Chapter 18
THE OTHER WOMAN
Her own face looked back at her from the bench, and Elizabeth made herself hold its eyes.
The painted woman was two years younger and would stay that way. She sat in spring light, mid-thought, about to say something clever. She had been about to say it since before Elizabeth had ever heard the name Darcy. The wit waited on one side of her mouth, exactly where Elizabeth carried her own.
Please, he had said. One word, bare on the cold air.
In six weeks of marriage she had never heard him ask for anything.
He gave, and arranged, and endured, and never asked, and the word had knocked something loose in her, and she had turned around before she had finished deciding to.
Very well. If she was staying, she would stay braced.
"I am jealous of her," Elizabeth said. "I want that understood at the outset. I have been jealous since you said the word September, and jealousy makes me unkind. If I am unkind in the next quarter hour, you will know its name."
"You have no cause—"
"I have every cause, and you will let me lay it out.
" Her heart was going hard. She kept her eyes on the painting, because looking at it was the discipline.
The fear had lived in the dark all her life, and dark was what it needed.
She had brought it out where the man and the painting could both see it.
"Look at her. She is everything I have been afraid of becoming since I was old enough to watch a marriage.
She does not age. She does not argue. She is never tired, never wrong, never ashamed of her mother.
She will not even take sugar." Her voice stayed level through the joke, which cost it something.
"A man could love her for fifty years at no expense at all.
And you did love her. You loved her first. I have spent a winter learning to want my own husband, and this morning I learn the position was filled before I ever applied.
Not by another woman. Another woman I could fight.
By me, with the inconvenient parts left out. "
He moved toward her. She put up one hand, and he stopped. She finished it, because the fear was hers and she would be the one to say it.
"Here is the whole of it, since you are collecting my secrets at last. I have always been afraid that marriage is a long exchange.
The woman goes in, and the picture of her comes out, and the husband keeps the picture and forgets where he put the woman.
I did not learn that fear from novels." Her voice did something at the edges, and she let it.
"I watched my father fall in love with a pretty face that laughed at his jokes, and I have watched him live in his library ever since.
You are not the only one who watched a marriage go quiet, Fitzwilliam. Mine served breakfast."
The valley was quiet. The painted woman went on almost speaking.
Darcy came and stood beside her, shoulder to shoulder, both of them facing the bench. When he spoke, it was to the portrait.
"Then we have been afraid of the same thing from opposite sides of it.
You, of being traded for the picture. I, of the original coming close enough to find me wanting.
" He studied his rival a moment. "Let me tell you what I know of this lady, after three weeks of devotion.
She is about to say something clever, and she never will.
I waited. It was restful. It was also nothing, and I did not know it was nothing until you turned around at an assembly and finished the sentence out loud.
"You have been finishing it ever since, and it has never once been what I expected, and that, Elizabeth, is the whole difference," he continued.
"She cannot surprise me. She cannot name a tree.
She has never lost count of the names to two footmen called Thomas, or counted my sister's wrong notes as trusts, or asked me whether protection and surveillance look alike from the receiving end. "
He turned from the painting to her, and his face was as open as the valley.
"I loved her because she asked nothing of me.
I love you because you ask everything, and the asking has made me better than I was.
You feared being traded for a picture. I traded the picture for you the night you walked into my book room, and I have never once looked back at the wall. "
Elizabeth's breath came easier than it had all morning. Almost everything in her believed him. The last of it, the dark-dwelling part, asked its final question with her mouth.
"And in ten years? When I am not clever at breakfast, and there is gray in my hair, and I have been wrong about something enormous and too proud to say so. She will still be mid-sentence somewhere in this house. Original things wear, Fitzwilliam. Copies keep."
"In ten years she will still be promising a clever thing she cannot produce," Darcy said, "and you will have produced three thousand of them, and I will have written the best in margins. I keep accounts, you know. It is a failing of mine. Ask anyone."
The laugh broke out of her sideways, half a sob, entirely against orders. The morning let go of its weight all at once. She pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth and breathed.
"I found a boy," she said, when she could.
"At the foot of your gallery, hung low, where the glory would not be troubled by him.
Eight years old, with a wolfhound, being careful with his face.
I have gone back to look at him all month.
I believe I married him, that careful boy, grown tall.
So let me say it where she can hear me." She nodded at the portrait.
"I am not asking the boy to be braver. He was brave this morning on this hill, with his oilcloth and his three hours of sleep.
I am asking the man to stop holding still.
That is my last term, and there is no lawyer for it.
The vault stays open. Hard things while they are hard. Not when they are old."
"Witnessed," Darcy said gravely, "before the lady."
"She is an excellent witness. She never gossips.
" Elizabeth pulled off her right glove, finger by finger, and held out her bare hand in the cold.
"Well, then. We have had it out, all three of us, and I find I can live with her.
She had you first, but she had you cheap, and I have you at full price, with the fear and the temper and the margins. Mine is the better bargain."
He took her hand in both of his, bare to bare, and bowed his head over it, and kissed her knuckles once, and did not let go. They stood like that for a while, on the cold hill. The painted woman went on not saying her clever thing, and nobody minded her at all.
They wrapped the other woman with care, the two of them, fold by fold, and tied the cord.
They carried her down the avenue between them, one hand each on the case, their fingers overlapping where the handle was short.
Past Sir William went the three of them, and he bowed them by.
Past Mary, who kept her sentiments to herself.
Past Mr. Collins, who had nothing to add.