Chapter 2
She woke before the household, as she had known she would, and lay for some minutes watching the pale green light move across the ceiling before she admitted to herself that she had no intention of going back to sleep.
The hour was not yet six. The maid who had been assigned to her, a quiet, capable girl named Sarah who seemed entirely unsurprised to find a guest awake and dressed so early, helped her into a morning gown with no comment beyond an offer to send up chocolate, which Elizabeth declined.
She wanted, this morning, no company at all, not even the company of a servant who would have to be spoken to.
She wanted the house and the grounds in the hour before they belonged to anyone but themselves.
She went down by a back stair Sarah showed her, and out through a garden door that stood, evidently, unlocked at all hours, and found herself on the gravel walk above the stream with the mist still lying low over the water and no sound anywhere but birds and her own footsteps.
There was a very particular kind of pleasure, she thought, in walking through a place built for grandeur at an hour when grandeur was entirely absent from it.
The house behind her, when she turned to look at it, had none of the composed, performing quality it had worn yesterday afternoon, arranging itself for visitors.
It simply stood there, large and grey and faintly damp with dew, looking the way a house looks when no one is watching it look like anything at all.
She found she preferred it this way. She had always preferred people, and places, when they had forgotten they were being observed.
She walked along the water for some while, past the spot where she had stood with Mr. Darcy yesterday (she noted the spot, and noted that she had noted it, and resolved to think no more about either fact), and came, by a path that curved away from the house and toward a stand of older trees, upon a gardener at work among a long border of roses.
He was an old man, bent at his labour, and he straightened when he saw her and touched his hat with the easy, unhurried civility of a servant who has never had occasion to feel uncertain of his place.
"Good morning, miss. You're up with the birds."
"I could not sleep past the light. Have you been long at Pemberley?"
"Forty years come Michaelmas, miss. Started under the old master, God rest him, and I shall finish under the young one, if he'll have me, which I don't doubt he will, for he's not a man to turn off an old servant for being old.
" He bent again to his roses. "These were his mother's planting, these here.
He won't have them touched beyond the necessary trimming. Says she chose the colours herself."
Elizabeth looked at the roses, nothing extraordinary, a modest planting of pink and white, the kind of thing any gentleman's garden might contain, and found that she was moved by them rather more than their modesty seemed to warrant.
It was not the roses. It was the forty years, and the easy hat-touch, and the certainty in the old man's voice that the young master would keep him on; it was the accumulating weight of a dozen small testimonies, each one ordinary on its own, each one another stone added to a structure she had once been very confident did not need building.
She thanked him and walked on, and did not examine, just yet, why her throat had tightened over a rose border.
A little further on, the path brought her past a low stone building she took, at first glance, for a gardener's lodge, until she saw the schoolroom windows set into its near side and understood it for something else: a place, perhaps, where a child of the house had once been taught her letters, in fair weather, away from the formality of the great house proper.
She did not go nearer. That was not her place, and she had, in any case, no business inventing histories for a family she had known a twelvemonth and disliked, with great confidence, for the better part of that time.
But she found the thought of it lingered with her regardless: a small girl at a small desk, in a room built specifically for her ease, by a father, or a brother, who had troubled himself to think of what a child might want.
It did not accord well with the account of pride and selfishness she had once been so ready to credit. Very little here did.
She thought of Charlotte, briefly and with some surprise at herself, standing in the dew with her half-boots wet through, Charlotte, who had married for a house and a settled future and had seemed, on Elizabeth's single visit to Hunsford, not unhappy in the bargain, whatever Elizabeth privately thought of its romance.
She had judged that marriage rather more harshly, in her own mind, than she now found she wished to.
A sensible match was easy enough to despise when one had never stood, even briefly, in a garden such as this one, turning over the question of what a life might be, and finding the answer less straightforward than her one-and-twenty years had previously required it to be.
The path brought her round to a part of the grounds she had not seen the day before, where the wood opened suddenly onto a wider prospect of the valley, the house visible below at an angle that showed its full extent for the first time — and Elizabeth stopped, entirely, because it was, without exaggeration, one of the handsomest views she had ever been given by accident.
She stood and looked at it for a long while.
She thought, with the particular ruthlessness she generally reserved for examining her own conduct, that she had spent a good deal of the last year being extremely certain about a man she had met perhaps a dozen times, in rooms designed to show neither of them at their best, and that certainty of that kind, arrived at so cheaply, ought to have made her suspicious of itself at the time.
It had not. She had been very pleased with her own perception.
She was considerably less pleased with it this morning.
