The Worst Hour #2
“Your name continues to be spoken well of. I should like you to know it. The papers Pemberton has reached have done their part. The Bingleys’ set in Bedford Square has been forming a settled opinion, which Caroline Bingley has not managed to disturb, having attempted at three different dinners in March and been politely set down at all of them.
Your uncle has heard her named with the kind of pity that finishes a woman in the City within two seasons.
I should not pretend that gives me no satisfaction.
It is a wonder to me that anyone will still receive her brother, but I suppose his loyalties have been declared differently to hers.
“I mention it because it shows you the case. Many are split, but the City has formed a view largely favourable to you — and so to your husband. The men who will sit on his jury have been hearing of Mrs Darcy at their dinner tables, their wives whispering of you in the salons for two months, and none of it has been Sterling’s account of ruin and deceit. ”
Elizabeth knotted the handkerchief. “What have they been hearing about me?”
“That you were promised, against your will, to a man whose temper was known in three counties and whose hand was not safe to any woman set in his way.
That your sister had been promised to the same kind of arrangement and had narrowly escaped.
That Mr Darcy of Pemberley, even while in hiding, heard of your situation and put aside his own safety to remove you from it, and married you under conditions he had not chosen, but judged the only ones in which he could keep you alive.
“The City does not, on the whole, accept romance easily. It has, in your case, made an exception. The wives of London have taken your part, Lizzy, so now Mr Sterling’s counsel has been competing against the only story the merchant class likes better than a fraud exposed, which is a young woman rescued from a brute by a gentleman of feeling. ”
Elizabeth drew a slow breath. “Let us hope it is enough that London’s female population finds me curious.”
“Not only the wives. Your uncle is hearing the same thing in his coffeehouse and at the Exchange and at his Friday club, which I believe is the most reliable measure of public sentiment in the City. The phrase he heard yesterday, from a man he has not seen socially in three years, was that he hoped Mr Darcy’s barrister was as clever as the wife was reported to be.
I gather it was meant as a compliment to both of you. ”
“He said that?”
“He said that. Your uncle had it from him at Cornhill, in front of two witnesses, neither of whom contradicted him.”
Elizabeth set down her tea.
Until her aunt said it, she had not known how much of the last few weeks she had spent imagining that her work had been wasted.
The confinement, in its daily texture, had been an erasure.
She had imagined the rooms she had sat in going quiet behind her, the names she had been introduced to forgetting hers, the ground she had built trampled by Sterling’s men.
She had not been able to tell whether she was imagining it correctly.
She had not been able to ask. The earl’s reports had been administrative; her uncle’s letters had been kind; nothing had told her plainly whether the work had survived her absence.
It had survived. Her aunt was sitting in front of her, telling her so.
“Thank you.”
“You are not to thank me. I have only brought you a piece of news. You did the work.”
“I had not been certain it was still there to do.”
“It is. It will be there on the morning of the trial. I cannot promise what it shall produce on that morning, but I can promise that it shall be there. You have not been wasting your afternoons in this house.”
Elizabeth pressed her hand against her own cheek briefly and turned her face towards the fire. She did not, for a moment, trust herself to look at her aunt.
“Tell me of my mother.”
Mrs Gardiner sighed with the affection of having prepared the answer to this question all the way from her drawing room.
“Your mother is in tolerable health. She is, I have to tell you, exceedingly cross.”
“With me?”
“With everyone. The cross has settled on you in the past fortnight because the rest of us have refused to satisfy her on the question of when she may call on her daughter at the earl’s house, which she now considers her daughter’s house, and which she has, in the last week, twice referred to in my hearing as the Pemberley townhouse, which I have not corrected because correcting your mother is, as you know, an undertaking with no observable return. ”
Elizabeth laughed brokenly. “Oh, Mama! She probably thinks I do nothing but ride about in carriages and think myself too fine for her now.”
“She has formed views on what you ought to be wearing in your present condition, what you ought to be eating, what your child shall be named, and which of the bedrooms at Pemberley you ought to assign him when he is of age to be removed from his nursery. She has discussed all of these matters with anyone in Pentonville who has not contrived to escape her parlour. She had also formed a view, two weeks ago, on what colour of carriage Mr Darcy ought to acquire to take you back to Derbyshire after the trial, the trial itself featuring in her conversation as a small legal formality that is unfortunately delaying your departure for the country. Your uncle and I have been managing her with a regimen of patience, mild deception, and lemon cake. The lemon cake has been, on balance, the most useful.”
“She does not — she does not understand —”
“She does not understand. We have judged it kinder to all parties not to make her understand. The reality of the trial would not improve her nerves; it would only translate her present cheerfulness into the kind of distress that requires Kitty to fetch the salts. You have, in the present circumstances, less of your mother to manage than you might have, and we have judged that mercy is the better part of the arrangement.”
Elizabeth drank her tea. The lemon preserve had been put on the tray with a small spoon. She had not eaten any of it. She put a little into the cup and tasted it and almost wept again, for an entirely different reason.
“It is very good lemon preserve.”
“It is. Your uncle insists on a particular grocer in Lombard Street. He is very tedious on the subject.”
“Tell him I shall write him a letter on the subject of his lemon preserve as soon as I have finished crying.”
“He will be delighted. He has been waiting for a letter from you on any subject at all and is prepared to receive one on lemon.”
Mrs Gardiner finished her tea and set the cup down. She rose and crossed to Elizabeth’s chair and bent and kissed her, briefly, on the forehead, with the unfussed affection of an aunt who had been kissing her nieces’ foreheads since they were small.
“I will come again on Friday. Mind the lemon preserve. I shall expect it half gone.”
“Half gone.”
“At minimum.”
She went, and the door closed behind her. Elizabeth sat for some minutes without moving.
Then she rose, went to the window, and stood looking out at the street below, where her aunt’s carriage was being brought round. Her aunt stepped into it, arranged her pelisse, and briefly lifted her hand towards the window before the door was closed. The carriage moved off.
She turned from the window, put the jar of lemon preserve where she would see it from the chaise, and picked up her book.
She did not read it. But she did not, for the rest of the afternoon, cry again.