Chapter 19
CHOOSING
The next morning, Darcy found a book waiting on the library table.
It was her father's Cowper, the one with her quick light hand in the margins. A slip of paper stood up out of it like a flag. The slip said: The gallery. Nine o'clock. Bring nobody.
He was there at seven minutes before nine, because eight minutes was unbearable.
Elizabeth stood at the far end of the gallery, at the foot of two hundred years of his ancestors, in front of the boy with the wolfhound. The morning came gray and clean through the high windows. She heard him, and spoke without turning around.
"I have been making this gentleman's acquaintance for a month. He is shy, but we get on." She looked at the boy a moment longer. "I have written to Mr. Ashford."
Darcy stopped three strides away. "Have you."
"This morning, before my courage was awake enough to argue. He is coming north in the spring." She turned. Her chin was up and her eyes were bright. Her hands were not steady, and she had not hidden them, and that was the bravest thing in the gallery. "I am commissioning a portrait. Of you."
"Of me." The gallery was full of him: rows of his own jaw, his own brow, performing their two hundred years. "There is no shortage."
"There is the worst shortage I ever heard of.
" She came toward him as she said it, unhurried, the length of three ancestors.
"The county has the Master of Pemberley.
The wall has the boy who learned to hold still.
Nobody has painted the man who laughs on the avenue.
The man who reads margins, and buys pianofortes the week of his own grim wedding, and stands when his sister wants listening.
" She stopped in front of him, close, her face turned up.
"The one who said please. I want him where I can keep him.
Mr. Ashford will paint you, and you will sit for it badly, and I will attend every sitting and provoke you, so that he catches the right face. "
His face was already doing the thing she meant to have painted. He could feel it and did not stop it.
"And where will you hang him?" he asked. "The gallery is for ancestors."
"The gallery is for performing. He will hang in our sitting room, where we live, beside the woman from Brook Street.
She and I have come to terms. She may keep the spring of the year eleven, and I shall keep you.
" Her hands came up and found his lapels.
They had gripped there once, in a cold cottage, because her hands had needed something to hold against fear.
They gripped now, and there was no fear anywhere in the building.
"You once loved a picture of me because it was safe.
I am asking you to sit for a picture so that I can prove I want the dangerous one.
That is the whole of the commission. Say yes. "
"Yes," Darcy said. It came out on no breath at all.
She pulled him down by the lapels, or he bent, or both, and her mouth found his, and the two hundred years of ancestors could do nothing whatever about it.
His hand came to her waist, where a ballroom had lived for three months.
Her heart was loud against him. His was louder.
The kiss was soft, and then less soft. Her balance left her.
His arm arrived before she had to ask, his lifelong habit at last in its right work.
She drew back only far enough to look him in the eye, her breath unsteady, her hands still full of his coat.
"I am told it is frightening," he said.
"It is. We shall get on famously." And she kissed him again, laughing, and the laugh got into the kiss and stayed there. Somewhere down the row a man in a ruff went on disapproving for eternity, ignored.
The letters came north four days later, two in one post. Darcy read them at breakfast with his wife reading his face.
The first was the Colonel's, brief as a dispatch.
Done, and cleanly. The colonel of the regiment had the accounts, the tradesmen's papers, and the other documents you sent, and was grateful to act before scandal could attach to his corps.
The commission is sold. The debts are bought and sit in my strongbox.
The gentleman has his terms, two hundred pounds and a written understanding that the debts follow him the day he crosses south again.
He signed it without reading, which tells you what he thought of his position.
He is expected north of the border by month's end.
He was, I am told, philosophical. They are always philosophical when the arithmetic is done for them.
Send my love to my new cousin. Tell her my price is a fortnight at Pemberley in June.
"Tell me," Elizabeth said.
He told her all of it, plainly, the vault standing open: the creditors bought up since January, the evidence gathered from Lambton and Meryton, the colonel's relief. And the last piece, which was not his.
"The note. The one that brought you to the cottage.
