Chapter Fourteen
Willowbrook Somerset
Darcy
The letter Darcy hoped for did not arrive until the last day of September. Georgiana had written once more in the interval, and Mr. Humphrey had sent another brief account of enquiries which had produced nothing useful.
That morning Darcy returned from a long walk along the edge of the timberland to find a servant waiting in the hall.
“Two letters for you, sir.”
Darcy's attention sharpened at once.
“Two?”
“Yes, sir. They came together.”
For one absurd instant, he wondered whether both might be Elizabeth's.
Perhaps one had been delayed upon the road and another had followed it, the post correcting in a single morning the silence of the preceding weeks.
The thought arose so readily that Darcy was annoyed with himself before the servant had even placed the letters in his hand.
One glance disposed of the fancy.
The first bore Bingley's familiar direction. The second was addressed, as always, to Miss Julia Harding.
Darcy's annoyance disappeared instantly.
He turned the letter over, though there was no need to examine the hand. After seventeen letters, he knew it immediately.
Elizabeth had written.
“Thank you.”
The servant withdrew. Darcy remained where he was for another moment, conscious of a relief altogether disproportionate to the mere arrival of a letter. A month of increasingly unwelcome conjecture had been answered by a few lines of ink upon folded paper.
She was well enough to write.
Whatever Bingley wanted could wait.
Darcy went directly to his study and had scarcely reached his chair before he broke Elizabeth's seal.
Longbourn,
Hertfordshire
27th September 1811
Dearest Julia,
I owe you an apology, and I find no better way of beginning it than plainly.
I have not written in over a month, though I have thought of you every day of that silence.
I know this makes the neglect worse rather than better, but I cannot help the manner in which my mind has behaved upon the subject.
I told you in my last letter that I meant to write directly to your aunt. At the time it appeared the most sensible course, indeed so obvious a one that I wondered why I had not taken it months ago. I sat down three times to do it but I could not.
I am afraid, Julia.
I did not understand how much until I attempted that letter and found myself unable to continue it. If I write to your aunt and she does not answer, I shall know no more than I know now, and ignorance, however miserable, is at least something I have learnt to bear. But if she answers...
There. Even upon paper I cannot finish it.
God forbid that I should open a letter one morning and find the very words I have refused these seven months to imagine. I know there is cowardice in preferring uncertainty merely because uncertainty still permits hope, but I cannot persuade myself to exchange one for the other.
Our vicar preached upon faith last Sunday, with the most inconvenient timing imaginable. He spoke of trusting where we cannot see and of the folly of demanding certainty merely because uncertainty pains us. I sat through the whole sermon thinking of you.
Perhaps I have misunderstood him entirely.
I dare say he would be very distressed to discover his sermon had been employed to justify my refusing to write a perfectly reasonable letter.
But I have decided, for whatever it is worth, that I would rather continue writing to you and believe you are somewhere growing stronger than seek an answer which I am not yet brave enough to receive.
It is not courage. I know that.
But I have ceased being ashamed of it.
Now I must tell you something of Meryton, or you will accuse me of filling an entire letter with my own fretting.
Mr. Sotherton has become considerably more determined since I last wrote.
Mr. Kingsley gave a ball a fortnight ago, where Mr. Sotherton sought me out with such perseverance that I began to suspect discouragement serves only to encourage him.
He remained beside me through two entire sets without once appearing to wonder whether his company had been requested.
I begin to think him possessed of the enviable ability to mistake endurance for encouragement.
I have not yet discovered how one discourages a gentleman who refuses to perceive that he is being discouraged. If you have any wisdom upon the subject, I should be very glad of it, though I suppose I must first solve the lesser difficulty of obtaining an answer from you.
Longbourn itself is in some commotion, though nothing so serious as the word suggests.
New families are spoken of as coming into the neighbourhood, the officers continue to provide Kitty and Lydia with inexhaustible occupation, and Mama has determined that between gentlemen newly arrived and officers already present, at least three of her daughters ought to be married before Christmas.
