Chapter Thirty-One
After the argument she had sat by her window until the candle burned low and guttered into darkness, and still she had remained there, watching the glass turn from black to silver with the slow approach of dawn.
Every room in that house had felt altered; her bed, her chair, the walls themselves, all of it familiar and all of it suddenly wrong.
One thought returned again and again, not with the force of surprise but with the dull certainty of recognition: she was not their daughter.
Perhaps some part of her had always known it.
Philip Bennet had been her father. Mr. Bennet’s elder brother.
There had been a mother too, and apparently a grandfather, and perhaps others besides, people who belonged to her and to whom she had belonged, and she knew almost nothing of them.
That ignorance pressed harder than the talk of inheritance ever could.
The loss of money was Mr. Bennet’s grievance; the loss of a life imagined was Mrs. Bennet’s.
Elizabeth found she cared very little for either.
What sat like grief was the thought that there had once been a family who had loved her, and they had died before she could remember them, leaving her to grow to womanhood among people who had spoken of duty and obligation when they meant convenience.
By the time the first pale light showed at the edges of the sky, she had not slept a moment.
She dressed quietly and went downstairs.
Cook was only just stirring the kitchen fire when Elizabeth slipped out through the back of the house and crossed the yard into the fields.
She did not pause to wonder whether he would be there.
She looked only toward the path where she knew he would come.
He had come almost to Longbourn’s boundary, and moved the moment she passed through the gate, as though he had been waiting a very long time and was very glad to be done with it. "You did not sleep," he said.
"Nor did you," she said.
They fell into step without discussion, the way people do when they have walked the same ground enough times that their feet know the way before their minds have decided. The light was coming up slowly, grey and uncertain, and the dew soaked cold through the grass at the edges of the path.
When they reached their place, the flat stretch at the northern edge where the field opened and the Hayes farm sat still in the early light, they stopped.
Elizabeth stood without speaking. She had spent the walk thinking only that she must tell him, and now that she must begin, she found she did not know how.
"After the assembly, I knew I would be called into his book room.
" She shook her head slightly. " I have called him father my whole life and I find I cannot do it anymore, and yet I do not know what else to call him.
Even uncle does not seem to fit either. Mr. Bennet feels like a stranger's name for someone I have known since before I could walk. "
Darcy reached for her hand and held it.
“When I asked about my grandfather, I meant very little by it. You had mentioned him, and I thought there must be some mistake, because I had always been told both my grandfathers died before I was born. But Mrs. Bennet was listening at the door, and she heard enough to suppose I knew more than I did. She came in, and before Mr. Bennet could stop her, she told me everything, or rather enough to make the rest impossible to mistake.”
She looked away across the fields, where the morning light was beginning to settle over the hedgerows.
“I am not their daughter. I never was. My father was Philip Bennet; Mr. Bennet’s elder brother. When my parents travelled north to visit my mother’s family, I was born there, and on the journey home there was a carriage accident. They were both killed, and I was left to my uncle’s care.”
“Apparently my grandfather once tried to take me and failed, and afterward left what he had to some Earl instead of his own blood. I do not know whether that is truth, or only Mr. Bennet’s version of it.”
Darcy's grip tightened slightly around her hand.
“He spoke of inheritance and obligation and family pride, but none of it told me anything that mattered. Only that there had been family somewhere beyond Longbourn, and that I know almost nothing of them. Perhaps there were others; a grandmother, aunts, cousins, I do not know. Mr. Bennet spoke of them as though they were an inconvenience best forgotten, and I stood there listening, unable to decide whether to be angry that they had not come for me, or ashamed that perhaps they had and I was simply never told.”
“She speaks of his brother only in contempt, and Mrs. Bennet spoke of my mother with nothing but bitterness. Then there is my grandfather, whom they both seem to despise, perhaps because of the inheritance, perhaps for other reasons. I care nothing for that. I only wanted to know that somewhere, once, I was wanted; that I belonged to someone who was glad I existed.”
Darcy's thumb moved once across her hand.
“At least one person fought for you,” he said at last. “Your grandfather, by what Mr. Bennet told me, and by what he has now told you, went to considerable trouble. Whatever else may be true, a man does not do so much for a child he does not care for.”
She looked down at their joined hands.
“What do you wish to do?” he said. “We spoke of leaving. Do you still wish it, or would you rather know more first? The banns will be read Sunday. You may refuse, but I think it would be better if we were not here when they are called.” He stopped. “Every time you leave my sight I am afraid.”
“So am I,” she said. “I am torn between the two. I wish to know more, and yet the thought of losing you—”
“We can discover everything afterwards,” he said. “Once we are married, I will hire every man of business in London if I must. I will write to every—”
She raised her hand and touched her fingers briefly to his lips to stop him. “I know,” she said. “I love you too.”
He kissed her fingers where they rested against his lips. “If we had gone last night, we would not have had enough of a lead. Tonight the moon is full. What time does your household generally retire?”
"Mr. Bennet keeps his own hours in the book room and is usually the last to go up.
The rest of the house is generally in their rooms by ten, eleven at the latest unless there is company.
If I use the servants' stair and go out through the kitchen I can be at the lane by ten without disturbing anyone. "
"Then I will be there before ten," he said. "And I will send my man ahead to the posting stations with the times, so we can change horses without delay."
The sound of a latch reached them from the direction of the farmhouse. Mrs. Hayes appeared at the door, having seen them from the window, and held it open with the quiet authority of a woman not accustomed to being refused.
"Come inside," she said. "Both of you. There is tea and the morning is cold."
The kitchen was warm and smelled of bread and the particular combination of woodsmoke and dried herbs that Elizabeth had associated with this house since she was small enough to follow Mr. Hayes through the furrows asking questions he had always answered.
Mrs. Hayes poured without ceremony and settled herself across the table.
"Forgive me," she said. "My window is not so far from your usual spot and the morning is quiet.
I heard enough to understand what has happened.
" She looked at Elizabeth with a plain, steady affection.
"I knew you could not be his. Not from the first year you came to the fields.
You were four years old and you asked my husband why the soil was darker near the ditch.
He came home that evening and said, that is Mr. Philip Bennet's daughter at Longbourn.
" She paused. "Your father was a fair, generous master.
He worked the fields himself when it was needed.
He knew his tenants by name and by circumstance and never forgot either. "
"And my mother?" Elizabeth said.
"Your mother." Mrs. Hayes's expression softened.
"She wanted a baby so badly. Nearly two years they were married, and then the letter came about her mother being ill and off they went north, and I always thought she had begun to doubt it would ever happen.
But she loved babies. She was wonderful with my Johnny, well, not so little anymore.
" A small smile. "In some ways you remind me of her, and in some ways of him.
She walked these fields every morning in all weathers.
She knew every tenant by name inside a fortnight.
She was kind without making a performance of it.
A true gentlewoman, raised on an estate and understanding exactly what it meant to care for the people on it.
" The look she gave Elizabeth was very direct.
"The current Mrs. Bennet never came once. Not in twenty years."
"And her name," Elizabeth said.
"Oh, goodness me, forgive me. Her name was Margaret. Mrs. Margaret. I am sorry, I cannot recall her maiden name."
Darcy said the names quietly, almost to himself. "Margaret. Philip." Something in his expression shifted, as though he were reaching for a memory that would not quite come.
"I wish I could tell you more," Mrs. Hayes said.
"No." Elizabeth's voice caught. "No, you have given me more than I knew this morning."
Darcy reached across and covered her hand with his, and spoke to give her a moment. " Having both their names will make the search considerably easier. It is more than we had an hour ago."