Chapter 11
It rained from breakfast onward, the steady, unhurried sort of rain that settles in for the whole of a day and asks no one's permission to do so, and the house, deprived of its usual occupations, arranged itself by slow degrees into the comfortable disorder of a party with nowhere to be.
Even the servants seemed to move more slowly through it, Elizabeth thought, watching a footman cross the hall with no particular urgency to his step, as though the rain had settled into the very fabric of the house and persuaded everyone within it that nothing required quite so much haste as they had imagined the day before.
Elizabeth had sent her letter to Lydia the morning before, a careful letter, she hoped, urgent enough to be taken seriously and yet not so alarming as to provoke the particular contrariness Lydia generally produced when she suspected her family of trying to manage her, and had spent the day since in a state of suspended waiting that the rain, if anything, only deepened.
There was nothing further to be done until an answer came, or did not come, and Elizabeth had never been a woman who bore waiting easily, and found the enforced idleness of a wet day a poor companion to a mind that wished, very much, to be occupied with anything other than its own anxious circling.
Cards were proposed after breakfast, and abandoned after an hour in favour of conversation, which dissolved, by the early afternoon, into the smaller, looser arrangements a long wet day naturally produces: Mr. and Mrs. Sutcliffe deep in some discussion of mutual acquaintances by the fire; Bingley and Jane, with the particular gravitational pull of two people who had reached an understanding neither had yet quite found the words to declare aloud, settled at a window seat with a book neither of them appeared to be reading; Fitzwilliam persuading Miss Beaumont into a hand of piquet that seemed, from the laughter accompanying it, to be conducted on terms only loosely connected to the actual rules of the game.
Georgiana went to the pianoforte after luncheon, and played for the better part of an hour with a confidence Elizabeth had not yet seen her display before so full a room.
Not the careful, controlled playing of a girl performing her accomplishments for an audience she feared to disappoint, but something looser and more genuinely felt, music played because the playing itself was a pleasure rather than an obligation.
Elizabeth, listening from a chair near the window, watched Darcy watch his sister, and saw in his face an expression she had begun, this past week, to recognize without quite knowing what to call it: something between pride and relief, the particular tenderness of a man who has spent a long while waiting for a thing to mend, and is now permitted to watch it doing so.
The room had thinned itself so gradually, sometime after that, that Elizabeth noticed the absence only once it was nearly complete.
She had gone in search of a volume of poetry Georgiana had mentioned admiring, and discovered that Mr. Darcy had come in by the other door for some purpose of his own, and that the two of them were, for the first time in the whole of the visit, entirely alone together, in the entirely respectable and entirely inconvenient way that two people end up alone in a library on a rainy afternoon when neither has quite intended it.
"Miss Bennet." He looked, for a moment, faintly surprised, though not, she thought, displeased. "I had not realized anyone else was in here."
"I came in search of a book Georgiana mentioned. I confess I have rather lost track of which shelf she described, in a room of this size."
"Allow me." He crossed to the far wall, and she fell into step beside him without quite deciding to, and they stood together before the shelf in question, both reaching, by an accident of timing that struck Elizabeth as almost too convenient to be entirely accidental, for the same volume at the same moment.
His hand closed over the spine a half-second before hers did. He did not withdraw it immediately. Neither, she noticed, with a small private astonishment at her own behavior, did she.
"You read this?" he asked, after a moment, his hand still resting beside hers on the worn leather binding, neither of them moving to claim the book outright.
"I have not. Georgiana spoke of it warmly, and I find myself generally inclined to trust her recommendations."
"She has good judgment, in books as in most things.
" He withdrew his hand at last, and held the volume out to her, and Elizabeth took it, aware of the particular care with which the exchange was managed, as though both of them understood that something had passed between them in that half-second of shared contact that neither was yet prepared to name.
They did not return immediately to the rest of the party.
There was a small sofa near the window, and a fire someone had thought to light against the day's grey chill, and Elizabeth settled into the corner of it with the volume unopened in her lap, and Darcy, after a moment's evident hesitation, took the chair opposite rather than retreating to whatever business had originally brought him to the library.
"You are fond of rain, Miss Bennet? You do not seem to share the general opinion of it as an affliction."
"I am fond of what rain permits. A house in fine weather is always busy with itself — there is somewhere to go, something to be seen, some excursion that must be undertaken before the light changes.