She has announced this at dinner nearly every evening, and the number of prospective husbands increases whenever the story is repeated.
Papa remains unmoved by the whole business. He says he will not have any of us pressed into a match we have not chosen for ourselves, a declaration with which I find myself disposed to agree with him.
I miss you, Julia.
That is a poor conclusion after so much nonsense, but perhaps it is the truest one.
I once supposed absence must become easier merely by becoming familiar.
I find instead that one grows accustomed only to the shape of it.
There are still things I hear and immediately wish to tell you.
There are still moments when I enter Meryton and expect, for no sensible reason, to see you where you used to be.
So I shall continue to believe you are somewhere to be told all these things one day.
I hope you are well. I hope you are stronger. And until I know otherwise, I shall keep enough faith for both of us.
Yours, always,
Elizabeth
Darcy remained very still when he reached the end. Then he released a breath he had not been conscious of holding, and with it some portion of the uneasiness that had attended him these past weeks.
It was so immediate, and so complete, that there was little purpose in denying it.
Elizabeth was not ill. No calamity had overtaken Longbourn.
Her silence had arisen from fear for Julia, not from anything which had happened to herself, and the knowledge released an anxiety Darcy had not fully appreciated until it was gone.
The relief was followed almost at once by something less comfortable.
Elizabeth was suffering.
Not as she had suffered in March, when Julia's sudden removal had left her frightened and bewildered.
Seven months had altered the nature of it.
She had learnt to live beside uncertainty, to joke around it, to fill pages with Meryton gossip and her mother's matrimonial schemes, but the uncertainty remained beneath everything.
But if she answers...
Darcy's eyes returned to the unfinished sentence.
He understood it.
In the days after Ramsgate, Darcy had more than once wondered what might have happened had he delayed his visit by even a day, and there were possibilities his mind still refused to pursue very far.
Even now, with the immediate danger past, another uncertainty had taken its place.
He did not know what lasting injury the affair might have done to Georgiana's confidence, nor whether she would ever cease to blame herself for having been deceived.
He wanted to believe that time, affection, and Mrs. Annesley's steady companionship would restore what Wickham's conduct had shaken, but wanting it did not make it certain.
Elizabeth's fear was different, but Darcy understood the impulse beneath it.
So long as she did not ask the question, hope remained possible.
She knew the reasoning was unsound. Her letter made that plain enough.
Yet knowing a fear to be unreasonable did not always make one more capable of facing it.
She was simply afraid.
Darcy wished, suddenly and uselessly, that he could relieve her of it.
Unwilling to pursue the thought any further, Darcy turned his attention to Bingley’s unopened letter beside him. He broke the seal and began reading.
Dear Darcy,
I have been the worst sort of friend these two months past and have not written half so often as I ought, though I hope you will forgive me when you hear the reason.
As you know, I have been at Hull nearly the whole time, buried in a matter of trade which I could not in good conscience abandon halfway through.
The negotiations continued considerably longer than I expected, but they are concluded at last and rather better than I had dared hope.
I shall spare you the particulars, since you have never shared my enthusiasm for the finer points of a shipping contract. I will tell you only that the profit has been handsome enough to persuade me finally to do what I have threatened to do these two years past.
I have taken a lease upon a property in Hertfordshire. Netherfield Park, it is called.
Darcy frowned and stopped. For a moment he thought he must have mistaken the words, and his eyes returned at once to the sentence.
Hertfordshire.
Though he knew perfectly well what he had read, Darcy’s eyes moved instinctively to Elizabeth’s letter, compelled by the absurd need to confirm that the same county was indeed written there.
Longbourn, Hertfordshire.
For several seconds he merely stared between the two pages.
Of all the counties in England, how had Bingley contrived to choose Hertfordshire?
He returned to Bingley's letter.
Netherfield is a very fine place, though rather more house than any unmarried man has immediate use for.
I went down to see it and liked it so immediately that I fear I gave the caretaker, Mr. Morris, very little work in persuading me to take it.
You know I have long meant to try something of country life beyond those visits in which one is forever somebody else's guest, and here at last is my opportunity.