Chapter 17
THE PORTRAIT CONFESSION
The appointments held for three mornings. On the second of them, Elizabeth stopped at the second turn and addressed a tree.
"Good morning, Sir William."
Darcy looked at the tree. It was the broad squat beech with the low bend in its trunk. The wind moved it as she spoke, and it did, in fairness, bow.
"You have been naming my trees."
"Someone had to. You keep a quarter mile of distinguished neighbors here and walk past them every morning without a word.
" She gestured down the avenue with her free hand.
"That is Sir William, who bows to everybody.
The thin one by the wall is Mary. She is full of improving sentiments, and nobody listens.
" They walked on. At the third beech, the stout one planted square where the avenue narrowed, she tipped her head. "And this is Mr. Collins."
"Mr. Collins."
"Stout. Immovable. Always exactly where one feared he would be." She considered the tree with judicial calm. "I addressed him for a quarter of an hour on Tuesday, and he said nothing I had not heard before."
The laugh got out of Darcy whole, before any part of him could dress it.
It rang down the bare avenue, an enormous unpracticed sound he had not heard from himself in years.
Elizabeth stopped walking. She looked at him as if a stranger had stepped out from behind her husband. The stranger had a better face.
Her hand tightened by some fraction on his arm. Darcy, who had spent a lifetime retrieving his countenance, did not retrieve it. He let her see the whole of it. It was the most reckless thing he had done since a wet field in December. They went on, and neither of them mentioned it.
On the fourth morning he brought the case.
He had slept three hours and rehearsed nothing, because every rehearsal ended the same way, with him eloquent and alone. He carried it out before the house was dressed, wrapped in oilcloth against the frost. When she came down the steps and saw it under his arm, her eyebrows went up.
"You have brought a parcel on a walk. Is it luncheon? I warn you that I have hopes."
"It is not luncheon."
"A betrothal gift for Mr. Collins, then. He has been very constant."
"Elizabeth." Her name still came out of him like something carried on a tray. "Will you walk up to the overlook with me? There is a thing I have meant to tell you since the cottage. You said it would keep. It has kept long enough."
The wit went out of her face, and attention replaced it. She took his arm without being offered it, which was new, and they went up.
The overlook stood above the lake at the avenue's far end, where the ground rose and the trees gave out.
The whole valley lay open: the water gray as slate, the woods black with winter, the house small and bright below.
There were no walls anywhere, and no ancestors watching.
He had chosen the spot for exactly that.
Standing on it now, he understood he had also chosen a place with no doors, for either of them.
He set the case on the flat stone bench and untied the oilcloth. The cord beneath was knotted, and the cold had tightened it. He pulled off his gloves and worked the knot with bare fingers. They were clumsy for reasons that had nothing to do with the cold.
"Let me," Elizabeth said.
Her hands came over his, gloved over bare.
For a moment they undid the knot between them, four hands on one cord.
He stood in the frost and held still under the small, ordinary, impossible weight of her fingers working against his.
The cord came free. He stepped back. Whatever happened on this hill in the next quarter hour, he had had that.
"Open it," he said.
She folded the cloth back. Darcy stopped breathing somewhere in the second fold. She met her own face.
The portrait looked out of the case the way it had looked out of the portfolio: alive, unfinished, on the edge of saying something the painter had never heard.
Two springs of weather had not touched it.
Elizabeth went very still. It was the stillness he knew from a breakfast room, with a note in her hand.
When she spoke, her voice was even and an octave lower.
"This is Mr. Ashford's study. I sat for it two springs ago. The family bought the formal one. He told Papa this one was not for sale." Her eyes came up. "Where did you get my face?"
"Brook Street. His studio. He keeps a portfolio of the work he will not sell, and I was idle in it while Bingley sat for his portrait, and I turned a leaf, and there you were."
"When."
"September."
He watched her do the arithmetic. He had done it himself a hundred times, and knew its stations: September. Before Netherfield. Before the assembly. Before everything. She passed each station in silence, and each silence landed on him like a sentence read out.
"You knew my face," she said slowly, "at Meryton. When you turned. When you went white and could not finish your sentence."
"I had known it for three weeks. I had looked at it three times and gone back twice on the pretext of an umbrella, and asked the painter who you were, and he could not tell me.
A gentleman's daughter, somewhere south of London.
I checked the map, Elizabeth. Hertfordshire lies north.
I told myself the whole way to Netherfield that I was attending my friend. "
"And then I turned around."