Rain settles all of that. It gives a house permission to simply be a house, for a day, and its inhabitants permission to simply sit in it. "
"That is rather how I think of Pemberley generally, though I had not considered the rain as its particular ally in the matter.
" He was quiet a moment, looking at the fire rather than at her.
"I confess I have sometimes envied houses that did not require quite so much managing.
A house of this size is never simply a house, Miss Bennet.
It is an obligation that happens to have rooms."
"And yet you love it."
"I do. I am aware that the two things sound contradictory, said together, and I am not entirely certain I can explain how they are not, except to say that the obligation and the love arrived at the same time, and have never since been entirely separable in my mind.
I do not know how to want Pemberley less simply because it asks a great deal of me.
I think, if I am honest, I would not know how to want anything that did not ask a great deal. "
Elizabeth turned this over for a moment, watching the firelight move across his face, and spoke before she had entirely decided to, with an honesty she had not planned and did not, on reflection, regret.
"I miss Longbourn rather more than I expected to, on this journey.
It is not so very fine a house — nothing in it would impress anyone accustomed to a place like this — but it is mine, in the particular way a thing becomes one's own simply by having witnessed the whole of one's life within its walls, and I find I think of it more often than I anticipated, walking these very grand rooms of yours. "
"What do you miss of it, particularly?"
Most people, she thought, would not have troubled to ask such a question, content instead with the general sentiment and no curiosity for its specifics, and she answered it more fully than she had answered anyone on the subject before.
"My father's library, chiefly, though it is a poor thing beside this one — a single room, crowded with books he has collected without much system, and a chair by the window where he retreats from my mother's nerves and pretends, not very convincingly, that he cannot hear whatever is being said about him in the next room.
I miss the particular noise of a house with five sisters in it, which I complain of constantly and would, I think, find unbearably quiet without.
I miss knowing every creak of every stair well enough to walk it in the dark without a candle.
" She paused. "It is not a grand list, sir.
I am aware it must sound very small, set beside Pemberley. "
"It does not sound small to me." He said it quietly, and with such evident sincerity that she looked up from the fire to find him watching her with an expression she could not, for once, entirely read as anything but plain and unguarded honesty.
"I think a house that is loved in that particular way — for its creaking stairs and its crowded library and the precise quality of its noise — is rather better loved than most houses manage to be, whatever their size.
I have spent the whole of my life in rooms a great deal grander than your father's library, Miss Bennet, and I do not think I could describe loving any of them with quite the specificity you have just described loving yours. "
Elizabeth did not know what to say to this, and so said nothing for a moment, and found that the silence between them, rather than growing awkward, settled instead into something closer to companionship — two people who had each said something true, and found the truth received without the smallest mockery or impatience, sitting together by a fire while the rain continued, unhurried, against the windows.
She reached out, after a moment, to set the unopened book down on the small table between them, and found, as she did so, that his hand had moved at nearly the same instant to do something similar with a paper he had been holding, and their hands met, briefly, on the spine of the book, not by design, on either side, as far as she could tell, but simply by the accident of two people occupying the same small space with the same small object between them.
Neither of them moved away immediately.
It was Elizabeth who withdrew first, after a moment that felt considerably longer than its actual duration could have warranted, and Darcy said nothing of it, only resumed the thread of their conversation as though nothing at all had occurred, though she noticed, glancing at him from beneath her lashes as she settled back into her corner of the sofa, that his color had risen very slightly, and that he did not, for several minutes afterward, quite manage to look at her directly.
They talked a while longer, of nothing in particular: books, and houses, and the small comfortable nothings two people exchange when neither wishes the conversation to end and neither has quite the courage to say so outright, until the rain began at last to ease, and the sound of the rest of the party drifting back through the hall reminded them both, with a faint and mutual reluctance neither acknowledged aloud, that an afternoon could not, however pleasantly, be made to last forever.
Elizabeth went up to dress for dinner with the particular unsettled warmth of a woman who has spent an hour discovering that a man she had once dismissed entirely was, in fact, capable of saying the truest things she had heard said to her in a very long while, and found, sitting before her mirror as her maid arranged her hair, that she could not, for the life of her, recall a single word of the poem she had gone into the library to find.
She thought it, on the whole, a very satisfactory afternoon to have spent indoors.