CHAPTER TEN
"Derbyshire," said Mrs. Gardiner, folding the letter that had just arrived from her husband's business correspondent, "and I confess I have not seen Lambton in an age. Would it trouble you greatly, Lizzy, to travel that far north instead of the Lakes?"
Elizabeth, who had been half listening while she mended a glove, felt her needle still. "Not the Lakes?"
"Business, unfortunately. Your uncle cannot be spared so long.
But Derbyshire has its own beauties, and I have old friends at Lambton I should dearly love to see again.
" Mrs. Gardiner glanced up, and something in her expression suggested she was watching for a reaction she half expected.
"Pemberley is very near Lambton, I believe. "
"Is it." Elizabeth kept her eyes on the glove.
"You need not come, of course, if the neighborhood holds no interest for you."
"I have no objection to the neighborhood." She bit off the thread, perhaps more sharply than the task required. "I have simply no wish to encounter its owner, and no reason to suppose I shall need to. A man does not generally haunt his own drawing room in July for the benefit of tourists."
Mrs. Gardiner said nothing further, but Elizabeth caught the small private smile her aunt did not quite manage to hide, and told herself, packing for the journey a week later, that her own eagerness to see the grounds had nothing whatever to do with their owner and everything to do with genuine curiosity regarding fine parkland, a claim she did not for one moment believe herself.
She brought the writing box.
She told herself this, too, was practical, nothing more than habit, a woman traveling with her correspondence in order. She did not examine too closely why she checked, twice, that the small brass lock held fast before the carriage door was closed.
They reached Lambton on a warm afternoon, and the innkeeper's wife, asked directly, confirmed what Elizabeth had spent a full day working up the courage to inquire after: the family was not expected at Pemberley until the following day, at the earliest.
"Then we may go," Mrs. Gardiner said, delighted, "and view the house properly, without fear of intruding."
Elizabeth agreed with rather more enthusiasm than caution warranted, and did not stop to ask herself why the prospect of an empty house pleased her so thoroughly, when a fortnight earlier she had claimed complete indifference to its owner.
The house itself undid her before she had even crossed the threshold.
They came upon it from a rise in the drive, the woods falling away all at once to reveal a great stone building set handsomely above a stream that had been left to run as nature intended rather than bent into some fashionable canal, and Elizabeth stood a moment in the open carriage simply looking, aware of something loosening in her chest that she did not have a ready word for.
"To be mistress of Pemberley," Mrs. Gardiner murmured, half to herself, "might be something."
"Might be," Elizabeth agreed, and said nothing further, because she had just realized, with an unwelcome jolt, that she had thought the very same words a half second before her aunt spoke them.
The housekeeper, Mrs. Reynolds, met them in the hall and led them through rooms furnished with a taste Elizabeth had not expected, less splendor than Rosings, and infinitely more elegance for the lack of it.
She trailed her fingers along a windowsill in the dining parlor and looked out at the view, the hill, the river, the scattered oaks, and thought, unwillingly, of a man standing at a different window in a different county, cataloguing her family's faults instead of the prospect before him, and wondered whether he had ever once looked out at all this and simply let himself feel something without first pricing it.
"He is not a hard master, whatever they say of him in Hertfordshire," Mrs. Reynolds said, apropos of nothing, when Elizabeth asked, carefully, whether the family was often in residence.
"I have known him since he was four years old, and I have never once heard a cross word from him in my life.
Generous to a fault, and the best landlord and the best brother that ever lived.
Some call him proud. I have never seen it. "
Elizabeth said nothing, but the words settled into her strangely, at odds with everything she had been so certain of, and she found herself, moving through the gallery a quarter hour later, stopping before a portrait she had not needed to be told the subject of.
He was younger in it, painted before some weight had settled into his shoulders that the living man now carried, and he wore, unmistakably, a slight smile she had only ever seen him attempt and abandon in her own company.
She stood before it longer than propriety required, studying that half smile as though it might tell her something the living man's careful reserve never had, and felt, standing there, a gentler sensation toward him than she had permitted herself since Hunsford.
"And of this place," she thought, though she would not have said it aloud for the world, "I might have been mistress."
She was still standing there when the sound of hooves on gravel reached her through the open window below.
He came around the corner of the house on foot, coat dusty from the road, evidently arrived a full day earlier than the housekeeper had promised, and stopped dead the moment he saw her.
Neither of them moved.
He recovered first, color rising sharply in his face, and crossed the distance between them with the particular stiff formality of a man determined not to betray how thoroughly he had been caught off guard. "Miss Bennet."
"Mr. Darcy." Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "We understood you were not expected until tomorrow."
"My plans changed." He glanced past her, toward Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner, who were making a visible effort to appear absorbed in the gallery's other portraits and failing utterly. "I hope you find the house to your liking."
"I find it very much to my liking." She had not meant to say it with quite so much feeling, and saw him hear the feeling regardless.
He asked after her family, stiffly at first, and then, when she answered, something in his shoulders eased, and the questions grew less formal, more genuinely curious, until he was asking after Jane by name and inquiring, with careful casualness, whether she had enjoyed her journey north.
She answered each question and watched him the whole time, aware of Mrs. Reynolds's praise still sitting uneasily alongside her own written ledger, the best brother that ever lived and the man who had itemized her mother's failings in the same breath as his declaration of love, and found she could not make the two accounts balance.
He asked, before they parted, whether he might have the honor of introducing his sister, and the request came out with a diffidence so unlike his usual bearing that Elizabeth agreed before she had fully decided to.
"Tomorrow," he said, "if that would suit."
"Tomorrow," she agreed, and watched him bow and withdraw with the same careful formality he had entered with, though his color had not fully settled, and understood, walking back to the carriage with her aunt and uncle full of questions she was not yet ready to answer, that whatever ledger she had kept locked in her writing box, some new figure had just been added to it that she had no idea yet how to enter.