Chapter 19
NINETEEN
HAPPILY EVER AFTER BEGINS
As was the custom, Darcy and Elizabeth remained at home for the first se’nnight of their marriage.
With a maiden’s view of things, Elizabeth had worried she might not find enough to do to occupy herself in that week; as a married woman, those remembered concerns made her laugh.
Her new husband was more than enough diversion for her, and she saw their first week as a married couple come to a close with no little regret.
At the breakfast table, on the morning of their eighth day of marriage, Mrs Hobbs handed her a stack of letters.
“My word,” said her husband. “You have certainly amassed a great deal of correspondence.”
She gave him a brief smile even as she rifled through the missives.
There were eight from Jane, and one from her mother.
One was from Mrs Gardiner, and another was from Charlotte.
The last two she set aside, meaning to read and reply to them.
The others would be dealt with as she had a stomach for it.
She had had no wish to mar the felicity of her private time with Darcy by thinking of Jane and Bingley and her mother, but now, seeing the letters, it was all brought back to her: the anguish she had experienced and the fear, the days of worry and despair for her sister.
It had been far more than merely the week in April when she had believed Jane knew it certain.
It began at the end of December when Jane had told her that she had missed her courses.
In retrospect, she wished she had said something to her mother.
‘How could you’, or ‘why did you’, or even ‘can you possibly understand what you have done’?
But no. She had left the bedroom with Jane, looking every inch a demurely joyous bride.
She had accepted kisses on her cheek, even one from Bingley, and had climbed into the carriage with her new husband.
And then, as the carriage had rolled way from the Gardiners’ home, she had decided she must embrace this new life, no matter how dizzying the change in her circumstances.
Thus when Darcy had kissed her, she had kissed him back equally fervently, perhaps more so.
And when he had tentatively asked her whether she would like to invite him into her chambers, she had said yes, absolutely, she wished to be Mrs Darcy in every way possible. She did not regret that, to be sure.
Darcy was giving her concerned glances over the top of his newspaper and so she put aside her recollections and smiled at him. He put the newspaper down.
“What say you to a walking party this afternoon? Saye has orchestrated the whole thing and will be vastly displeased with us for not attending.”
“That sounds very agreeable,” she said warmly. “He need not be displeased on my account.”
Some hours later, the party had assembled in the park, consisting of ten persons in total, several of whom were unknown to her.
One was an enormous red-haired fellow who introduced himself as Jolly, bowed deeply, and lost his hat into a mud puddle.
Bending to retrieve it, he managed to step on it, which produced chuckles all around.
“There will never be a valet who is attentive enough to keep you neat, Jolly,” said another gentleman at his side who was introduced as Mr Egremont.
Of more interest to Elizabeth were the ladies present.
There were four besides herself: Georgiana who was positively aglow with the thrill of being included; a Miss Bentley who appeared friendly and artless and dashed off immediately in search of some unusual plant she spied; Miss Hawkridge, a cousin of Lady Matlock who was as affectedly languid as Lord Saye was; and a Miss Lillian Goddard, a beautiful young lady who, like Elizabeth, hailed from Hertfordshire.
She seemed friendly and clever, and Elizabeth liked her immediately.
Lord Saye arrived twenty minutes past the appointed hour, strolling towards them with an unhurried air. Darcy made a great show of checking his pocket watch and then giving his cousin a pointed look.
“Save your censure, Darcy,” said his lordship. “I endured extreme hardship in getting myself here.”
“What was that?” Fitzwilliam said with a smirk. “Boots failed to shine up when you applied the Champagne to them?”
“Worse,” said Lord Saye. “My cravats were all…yellowish. It was disgusting. I nearly let my man go without a reference.”
Elizabeth looked at the cravat he was wearing which, in truth, seemed impossibly white and then glanced at Darcy who rolled his eyes. “We are thankful you were able to overcome such a trial and join us,” he remarked drily. “Shall we walk, then?”
Everyone began to walk at a slow pace, with Saye drawing near to tell Elizabeth, “You should become friends with Miss Goddard, Elizabeth. She is not nearly as stupid as most ladies of the ton.”
“I beg your pardon,” said Miss Hawkridge with what appeared feigned pique.
“What?” said Saye. “I daresay you are the stupidest of them all, Georgette, taking up with Blanderson as you have.”