By the time she turned back toward the house the mist had begun to lift properly, and the gravel walk before the entrance was catching the first real warmth of the sun, and she went in by the same door she had come out of, somewhat later than she had intended, and with her mind a good deal less settled than when she had left it.
She found, on entering the breakfast room, that she was not the first down after all.
Mr. Darcy was standing at the window with a letter in his hand, not reading it — he had evidently finished — but holding it, in the particular abstracted way of a man whose thoughts have wandered some distance from the paper itself.
He turned at the sound of the door and something in his face arranged itself, quickly, into the ordinary courtesy of a host greeting a guest, though Elizabeth thought she had caught, in the instant before the arrangement was complete, something else beneath it — surprise, perhaps, or simple pleasure at finding her there, she could not have said with any confidence which.
"Miss Bennet. You are an early riser."
"I find I sleep poorly in unfamiliar beds, however comfortable. I hope I have not disturbed you."
"Not at all. I am generally up by this hour myself.
" He folded the letter and set it aside, and Elizabeth, with the small, unworthy curiosity of a person who would dearly like to know the contents of any letter not addressed to her, noted that he did not offer to say from whom it came, and that she had absolutely no right to wonder. "Did you walk far?"
"As far as the rise above the wood — your gardener was kind enough to point the way, after first telling me a great deal about your mother's roses."
Something moved across his face at that, brief and unguarded, gone almost before she had registered it. "Old Thomas. He has been at Pemberley longer than I have."
"He seems very certain you will keep him."
"I should hope he has reason to be." He said it simply, without any apparent awareness that the remark told her anything at all, and Elizabeth thought, not for the first time since yesterday, that this was perhaps the central difficulty of revising an opinion so thoroughly held: that the evidence against it kept arriving in the most inconvenient form, which was to say, in the form of a man entirely unaware that he was offering any.
They were joined, a few minutes later, by Mrs. Annesley, a quiet, sensible-looking woman whom Elizabeth understood to be some sort of companion to Miss Darcy, though she had not yet met Miss Darcy herself, and the conversation turned to nothing in particular: the weather, which promised fair; the plans for the day, which included, Mr. Darcy said, a small excursion to a viewpoint some miles distant, weather permitting, for any of the party who cared for it.
He addressed this information chiefly to Mrs. Annesley, but Elizabeth was aware of being included in it, in the careful, unobtrusive way a good host includes a guest without appearing to single her out.
Her aunt and uncle came down shortly after, full of the comfort of their rooms and the excellence of the chocolate, and the conversation broadened, and Elizabeth observed the table from a small distance even while she sat at it, the way one observes a scene one suspects one will want to remember precisely.
She watched her uncle, who had spent the whole of dinner the previous evening rather quiet, grow easier by degrees as Mr. Darcy asked him, without the smallest condescension, some intelligent question about the trade he conducted in town, and listened to the answer with what was unmistakably real attention rather than performed civility.
She watched her aunt watch all of it, and catch, once, Elizabeth's eye across the table, and look quickly away again with an expression Elizabeth had no difficulty interpreting and every intention of ignoring.
She thought, watching them, of the letter at Hunsford — the one she had read so many times that certain phrases had worn smooth in her memory, the way a much-handled coin loses its edges.
She had read it first in fury, certain that every line was either falsehood or self-justification.
She had read it a second time, days later, in something closer to shame.
She had not, until this morning, considered that she might need to read it a third time, in light of a rose border and a forty-year servant and a man who asked intelligent questions of a tradesman because the answers interested him and not because manners required it.
She did not know, yet, what the third reading would tell her.
There was a fourth possibility, too, which she had not permitted herself to consider directly until this moment: that she had been correct about a great many particulars (his manner at the assembly, the slight he had offered her before he knew her, the interference at Netherfield, all of it true, all of it fairly resented) and yet had constructed, from those particulars, a man considerably smaller and more ungenerous than the one who had actually existed beneath them.
It was possible to be right about the evidence and wrong about the verdict.
She had not previously thought herself capable of such an error.
She was beginning to suspect she had committed it rather thoroughly, and that the suspicion would cost her something to confirm, not because the discovery would be unwelcome, but because Elizabeth Bennet had never found that particular admission came cheaply, however much she might privately respect the people who made it.
She put the letter, and the roses, and the look on his face when she mentioned old Thomas, away in the part of her mind reserved for things she would examine again later, when there was leisure for it.
There was not, this morning. There was a house full of expected guests arriving within the hour, and a host whose ease in his own home she was finding it increasingly difficult to set beside the man she thought she had known in Hertfordshire, and no time at all, before the carriages began arriving, to decide which of the two men she was actually going to have to sit across from at dinner.