XXXII
The Door
Angus came at the usual hour with the Aberdeen packet and the domestic report. It was the arrangement they had developed over seven months — the closest Darcy came to knowing what was happening in his own house.
“Good morning,” Darcy said.
“Aye.” Angus set the packet on the table and removed his hat. “Cold enough this morning.”
“The north field — did MacAulay send word about the drainage?”
“Sent word yesterday. He’ll have the channel dug before the ground freezes, he thinks. Wants to know about the east boundary fence come spring.”
“Tell him to do what’s needed. He knows the estate better than I do.
” Darcy sorted through the packet. Two letters — a dinner invitation from the Garrows and something from the minister about the parish subscription, neither of which required an answer before the week was out.
They were for Elizabeth, anyway. Not him. “Any trouble in the house?”
“None I’d come to ye wi’. The wife had words wi’ the lass about the lamps yesterday, but the lamps were lit afore the kettle was hot, so I’d say the lass came out of it the better.”
“And the baroness. How is she this morning?”
“Well enough. She was at her book again. Russelus, the lady called it. By yon Abysmia, the Frenchman.”
Darcy smothered back a smile. Rasselas. Five weeks since the parcel had come up from London, and she was still on it.
The book had been the last present in his power to give her — her father’s voice in her ear by way of Paternoster Row — and she had kept it within reach of her breakfast tray ever since.
It pleased him beyond reason or measure, and he did not let it show.
“Letter came wi’ this morning’s post, as well. From the south. She’ll have it by now.”
Darcy looked up from the papers. “From her sister, you think?”
“Aye, likely. Same hand as t’others.”
He set the packet down. A letter from Miss Bennet meant news from home — her mother, Kitty, whatever was happening in Hertfordshire or London or wherever the latest gossip had carried.
Elizabeth would spend the morning with it.
She might come to supper tonight with the warmth of it still in her, Miss Bennet’s cheerful handwriting, and the news of people she loved.
It had been some weeks since she had had anything from that direction, and he had watched the absence of it in her evenings — the way she sometimes went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with him.
“Good,” he said. “Thank you, Angus.”
Mrs Garrow from the village had called after breakfast, as she had taken to doing on Tuesdays, ostensibly to enquire after the barony’s interests in the matter of a boundary wall between her husband’s property and the lower field, but in practice to talk, which Elizabeth had found she did not mind.
Mrs Garrow was forthright and unsentimental and had no interest in whether Elizabeth’s husband was reclusive or her marriage unusual, which made her restful company.
“The wall’s been falling since before my time,” Mrs Garrow said, sitting with her tea and her very upright opinions.
“Mr Garrow says let the stones lie. I say let the stones lie, and in ten years you’ll have cattle in your turnips and a neighbour who pretends he never noticed.
You could put it to the laird. He heeds you, I’m told. ”
“He does,” Elizabeth said. “I will mention it this evening.”
Mrs Garrow nodded, satisfied, and drank her tea.
She told Elizabeth about her daughter’s confinement in Banchory and the new minister who was young and enthusiastic and would probably improve with age.
Elizabeth listened and contributed where she could, which was not often. Mrs Garrow did not seem to require it.
After she left, Elizabeth went to the hall table. One letter waited in Jane’s hand. She picked it up and went up to the library. Jane’s handwriting on the outside was its usual careful self. Elizabeth broke the seal and read.
She read the first page.
She read it again.
Her hands were shaking — she had not felt them begin.
She read the rest of it, and by the last line, she was crying, no warning, no sobs, just her face suddenly wet and the words gone blurry and Falstaff off the hearth rug with his head in her lap and her hands in his fur because there was nothing else to hold.
She needed her husband.
It was not a thought she had let herself have before, in those words, with that plainness.
She had wanted things from him — answers, warmth, his company, his voice across a dark table, even his touch — but she had managed those wants at a careful distance, fitting them into the shape he had made available.
This was different. She needed him, specifically, now. The supper table at seven o’clock was not sufficient, and she was not going to pretend it was.
She went to the far end of the corridor and stood at the foot of the stairs she had never taken.
Since July, she had heard his footsteps on these stairs, coming down and going back.
She had never gone up, even to look at his door.
He had never asked her not to — not in so many words — but the understanding had been there since the first evening.
The upper floor was his. She had kept to hers.
The upper floor was colder than anything below, the ceiling lower, the stone older. She had known where his rooms were in the abstract, and now she knew it in her feet — the end of a passage, a door, heavy oak, iron-banded.
She knocked.
Nothing came back to her. She knocked again, harder, and pressed her palm flat against the wood and said his name. “George.” Too thin. She tried again, urgent. “George, please! I need you to come. I need—” She stopped. She pressed her fingers to her mouth and breathed. “Please.”
For a moment, there was only the wood under her forehead. Then footsteps — uneven and quick, from deep in the room — crossing towards her. She braced.
From the other side came not the modulated whisper of the supper table but something lower, stripped of the usual control, a man already at the door because he had heard her say please twice. “Elizabeth! Are you hurt?”
She had not known until this moment how much she had needed to hear him frightened for her.
The door between them and the sound of him like that, close and urgent and entirely unguarded — she pressed her forehead to the wood and tried to keep herself together.
“No. No, I am not hurt. I have had news. A letter from home.” She heard herself and knew how inadequate it was.
“I cannot — I need to speak with you. Not tonight at supper. Now. I know you asked me not to come up here, and I am sorry for it, but I could not—”
“Do not apologise. Are you certain you are not hurt?”
“Yes.” Her voice was wet with it — she was crying again, which was inconvenient. “Yes, I am quite well. I have had the worst possible news, and I cannot be alone with it, and you are the only person I have.”
She heard him breathing on the other side of the door.
“If you would prefer not to have the door between us, I will come down to your room.”
“No.” She pressed her hand flat against the wood. “I cannot go back down and sit and wait for you and hold this alone until supper this evening. I cannot!”
“Your room,” he said. “Draw the drapes fully. I will be there directly.”
She breathed out — a long, ragged thing that had been waiting to leave her. “I will be waiting.”
She heard him already moving away from the door as she turned for the stairs, one hand on the wall in the dark, going back down towards the light.