"And then you turned around, and the painting was standing in an assembly room, laughing at something I would never be told.
" His voice stayed level by labor. "Bingley pressed me to dance, and I began to answer with the truth.
She is. The truth was: here. She is here.
I strangled it, because saying it meant explaining the portfolio and the umbrella and the map, in front of two hundred strangers, while you watched.
What came out instead, you heard. You carried it out of the room and made it famous. "
Elizabeth looked at the portrait. Then at him. The frost ticked in the grass.
"Tolerable," she said.
"The most expensive word I will ever say.
I have paid on it since." He made himself go on.
The worst was still in the case. "You should understand what you were to me before you were anything.
I had a portrait that could not interrupt me.
It waited where I left it. It wanted nothing, asked nothing, and would never look at me and find the frame better company than the man.
I had watched a marriage from inside a house, Elizabeth, my whole childhood: two people smiling from one canvas in the gallery while the breakfasts below went silent, year on year.
I do not know to this day whether they were unhappy or whether I saw it wrong.
But I chose the picture. I was eight-and-twenty years old, and I fell in love with a flat thing in a portfolio because it was safe, and I called that taste. "
"And the woman at the assembly was not safe."
"The woman at the assembly was the end of safety.
She was loud and quick and alive in every direction, and the room moved around her like water, and I have never in my life been so frightened of anything as I was of you, laughing, seven feet away.
" He took a breath. The next part he had said aloud to no living person, and his body knew it: cold hands, loud heart, the hill very still. He said it anyway.
"There is a question you asked me in the cottage.
The wheels cut it off, and you were too proud to ask again, and I have owed it since.
What are you to me. Here is the whole answer.
You were the portrait, and then you were the proof that I had wasted my life on portraits.
I loved the idea of you before I loved you, and I am sorry for it.
You deserved better than to be someone's safe dream.
What I feel now is not safe, and it is not a dream, and it has your name on it, and I will not insult either of us by calling it anything but what it is. "
She stood with her own painted face in her hands, in the cold, for a long time. Her fury he had met before. He had maps of it. This stillness was new country, and he stood in it without shelter and waited.
"When you heard I refused Mr. Collins," she said at last, not looking up. "In Hertfordshire. What did you think?"
"That you had more courage than I did. In those words.
You chose yourself over the safest roof in the county.
I had been choosing safety over myself for twenty years and calling it judgment.
I have measured every brave thing I have done since against that refusal.
The list is short, and you are on all of it. "
"Ashford." Her voice had begun doing something at the edges. "He would not sell it. He told my father so. How did you—"
"He would not sell it to me either. He gave it.
A wedding gift, when I went for the license, with advice attached.
" Darcy looked at the painting between her hands rather than at her face.
Her face had gone somewhere he could not follow.
"He told me to give it to you before you found it on your own.
He said a secret kept past its moment becomes the lie.
He also said yours was the only face, of forty, that anyone came back for.
He thought it would help. He warned me it would not. "
The valley lay quiet under them. Below, the house went about its bright small business.
Elizabeth looked at the portrait, and Darcy looked at Elizabeth.
The silence ran longer than any silence of their marriage, and he let it run.
He had finished, and the rest of his life belonged to whatever she said next.
She covered the painted face with the cloth, deliberately, fold by fold, and set the case down on the bench.
"Six weeks," she said. "I have been your wife six weeks. I asked you in your book room for everything, and you gave me everything but this."
"You said it would keep."
"I did." Her chin came up. Her eyes were terrible and bright. "And you let me say it, knowing what was in the corner of the room. Do not tell me about the painter's advice. You did not give me this before I found it. You gave me this before I found it out."
It went in clean, as true things do. He offered no answer. There was none. There was only hope, which he had stopped measuring out three days too early.
Elizabeth stepped back from the bench, one full step, and the frost cracked under her boot. She turned toward the avenue.
"Do not go."
It came out of him with no grace in it at all.
She stopped where she was, her back to him, her breath standing in the air.
Darcy had spent his life letting people walk away from him and calling the letting dignity.
He had watched her go small down a winter road once already and made a virtue of standing still.
He looked at her straight back and her gloved hands and the whole departing shape of the only argument he would ever care about winning.
He said the word he had never in his adult life said to anyone.
"Please."
The valley held still around them. Then she turned, and came back past him without a glance, to the bench. She unwrapped the portrait again, fold by fold. She stood it upright against the back of the bench, facing the two of them.
"Now," she said. "All three of us are here. Let us have it out."