the keyboard.
"He has not told you about me. Has he."
Elizabeth put down her needle. "He has told me he is sworn to protect someone. He has never once said from what, or whom. I concluded years ago that gentlemen keep vaults. I married the vault."
"He said I never need tell anyone." Georgiana's hands kept moving, the air gone soft and absent under them.
"He wrote it at Christmas. That the door was mine alone.
So you will understand that I am choosing.
" The music faltered, found itself. "I would like to tell you.
You will hear it wrong if anyone else ever tells it. "
"Then play," Elizabeth said, "and tell me, and I will sit here and sew badly."
It came out haltingly, to music. Ramsgate, last summer.
The hired companion, Mrs. Younge, who had friends she did not mention.
The gentleman who appeared on the parade the second week, who had grown up at Pemberley, who remembered her pony's name and her mother's roses and her sixth birthday.
She was fifteen. He was nine-and-twenty and the handsomest man she had ever spoken to, and he said the word love on the eleventh day.
"I agreed to go with him." The music had gone down to single notes, struck slowly, like steps.
"To Scotland. I thought it romantic that it must be secret.
He explained why it must: my brother, he said, had a cold heart and an old grudge, and would part us out of spite.
I had thirty thousand pounds, and I did not think of them once, which I have since understood was the entire point of me. "
Elizabeth sat still. Wickham's voice came back to her across three months: the name he could not give me. He had a sixth birthday's worth of detail for every occasion. He had remembered her own walking routes the same way he had remembered a child's pony.
"Fitzwilliam came two days before we were to go.
He was not expected. I told him myself, within the hour, because I could not be in the same house and not.
" A wrong note, held. "I watched my brother's face while I said it.
He went somewhere I could not follow, and came back, and was gentle.
He has been gentle ever since. He never once reproached me.
I wish he had. It would have been easier to carry. "
The music stopped.
"He paid Mrs. Younge off quietly and took me to town, and no one ever knew, and the man went away whole.
" Georgiana turned on the bench at last and looked at her.
"He is in Hertfordshire now, or was. George Wickham.
I saw the name in the militia lists of a Hertfordshire paper my companion left out, and I have watched my brother not say it in every letter since.
So I am saying it." Her chin came up, sixteen years old and shaking.
"Whatever he told you, and whatever he was to you, and whatever has happened that nobody will write to me plainly, you should know what he is, and what my brother is.
You should know which of the two of them sat with me afterward, while I learned to stop being ashamed. "
Elizabeth crossed the room and took her hands off the silent keys and held them.
"You were fifteen," she said. "The fault has an owner, and you are not she. And you have told it right. I heard every word of it right."
They sat a long time, while the candles went down.
Darcy had come up at the hour Georgiana usually finished, to say goodnight. From the stairs he heard that the music had stopped and the voices had not.
He stood with one hand on the rail. His sister's voice ran low and even, further than he had heard it run in eighteen months. Then came quiet, and then his wife's voice, two words he could not make out. He knew the tone. It was the cottage tone turned inside out, with everything in it.
He sat down on the stairs in the dark, outside the door, in the old place.
He could not hear the words and did not try. He heard the shape of it: his sister talking, and being heard. Then, muffled by the door, came a sound he had been hungry for since a Hertfordshire assembly. Elizabeth laughed, once, low, and Georgiana, unmistakably, laughed with her.
The two of them went on talking. The man who owned the house sat on his own stairs like a thief, listening to the only music in it, and wanting nothing in the world moved an inch from where it was.