Chapter 1 #2
It was Elizabeth who gave way first. "Your aunt gave me this." She opened her hand. The brooch lay in her palm, the dark stone waking and dimming in the carriage lamp. "She said it had been your mother's."
He did not answer at once. He had not seen it in years and the sight of it in another woman's hand undid something in his chest he had believed long since put away and set on a high shelf.
His mother had worn it at the collar of a pale rose morning gown. He remembered the gown more clearly than he could now remember her face, which was its own small grief, and not one he had looked at squarely in some time.
"It was hers," he said. His voice was not entirely steady, and he did not trouble to make it so for there was no one in the carriage he needed to be steady for.
"I had thought it gone. Sold, or lost, or carried off to Rosings with everything else of hers my Aunt Catherine took it into her head to keep." He looked up from the brooch to her face. "I am glad it is yours. I find I am a great deal gladder than I know how to say."
"Then do not try to say it now." She opened her reticule and gently placed the brooch inside and reached across the narrow space between the seats, and laid that same hand against his, warm through her glove.
"Say it some other day, when we are not being jostled half out of our seats. I shall hold you to it."
He turned his hand beneath hers and held it, and they rode the rest of the way so, not speaking. It was something he had once believed himself unable to do, and now suspected he preferred to almost any conversation in London.
At Gracechurch Street, he handed her down and saw her to the door, though it was four steps and a forgiving household. The maid who let them in took one look at the pair of them and discovered she was wanted somewhere down the hall.
Darcy did not let go of Elizabeth's hand. He turned it palm-up instead, drew the glove back from the inside of her wrist, and set his mouth to the bare skin there. Once, without hurry.
It was a thing he had no business doing on an open step and did anyway. Her breath caught, and he heard it, and was not sorry.
"There," he said, very low. "Now you have something to remember that is not my failings."
Her laugh came out unsteadily. "You are determined to be remembered."
"By you? Always. It is the whole of my ambition." He pressed her gloved fingers once and let them go. "Goodnight, Elizabeth."
"Goodnight Fitzwilliam,” she said, her face glowing and her eyes bright with mischief and her love for him, and went in.
He stood a moment on the step after the door had closed, as though he had forgotten the way to his carriage.
Darcy boarded and gave the coachman his direction and sat back as the horses came round toward home, and for the length of that drive he let himself be simply and uncomplicatedly happy.
It was a condition in which he had little practice, and was beginning to believe he might, with application, acquire some.
At home soon after, Darcy saw a letter on the salver and he very nearly let it lie until morning.
The evening had been a good one. He had laughed twice in company, which his cousin Richard thought remarkable in him, and not been wrong.
He had a superstition, privately held and never examined, against opening unknown correspondence at the end of a good day. He knew how readily his own hope rose and had learned to be careful of it.
Darcy looked closer and had his superstition proven correct. He knew the hand at once.
He had carried Lady Catherine's writing in his memory since boyhood. The heavy downstroke, the certainty in every letter, the hand of a woman who had never in her life supposed she might be writing to someone who would not do as she said.
He broke the seal standing in the hall and read it there, and then went into the study and read it again sitting down, but the second reading did not resolve what the first had begun.
It was the tone of the thing. The hand was hers and the tone was not. She wrote with care, each sentence set in its place like a plate laid for a meal long planned.
She had come to town and opened de Bourgh House. She wrote, she said, in the hope of being received as something other than what she had been when last they had spoken under his roof.
She asked, she did not demand, that he bring his bride to take tea, at whatever hour was convenient to Miss Bennet, who he must understand could have no warmer well-wisher than herself however little her recent conduct had given Miss Bennet cause to believe it.
It was, line by line, unanswerable. There was not a word in it that overreached. There was not a phrase a reasonable man could call false.
That was precisely what he could not get past. His aunt was many things and had never once in his memory been humble. Her convictions were not the sort that bent because an argument had gone against her.
A woman did not arrive at humility the way one arrived at London, by simply setting out. And yet here was the letter, complete, coherent, with every word laid true.
He sat with it a long while. The fire went down. In the end he could neither trust it nor dismiss it.
Darcy found he would have to account for it in the morning, because he was already half certain that Elizabeth, who forgave more readily than she admitted and was braver than was good for her, would want to go.
He carried it to Gracechurch Street after breakfast and watched her read it at the parlor table. That quick, expressive face she imagined she kept unreadable was, to him, as plain as print.
"She has apologized," Elizabeth said.
"Yes."
"By name. For particular wrongs." She did not look up. "That is not nothing. It is difficult to apologize in general. It is very difficult to apologize in particular."
"It is well done," Darcy said. "What troubles me is how well."
"Yes." She set the page down on the table and regarded it without picking it up again. "And yet you are here, and you have not refused her, which tells me you do not entirely believe your own suspicion."
He had not refused her. He acknowledged it. She was his aunt. There existed, somewhere among the possibilities, a version of this in which a proud woman had looked at what her pride had nearly cost her nephew and tried, clumsily and late, to mend it.
He was not willing yet to shut the door on that version, even if he could not quite make himself trust it.
"I should like to meet her on better terms than the last," Elizabeth said. "If these are what better terms look like."
She picked the letter up, read it once more, and laid it down with a small decisive motion. "Let us go. I would rather risk being wrong about her kindness than be certain of her unkindness for the rest of my life. It is a great many years to carry a certainty like that."
He had known she would say it. He had not known, until she said it, whether he would be glad.
"You are looking at me," Elizabeth observed, "as though I have proposed something reckless."
"You have proposed kindness to a woman who has not earned it. In my experience that is the most reckless thing you do."
"It is the only reckless thing I do. I am otherwise a model of caution, as you would know if you attended."
"I attend to nothing else." He took her hand and held it. “Ten days," he said. "I find I am counting them like a schoolboy. It is not at all dignified and I have given up minding."
"Then we are matched," she said, "for I have been counting them since February, and I gave up minding a great deal sooner than you did."
She let him keep her hand. "Go and arrange your aunt's tea, Mr. Darcy. And do not look so grave about it. Whatever she is, you will be standing beside me the whole of it, and I have never yet met the woman I could not survive for one hour with you in the room."
He told her he would arrange it for the following morning. He would not, he found, be able to wait longer than that, and he rose to go.
Ten days, he thought, settling into his carriage. And then a church, and then the whole long ordinary lifetime he had stopped letting himself believe in until quite recently.