LXI The Arithmetic
LXI
The Arithmetic
February came and went at Matlock House by small repetitions.
A tray left outside Elizabeth’s door before breakfast. Notes from Pemberton in a hand progressively sharper as Sterling’s petition acquired supplemental insolence.
Richard gone to Bristol and present only in letters and in the mud on his boots when he reappeared.
Georgiana reading in the library until midnight, pretending not to notice when Elizabeth failed to turn a page for ten minutes together.
Jane quietly intervening with soup, oranges, reason, and the sort of practical sisterly tyranny from which there is no appeal.
She had been three weeks at her aunt’s drawing room by now.
The Tuesdays in Coleman Street had become a small fixed point in the week, and to the Tuesdays had been added other days — a Thursday with Mrs Hartshorn of Threadneedle Street, who underwrote at Lloyd’s and had wished to be introduced; a Friday dinner with the family of a junior King’s Counsel whose wife was Pemberton’s wife’s particular friend; a Sunday at the Gardiners’ church, sitting in their pew, where she had been observed by perhaps a dozen families whose names she had not yet learned and who had, by Monday morning, learned hers.
Her aunt managed the introductions with gentle authority; she had kept house in the City for fifteen years and knew precisely which doors were worth approaching first. Elizabeth had only to be present, civil, and respectable.
She had begun to be recognised. Yesterday, she had taken tea at her aunt’s with four ladies whose husbands sat between them on the boards of three banks and an East India agency, and the conversation had been general for an hour before she had understood that all four of them had come specifically to meet her and were leaving with views of her they meant to repeat at home.
By this morning, two more invitations had arrived at Matlock House — one to dine on Friday in Lothbury, one to attend a private musical evening the following week at a house in Aldermanbury whose mistress, she gathered, had hesitated for some days before sending the card and had decided, in the end, that her curiosity outweighed her caution.
Elizabeth had accepted both. She had then sat at the small writing-desk in her chamber for a quarter of an hour with the cards in front of her, working through what it had cost the lady in Aldermanbury to send the second of them.
But she had Darcy’s letters.
Not every day. That would have been impossible and unwise. Often enough, however, to alter the nature of the waiting.
She carried the first in her pocket for three days, read it at breakfast before anyone came down, read it in the corridor while Pemberton kept the Earl with some new affidavit, read it in bed with the candle nearly gone.
By the fourth day, she had the line about the precise weight of her hand by heart, and hated him for writing anything so restrained and so destructive.
She answered with care.
Not every letter could be sentimental. Some had to be useful, and usefulness was a safer disguise than longing.
She wrote of Richard’s progress in Bristol, of Pemberton’s success in blunting one procedural challenge after another, of Georgiana’s unnerving competence at accounts when handed the charity books for want of other occupation.
She wrote of nothing at all, on one page, except that the roses in the blue saloon had opened too early under the greenhouse glass and that she had discovered herself irrationally annoyed by their obedience to seasonless heat.
His reply came the following day.
My dear wife,
Your account of the roses has produced in me a degree of jealousy I should prefer not to examine too closely. They have, it seems, been admitted to rooms from which I remain excluded and have had the advantage of your notice in a season when every rational thing ought to be bare.
If this is pettish, imprisonment must answer for it.
I am glad the house gives you occupation, though I would rather it gave you comfort.
The distinction, I know, is one you are perfectly able to maintain without assistance from me.
I nevertheless continue to offer the observation because marriage appears not to have cured me of issuing opinions where they are unlikely to be followed.
You should not let Georgiana overtake you entirely in the government of Matlock’s charities. She is ruthless with ledgers and has no proper respect for the weaknesses of human nature. This will surprise you less when I say that she inherited the quality from the Fitzwilliam side.
Richard’s movements in Bristol are encouraging. If MacNeil begins to complain of Sterling’s neglect, press the complaint. Vanity is often easier to turn than conscience.
You mention the blue salon. I find I am trying to remember whether the chairs there remain in the scattered arrangement my aunt preferred or whether my uncle has at last succeeded in having them moved into a more martial order.
If you have the chance, satisfy the question.
Confinement produces in the mind a ridiculous hunger for household certainties.
It also produces, in mine at least, the conviction that there are a number of ordinary domestic sights for which I have not properly accounted. I should like, for example, to know whether you still tuck your left hand under your sleeve when you are reading something that offends you. I remain,
Yours,
F. D.
She had laughed at the roses and then, on reaching the line about her left hand, put the paper down and closed her eyes because the alternative was to let the household see what one man’s accuracy could do to her face.
For several seconds, she sat very still with the sheet against her mouth and one hand low across herself, as if some private part of her might be steadied by the pressure.
The recognition came with humiliating clarity — the man she had once argued with in a ballroom had become necessary to her breathing.
If the law kept him, she did not know by what art she was expected to continue behaving like a reasonable creature.
By the time Pemberton arranged the second visit, the letters had made a dangerous improvement to the prison.
She knew what his hand looked like when hurried, what turns of phrase he abandoned when writing to a wife and not to a world.
She knew her own letters were becoming less guarded whether she intended it or not.
When the note arrived saying the visit was set for Thursday, she folded it calmly, thanked the servant, and spent the next hour entirely unable to read.
Darcy did the arithmetic again after dark, though the arithmetic was no longer required.
He had been keeping the count since November, in the back of the mind that handled such accounting.
He knew the regularity of her courses to the half-week.
He knew when she had been late, and when she had been certain.
He knew, by his own reckoning, the week within which she could have conceived, and he had a private suspicion as to the night.
The night she had struck the candle.
He could not prove it. The arithmetic permitted it; it did not require it.
There had been other nights in that week, and other nights in the week after.
But the candle-strike night was the one his mind returned to, because that had been the night she had undone him down to his marrow, said his name for the first time, and the night he had answered her in his own voice and the night the long restraint of the dark months had ended in the middle of his life.
If a man were going to be allowed one private fancy in a prison cell, he would have that one.
He sat at the table by candlelight with one elbow against the wood and his hand across his mouth and considered dates in the same mind that had once considered cargo lists and shipping records and the probable movement of a clerk between one false lodging and the next.
The end of November to the middle of March. Her sixth visit, this had been, since the first.
He had begun, by the third, to be able to predict the hour and the day.
The Earl’s carriage at the inner gate, Pemberton’s clerk in attendance with the proper papers, the gaoler at his door announcing his lady had come.
He had taken to dressing as carefully on the morning of her visits as he had ever dressed for any drawing room in his life, because he was permitted half an hour of her presence in a week and would not waste it being a man who had stopped attending to himself.
Yesterday’s visit had been like the others and unlike.
She had not yet been showing when she had come at the end of January.
She was not properly showing now — not under the cut of the gown she had worn into the room, which had been chosen with care — but she had been altered in a way he could see and that the gaoler, he thought, could not.
Something fuller at the mouth, a softness under the skin no fear could counterfeit.
A new gentleness in her smile. The way she sat at the table. The way she breathed.
And the thing she had told him at the parting embrace.
The gaoler had turned his head deliberately towards the window, as the gaoler now did at every parting, and Darcy had had her in his arms briefly with her face against his throat, and she had taken his hand — not slowly, not for the gaoler to see — and laid it flat against the lower curve of her belly under the cloak she had not entirely fastened, and held it there.
Yesterday, she had whispered against his throat. I felt him. Twice. I have not told anyone yet. I wanted you to be the first to know.