Nothing to do but Talk
XIV
The cart had one virtue, which was motion, and every other quality of a penance.
It had been built, so far as Darcy could determine, by a man with a grudge against the human spine.
Within a mile, he had surrendered the last of his bearing to it.
Elizabeth sat opposite, on the other board, and rode the lurching of the thing as easily as she appeared to do everything else, which he was beginning to find a provocation in its own right.
She was quiet for perhaps a quarter of an hour. He had learnt, that morning, not to trust her quiet, and was proved right.
“Tell me about your heiress, the one waiting for you to reclaim your fortune and sweep her off her feet.”
He shifted against the rail and looked away. “No.”
“That was very quick. You have been rehearsing it.”
“I have had nothing to rehearse, because there is nothing to tell, and if there were, it would not be told in a cart.”
“It is a very good cart. It keeps our secrets admirably. Boabdil, do you not keep our secrets?” The driver only looked up, slapped a fraying hemp rope on his mule’s rump, and did not alter his pace.
She turned back to him. “There, you see? He would not be alarmed if you announced yourself engaged to a mermaid. You told me, while I was in the middle of proposing to purchase my safety from the mob with your name, that there was an understanding waiting for you in England, and that yesterday’s disaster had endangered it, and that you hoped to Heaven it survived so that you should not be reduced to cleaning grates.
That is a great deal of information to have volunteered, sir, for a man who now declines to give me any at all. ”
“I was under duress. Soldiers had ransacked the house.”
“And now merely a cart is ransacking your composure, which I grant is the lesser assault, but I am comfortable, and it is a long way to Estella, and you have nothing else with which to entertain me.” She folded her hands in her lap. “What is she like?”
He gave it up, because the alternative was silence, and silence in that cart meant his own thoughts, and his own thoughts at present were a memorandum with a figure at the foot of it.
“She is everything that is proper.”
“Oh, dear.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing. Go on. Proper. That is one.”
“She is well-bred. Amiable. Accomplished —”
“You are reading me a subscription list. Amiable, accomplished, well-bred. I could describe a spaniel in those terms and make the creature sound the better match, because I should at least add that it was fond of me.” She tilted her head. “Is she fond of you?”
“She has always shown me civility.”
“Civility.” Elizabeth pronounced the word as though holding it up to the light to find the flaw in it. “You are going to marry a woman who has always shown you civility. Mr Darcy, I show the fishmonger civility. It is not generally understood to be a foundation for matrimony.”
“It is a foundation for a great many marriages considerably happier than the ones got up on warmer stuff.”
That gave her a moment’s pause, and he had the brief, unworthy pleasure of having scored a strike. She inclined her head, conceding the hit with a fairness he had not expected and rather wished she had spared him, since it made her harder to be irritated with.
“That is true,” she said. “That is entirely true, and rather bleak, and I withdraw the spaniel.” She let the road jolt them a while. “What is her name?”
“No.”
“Now that is interesting.”
“It is nothing of the kind.”
“It is the most interesting thing you have said. You will give me the sum of your ruin to the shilling, you will confess your father’s folly and your own, you will grant me that she is amiable, accomplished, and civil.
But the name, her mere name, you guard as though I meant to do something dreadful with it.
” She leaned forward over her knees. “What is it you are afraid of, precisely? That I shall appear at the church on the morning and rise up in the gallery to forbid the banns? I knew this man in Spain, and he owes one hundred thousand pounds and cannot bend over without an audience —”
“Good God.”
“— and once he hid behind a table from a woman half his size with flour on his coat.” Only think of the scandal. You had far better tell me the name and have done, for I shall only invent a worse one, and go about calling her Seraphina to your face for the rest of the journey.”
“You would not dare.”
“I would dare a very great deal before we reach Estella. I have already married you. Seraphina is nothing beside it.”
He looked at her — the flushed, laughing, indefatigable ruthlessness of her, entirely without malice and entirely without mercy, prying the last coin out of him for no better reason than that it was there and the road was long — and he heard himself surrender the name he had not meant to say aloud in this country to anyone.
“Lady Honoria Vane. She is the daughter of the Earl of Marchwood. And if you call her Seraphina, I shall put you out of the cart and let Boabdil decide between us.”
“Lady Honoria.” Elizabeth sat back and turned the name over with evident satisfaction.
“That is a very handsome name. That is a name with land behind it. An earl’s daughter — well done, Mr Darcy, truly.
I congratulate you without the smallest reservation.
You will be Darcy of Pemberley, son-in-law to Lord Marchwood, and there is not a hostess in England who will not think the better of her table for having you at it. ”
Darcy stared at her for a few seconds, then wedged himself further into the corner of the slats and looked up the road.
He had been braced for jealousy, or pity, or the sort of feminine cross-examination that goes fishing after a compliment to itself.
She offered none of the three. She was pleased for him.
She had heard the whole sensible, splendid construction of his future and approved it, warmly, and she went back to watching the country go by.