Darcy leant over her and murmured, “Saye despises his cousin’s suitor whose name is Anderson.”
“Why does he dislike him so?”
“I am not sure.” Darcy pondered a moment, then said, “I believe he might have once worn boots to a ball?”
Elizabeth giggled. “Capital offence!”
“Incorrect,” Saye informed them both. “I despise the very dullness of him. He is the very embodiment of laudanum.”
“You have never taken the trouble of knowing him,” said Miss Hawkridge. “So you ought not to abuse him so.”
Miss Hawkridge’s words were less vexed than the accent in which they were delivered, but Elizabeth thought that she must surely be offended. “I do hope I might meet him some day?” she said.
“I hope so, too,” said the lady. “Pray have a dinner party that I might bring him to you.”
“That sounds like a very agreeable idea,” said Darcy, much to Elizabeth’s surprise. She echoed his sentiments but could say no more as Miss Goddard had drawn near to her.
“I understand that you are very lately married?” the lady enquired.
“Eight days ago,” Elizabeth told her.
“Now that is newly-married! You must tell me all about it, for Mr Darcy has been a mystery to us all for years now. A great many of us have believed there was a soul of a poet beneath his grave demeanour.”
Elizabeth laughed awkwardly and glanced at her husband beside her. Georgiana was on the other side of him, and the two were in conversation. “Perhaps not so much the soul of a poet,” she said, “but he is certainly much more the lover than I believed when I first knew him.”
“You have known him long?” Miss Goddard peered at her. “I have not seen you around town, but then again, I was not allowed out until my elder sister had married.”
“My father dislikes London, so no, we did not come to town for the Season. I met Mr Darcy when he came into Hertfordshire with Mr Bingley last autumn,” Elizabeth explained.
Lord Saye thought this an excellent time to jostle himself between Elizabeth and Darcy. Leaning over her, he informed Miss Goddard, “Had I any notion of the beauties which evidently abound in Hertfordshire, I might have joined them as well.”
Darcy used his elbow then to eject Lord Saye from the space between himself and his wife, making Elizabeth laugh.
“You have had her hidden away all week, Darcy,” Lord Saye complained. “Do allow the poor girl a bit of air!”
“Go on the other side,” Darcy ordered. “Beside Miss Goddard.”
“Very well,” Lord Saye replied. “Lilly, come walk beside me. Darcy’s orders.”
With a roll of her eyes, Miss Goddard complied, albeit with a little reproof. “Do not call me Lilly!”
The party went on in a most agreeable manner.
Jolly proved an excellent source of comic relief, going so far as to dare to imitate the manner in which Lord Saye had walked—or rather stumbled—out of a party the night before.
Lord Saye then made a great show of twisting up his cravat, half-untucking his shirt tails, and unbuttoning his waistcoat to demonstrate how Jolly looked on even ordinary, not-drunken occasions.
Miss Bentley was forever dashing off to find insects or plant species she thought interesting but did come abreast of Elizabeth long enough to share her great love of baking.
She also confided that she had recently taken up making maccheroni in the Italian fashion and promised to have her for tea soon that Elizabeth might sample her efforts.
“Very unfashionable,” Lord Saye remarked. “Miss Bentley, if one did not know better, they would think you had a shop somewhere.”
“I wish I could,” she said earnestly. “Being a lady is dreadfully tedious at times. I long to fill my days with something more useful than calls and letter-writing.”
Elizabeth was still smiling when the path curved and the view opened, and the smile remained on her face even as the phrase ‘letter-writing’ recalled Jane to her mind.
She wondered how her sister’s first week of marriage had passed.
She could not imagine that her mother had abstained from intrusion upon them, but perhaps Bingley had welcomed the respite.
From what Elizabeth had heard of the plans, the Bingleys would be off to Scarborough soon enough anyhow.
She glanced over at Darcy, catching him looking at her. She smiled up at him, and he smiled in reply then guided her around a small divot in the path.
Ought I to tell him?
It was a different matter for him of course, perhaps not as keenly felt as she did.
He had been deployed as an instrument by people who had manufactured a crisis they knew would move him to act.
She had been actively deceived, lied to, allowed to suffer, by her family, by Jane!
Her dearest friend since the day she was born!
But Darcy had been willing to fight a duel for her. He might have shot his friend; he might have been shot himself. The fact that Bingley had belatedly, finally, capitulated to what was right was beside the point.