The hand was disguised, but a disguised hand keeps its habits, and the colonel had a year of Wickham's returns and mess chits to lay beside it.
It was proof enough of design, and I needed the note itself to prove it.
" He turned his cup. "I wrote to your father for it at Christmas.
He sent it by return of post, with one line: I kept it for exactly this letter. "
Elizabeth sat back. Her father, who waited in his library to be asked, and her husband, who never made anyone ask, had between them spent the winter building a cage around the man who hunted her. Neither had said a word.
"Not vengeance," she said, testing it.
"No. He is alive, solvent, and in Scotland. But he is on a tide table now, and the tide is mine." Darcy said it without heat, the way he said true things. "He will not come back. Men like him go forward. It is the one reliable thing about them."
The second letter was Bingley's, and Bingley's hand was a gallop.
You will have heard from your colonel, so I will give you my news straight out: Caroline is gone to Louisa in town, for a long visit, duration unfixed.
I asked her about the note. She would not lie to my face, which I will say for her, and I find I cannot be in a room with her yet, which I will not apologize for.
Jane knows the whole and has been gentler about it than I have managed.
We are married on the tenth of March and you are both commanded to Netherfield, where I promise the company will be smaller than formerly, and better.
Elizabeth read it twice. The morning Caroline Bingley had built in a cottage doorway had come round the long way at last. It had arrived at her own door. The bill was in the one currency she had never planned to spend: Charles's good opinion.
"The tenth of March," Elizabeth said. "Jane will want me a fortnight early."
"Then we shall go a fortnight early."
"We." She looked at him over the marmalade. The word sat there being enormous, and neither of them remarked on it.
Hertfordshire in late February was mud and wedding-clothes, and Longbourn had never been louder in its life.
Mrs. Bennet had decided sometime in the winter that Mr. Darcy was the finest man in England.
The conversion had the heat of the newly converted.
He was fed, praised, consulted about lace as a man of taste, seated in the best chair, and reported on to neighbors through an open window while he sat there hearing it.
He bore it all with a gravity that Elizabeth, watching from across the parlor, knew at last to read fluently.
The line at his mouth was not endurance.
It was her own joke about the locket, being saved up to tell her on the stairs.
Jane glowed, and the glow had no shadow side now. They sat up the first night with the candle between them. Elizabeth heard every plan for the tenth of March and matched her sister joy for joy. She meant all of it, and fell asleep mid-sentence in her old bed like a girl.
She took Lydia for a walk the second day, alone, on the path to Oakham Mount.
"You walk too fast," Lydia said. "And there is nothing at the top but wind. I cannot think why—"
"Lydia. I am going to say a thing once, and then we shall talk about bonnets the whole way home.
" Elizabeth kept walking, and kept her voice level, because level was what would land.
"Last autumn a man sat beside you at our aunt's card table and asked you small questions about me.
My walks. My hours. Where I went alone. You answered them, because he was handsome and he laughed at what you said, and he took what you gave him and used it to do me harm.
Real harm, Lydia. The kind that does not mend. "
"I never did anything—"
"You never did anything." Elizabeth stopped and looked at her sister, fifteen and pink with cold and outrage.
She gentled it, because gentling was the only road in.
"I know. That is the whole lesson, and it is a hard one, so I will say it plainly: a clever man can do a great deal with a girl who never did anything.
What you know is worth money to people who smile at you.
Spend it like money. That is all. That is the entire sermon. "
Lydia walked in furious silence for a hundred yards.
Then she said, "Was it Wickham?" and Elizabeth said nothing.
Lydia, fifteen, looked for one unguarded moment like a person doing sums she did not enjoy.
"Mrs. Forster said he left without paying his mess bill," she said at last, with great scorn, and tossed her head, and began to talk about bonnets.
It was not a reformation. It was a seed in February ground. Elizabeth walked her sister home and counted it.
Her father found her in the library on the last evening. She understood he had been waiting for her there since dinner.