“You are very quick to marry me off,” he said, “for a woman still legally in possession of me.”
“On loan,” she said, not turning from the country. “I keep excellent accounts. You will be returned in the condition I found you — give or take a wife.”
The road out of Tudela ran first through dust, then vineyards, then a country so openly stripped by war that even the trees looked uncertain of their tenure.
The Lady Honoria interrogation had annoyed him, she could see, and he had gone quiet after it as if licking a wound he would die before admitting to.
She let him have the silence for a mile or two.
It seemed only fair. She had, after all, got a great deal for her afternoon’s work — a name, a fortune, a father-in-law with an earldom — and generosity came easily to the victorious.
It did not last.
“Your mother is in Gracechurch Street?” he asked.
“Partly there. Partly everywhere. She is most often with my aunt Philips, though no roof was ever built broad enough for my mother’s anxieties. Kitty and Lydia are still with her, when they are not making some other household wish them elsewhere.”
“And Miss Bennet?”
There it was — the return of his serve, and a good deal harder than he knew.
She might have turned it. She had turned worse.
But she thought of the lane at Netherfield, and Jane riding out in weather no sensible creature would face, and Bingley’s whole open face swinging round to her sister as though the sun had learnt to enter a room.
Darcy had been Bingley’s friend. He had been forever at Bingley’s elbow. Let him carry it back.
“Jane is married.”
Something in his face eased. Relief, perhaps, at a life disposed of in three words. “My congratulations to her.”
“It was a gentleman near Meryton. Advanced in years, steady in his habits, possessed of a sound house, a good income, and the very proper wish to attach a wife who would be kind to his children and useful to her own people. My mother wanted keeping. Jane could supply it by marrying, so she did.”
The eased look went out. “She was compelled?”
“Compelled is an ugly word. Say rather that she was persuaded — by necessity, by duty, and by the excellent market price of female sweetness in a season when the family was short of everything but daughters.”
He looked as if the cream in his tea had gone sour. She found she could not stop, now that she had begun.
“She behaved beautifully, of course. Jane could make a martyrdom look like good breeding, given half an hour to arrange the cushions. She married him. She smiled where smiling was wanted. She consoled my mother for the loss of Longbourn far more tenderly than my mother ever consoled her for the loss of anything else. And on her wedding morning, she wept enough to satisfy any parish still of the opinion that brides ought to.”
The cart dropped into a rut and climbed out of it. Darcy’s head snapped back and forth, and if there was an instant’s dissatisfaction crossing his face, surely it was only the state of the road.
“She was… displeased with her mother?”
She looked at him directly. “No.”
His eyes came to hers and held, and there was a hollow quality to his voice. “At Mr Bingley?”
Elizabeth crossed her arms and lifted one brow.
In a less disciplined man, she would have called the thing that crossed his face guilt. As it was, it arrived, was arrested, and went down so fast that only a woman hunting for any sign would have trusted herself to name it.
“You knew him better than anyone. If chance, or friendship, or whatever gentlemen exchange in place of confidence should ever put him within your hearing again, you may tell him that Jane Bennet married respectably, keeps a handsome house, is all duty to her husband, and no doubt still weeps for him at the correct intervals.”
“Elizabeth, I —”
She very nearly laughed. “No. You shall not offer your regrets! I would rather you reproached me on the matter.”
“I was not going to reproach you, and I fear it is a vast deal too late to offer regrets.”
“What, then?”
“I was going to ask whether you were satisfied. You recited all that as though you have wished to for a very long time, and had no proper ear.”
She frowned. “You are unsettlingly persipacious. Jane loved Mr Bingley, and either he never returned her feelings or he was taught not to want her, so she married an old man to feed the rest of us. If I sounded eager to air my grievances, it might be said that they have been heard too little in other quarters.”
He looked out through the narrow gap of the cart rather than at her. The driver cursed a passing carter’s mother with real feeling, and the country went by.
After a while, he said, “I had not known.”
“No,” she said. “Hertfordshire was full of things gentlemen did not trouble to know until they were safely past undoing them.”
She watched him wince at that, despised herself a little for the pleasure of it, and took the pleasure regardless.
It did not keep. Such victories never did; they curdled almost in the winning.
She turned her face to the road and wished, with a suddenness that unbalanced her, that Jane had never had to be made a weapon, least of all here, least of all in her hands, against a man who could not even defend himself without confessing his own part in it.
“One more question, and I hope you will do me the courtesy of an honest answer. Did she wish to refuse him?”
She shut her eyes. “Yes.”
Nothing else. There was no profit in trimming a thing already as black as it would go.
The rest of the afternoon passed in its own coin — jolting quiet, a question or two about the road, the mule stopped and started and stopped again.
But the air in the cart had changed and would not change back.
Jane was in it now. So was Bingley. And behind them, unbidden, the whole of what the two of them had been before yesterday had made near strangers into man and wife.