A Season at Pemberley (The Longbourn & Pemberley Variations #3)

Chapter 1

Elizabeth had been promised a house, and the house, when at last they came upon it, exceeded every promise that had been made on its behalf.

They had driven through the park for the better part of half a mile before the trees gave way and the building presented itself entire: a large, handsome stone edifice standing well on rising ground, backed by a ridge of high woody hills, and in front a stream of some natural importance swelled into greater, without any artificial appearance.

Elizabeth was delighted. She had seen good houses before.

Rosings was a good house, in the way that a sermon is a good sermon, by virtue of its length and its insistence upon itself, but she had never before felt that a house had been arrived at, rather than imposed.

Pemberley had not been built to overawe a visitor.

It had simply been built well, in a place that deserved it, and had been left to speak for itself for a very long time.

"Well," said her uncle, who was a man not given to raptures, "I begin to think your friend Wickham did not do this family justice."

Elizabeth did not answer that. She had been managing, since they entered the county, a private campaign against thinking of Mr. Darcy at all, and it had not gone well even before they passed the lodge, and she suspected it would go a great deal worse now that they were quite inside his park, surrounded on every side by evidence of a mind she had once been very certain she understood.

She had not wished to come. She had said so to her aunt, with what she had believed at the time to be a perfectly creditable degree of indifference, and her aunt had looked at her with an expression Elizabeth did not care to examine too closely, and had said only that the housekeeper would surely know whether the family was from home, and that they need not go in if Elizabeth had some objection she preferred not to name.

Elizabeth had no objection she preferred to name, which was not at all the same as having none, and she had got into the carriage anyway, telling herself that a woman could admire architecture without admiring its owner, and that the two were entirely separable, and that she was now thinking of this a great deal more than the subject warranted.

The housekeeper, a respectable-looking elderly woman, much less fine and more civil than Elizabeth had any notion of finding her, received them in the hall and conducted them through rooms lofty and handsome, and furnished in a style corresponding with the fortune of their proprietor; but Elizabeth saw, with admiration of his taste, that it was neither gaudy nor uselessly fine, with less of splendor and more real elegance than the furniture of Rosings.

She thought, and could not help thinking, that to be mistress of Pemberley might be something.

She had not expected to have that thought. She set it aside, with the particular firmness of a woman who has caught herself out and does not intend to be caught out twice.

The housekeeper's name was Mrs. Reynolds, and she had been in the family, she told them, ever since her master was four years old, and she spoke of him with a warmth that made Elizabeth's attention sharpen in spite of herself.

He was the best landlord, and the best master, that ever lived; not like the wild young men nowadays, who think of nothing but themselves.

There was not one of his tenants or servants but would give him a good name.

Some people called him proud, but Mrs. Reynolds had never seen anything of it.

To her, he had always been the sweetest-tempered, most generous-hearted boy in the world.

Elizabeth listened to this with a sensation she could not immediately name, and which she did not attempt to name until they had passed into the picture gallery and stood before a portrait she had been brought to see particularly.

It was a good likeness, Mrs. Reynolds said, taken when his father was alive, and Elizabeth, looking at it, understood that the elder Mr. Darcy had been a man of considerable dignity, the sort of face that did not invite familiarity and did not seem to require it.

She moved a few steps further, and stopped before another, smaller picture, and there he was: Mr. Darcy, with such a smile over his face as she remembered to have sometimes seen when he looked at her.

She stood several minutes before the picture, in earnest contemplation, and returned to it again before they quitted the gallery.

There was something strange in standing in a stranger's house, for he was, in every way that mattered, still largely a stranger to her, whatever they had said to each other at Hunsford, and finding that the housekeeper's account of him and the housemaid's portrait of him and her own private, much-revised opinion of him had all, by some accident of architecture and light, arrived at the same room at the same time.

She had refused him. She had been right, she still believed, to refuse him as he had asked her then, but she had not been right about everything she had believed of him while she did it, and the gallery seemed unkindly designed to remind her of the distinction.

They were on the grounds, walking toward the stream that ran below the house, when she saw him.

There was no mistaking him, even at a distance, even though she had been assured, with apparent certainty, that the family was from home.

He was coming down the walk toward them, and there was no time to do anything about it — no time to compose her countenance, no time to decide what expression would be correct, no time even to fully credit that this was happening before it had entirely happened.

She felt herself colour, and could do nothing to prevent it, which struck her, even in the moment, as a particular kind of misfortune: that the body should betray what the mind had not yet finished deciding to feel.

He looked, for the first instant, as surprised as she was.

Whatever she had expected — coldness, civility worn as armor, the particular blankness of a man determined not to be moved — it was not what she saw, which was something closer to confusion, quickly mastered, and then something else beneath the confusion that she did not permit herself to examine.

"Miss Bennet." He said it, and then seemed to find that insufficient, for he added, "I had not understood that you were in the country."

"We had not intended to trouble Pemberley, sir. We understood the family to be from home, or we should not have presumed."

This was not, strictly, true; her aunt and uncle had wished particularly to see the house, and Elizabeth had not found, in the end, sufficient grounds on which to object without explaining herself, which she had been entirely unwilling to do.

But it seemed the correct thing to say, and she said it, and watched him absorb it.

"You are not intruding in the least. I came down a day earlier than I was expected. The household had no notice of it."