She watched him now, turned slightly away to say something to Fitzwilliam, the clean line of his profile against the grey-green of the park, and felt the almost painful certainty that she had not deserved him and had got him anyway.
But he did want you, she reminded herself. He emerged a victor in this.
The question was whether telling him would be honouring him or simply unburdening herself. If it was the latter, what good would it do, save to give him one more thing to dislike about his new relations?
Last autumn, none of the Bennets had shown themselves to advantage, not her mother who gossiped about him from the first, not her sisters who were excessively silly in his presence, and not her father who did not once take the trouble to check any of them.
Only Jane, she might have imagined, would prove herself acceptable.
She knew not if even Jane could earn his approval now, but she certainly would not if he learnt that what had happened was not the misunderstanding of an innocent, but rather a calculated scheme.
He would despise them forever; there would be no chance of redemption for any of them.
Darcy had been careful and warm and tolerantly amused by her mother at the wedding breakfast. He had said nothing beyond what was necessary about Jane and Bingley’s irregular beginning.
But what he had done, he had done in good faith, in the belief that Jane was in genuine danger and that his interference was genuinely necessary.
To learn that he had been manipulated, that the whole enterprise had been assembled to produce precisely his response—
She did not know what he would make of it.
And she did not know what she would do if he made something of it that she could not forgive or if he felt that he could no longer admit any of them into his society.
Of course, at present, she did not wish them in her society, but neither did she want to close off all hope for future rapprochement.
Miss Goddard, she realised, was back beside her and had asked her something.
“Oh! Pray forgive me,” Elizabeth exclaimed. “I was wool-gathering. The park, you know, one gets distracted.”
Miss Goddard regarded her with an expression of mild intelligence that suggested she found this explanation incomplete but was too well-bred to say so. “I asked only whether you have found London agreeable since your marriage.”
“If every party is as agreeable as this one, I shall like it very well indeed,” Elizabeth said.
“I confess, having been prohibited from coming out for such a long time, I arrived with more than a little trepidation,” Miss Goddard said. “I feared people might think me a spinster before I had even begun.”
“Surely you cannot be older than twenty-one?” Elizabeth enquired.
“I am twenty,” she confirmed. “I will be twenty-one in June.”
“As will I!” Elizabeth always thought it amusing that people were so delighted by a commonality in birthdays and yet she felt it now. “The eighteenth.”
“The sixteenth for me,” said Miss Goddard, looking as if she too understood the strange pleasure in it.
Ahead of them, Lord Saye had arranged himself on a low stone wall in order to lecture Georgiana and Fitzwilliam about something, gesturing expansively.
Miss Goddard observed this with an expression Elizabeth was beginning to catalogue as her habitual response to Lord Saye: amused, knowing, and carefully non-committal.
“Lord Saye seems to be…” Elizabeth began hesitantly.
“Giving me particular attention in his own, inattentive way? Yes, he has asked me to marry him two or three times now.”
This was surprising indeed. “He has?”
Miss Goddard nodded. “But in all the worst ways. The first time he said, merely, ‘Very well, since we must, let us get on with it’. I had no idea what he was speaking of until he clarified by saying, ‘The parson’s mousetrap’.”
“Oh dear,” said Elizabeth with a laugh.
“The second time he told me, ‘You know, for someone who is merely a Miss Goddard, you could do far worse’.”
Elizabeth laughed harder. “Yes, explaining one’s social inferiority is a sure prelude to love.”
“I told him I would rather marry a charming banker than a high-in-the-instep viscount, and do you know what he said to that? He said, ‘Yes, but my father is having strange flutterings in his chest, so I may be earl sooner than you think’. What a thing to say!”
“Good lord! He is certainly not doing very well.”
“I am surely in no hurry, so I am happy to let him bumble along until he does it correctly,” said Miss Goddard.
“On my part, I hope he manages that soon,” Elizabeth said. “I think I might like to be your cousin.”
Miss Goddard smiled. “I think I would like that too.”
Darcy had fallen back to meet her, his hand finding hers with the ease of new habit, and she tucked herself against his side and let the thought of Jane settle back below the surface, where it had taken up its residence, not gone, not resolved, but quiet.
There would be a moment for truth, or perhaps not; either way, it was surely not today.