There followed a silence of the kind that exists only between two people who have a very great deal they are not saying, and who are both perfectly aware of it.

Elizabeth was conscious of her aunt and uncle some few steps behind her, and of Mr. Darcy's eyes moving, briefly, past her shoulder to take note of them, and then returning.

"Will you do me the honour of introducing me to your friends?"

It was so unlike anything she had expected of him, this was not the Darcy of Hertfordshire, who could not be troubled to dance with anyone he had not specifically been asked to admire, that for a moment Elizabeth simply looked at him.

Then she recovered herself, and performed the introduction, watching with something very near astonishment as he conversed with her uncle, a tradesman whose situation in life Mr. Darcy could not have failed to understand, with an ease and a civility that asked nothing and assumed nothing and gave every appearance of genuine pleasure in the acquaintance.

They walked together along the stream for some time — Mr. Darcy, by what arrangement of will or accident Elizabeth could not afterward have said, falling into step beside her while her aunt and uncle walked a little ahead, admiring the grounds with the particular attentiveness of people who have not often had the leisure to admire anything so fine.

He asked after her family. He asked, with what she thought was rather more care than the question strictly required, after her sister Jane, and Elizabeth answered him, and found, to her considerable surprise, that the conversation between them had none of the laboured quality she had expected of it.

It was not easy, precisely. But it was not difficult in the way she had feared, either.

It was the conversation of two people who had once said a very great many wrong things to each other, and who were now, with some care, attempting to say a few right ones instead.

It was her uncle who undid her composure entirely, by mentioning, in the most natural way in the world, that they were travelling through Derbyshire for some days yet, with no very fixed plan beyond seeing what was worth seeing.

"Then you must allow me," Mr. Darcy said, "to be of some use to you in that respect."

And then, in a sequence Elizabeth was never afterward able to reconstruct, happening with a speed that left her no opportunity to prevent it, he was explaining that he was that week engaged in receiving a small party of friends at Pemberley, nothing formal, nothing that should make the smallest claim upon anyone's ceremony, and that he hoped Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner, and Miss Bennet, would consent to remain as his guests for some part of the week, that they might see something more of the country than could be managed from an inn.

Elizabeth's aunt, who had eyes, and who had been using them since the moment Mr. Darcy first appeared on the walk, looked, for one unguarded instant, entirely delighted.

"We should not wish to discompose your household, sir," Elizabeth said, with what she hoped was sufficient firmness to end the matter, "arriving with so little notice, and at a time when you are already engaged with other company."

"There is no discomposing a house with twenty bedchambers, Miss Bennet, by the addition of three more persons to it. My sister will be very glad of it. She has had no female company her own age in some time, and I think she would value yours particularly."

It was, Elizabeth understood, not an argument addressed to her at all, but to her aunt, and it succeeded entirely.

Mrs. Gardiner said that they should be very happy to stay, if Lizzy had no objection, and looked at Lizzy in a manner that made plain she expected no objection to be forthcoming, and would not have credited one if it had been.

Elizabeth, who could think of several objections, all of them true, and none of them speakable in present company, had no means of declining that would not require an explanation she was entirely unwilling to give.

To say, *I cannot stay, because I once refused this man's hand and called him the proudest, most disagreeable man of my acquaintance, and he wrote me a letter afterward that I have read perhaps thirty times since, and I no longer know what I think of him, which is a state of affairs I find considerably more alarming than the dislike I once felt with such confidence* — that was not a sentence available to her, in a garden, with her aunt's bright and watchful eye upon her, and Mr. Darcy himself standing not three feet away, awaiting her answer with an expression she could not read and did not entirely trust herself to try.

"You are very good. We should be glad to stay."

She did not look at him as she said it. She did not need to look at him to know that something in his face had eased.

It was settled, in the end, with the speed and informality of a thing decided by people who had already decided it before they had quite finished discussing it.

A servant was sent ahead to the inn at Lambton for their trunks.

Mrs. Reynolds, recalled and informed that the rooms in the east wing should after all be wanted, received the news with no surprise whatsoever, which told Elizabeth something about how often this particular master's plans altered themselves on short notice, and how little it troubled his household when they did.

By the time Elizabeth climbed the stairs that night to the room that had been prepared for her, a fine room hung with pale green silk, looking out over the very stream they had walked beside that afternoon, she had spoken perhaps eleven words to Mr. Darcy since dinner, on the entirely unremarkable subject of whether the weather would hold for tomorrow's plans, and she had spent the whole of dinner intensely aware of where he was sitting, and had eaten almost nothing, and had laughed twice at things that were not, on reflection, very amusing.

She sat for some time at the window before she undressed, watching the last of the light go out of the water below.

She tried, with the particular discipline she generally reserved for difficult truths about herself, to take an honest accounting of the day: of the house, which had moved her more than she had expected; of Mrs. Reynolds, whose testimony she found she could not dismiss, however inconvenient it was to credit it; of the man on the walk, who had not been proud at all, not once, not even when speaking to her uncle, whose situation in life he must once have thought beneath his notice entirely.

She had come to Pemberley to see a house.

She had not expected to leave the gallery uncertain of a man she had believed herself entirely settled upon.

She lay down at last in the dark, in a bed finer than any she had slept in, in a house that did not belong to her and never would, and tried, with a determination she had rarely needed to summon on her own account, to feel nothing at all.

She did not succeed.