Chapter 2
The de Bourgh townhouse stood in a quiet, costly street where the railings had been newly blacked and the steps newly whitened, and Elizabeth, studying it from the carriage window, thought it wore the blank, unlived look of a house got ready in a hurry.
The knocker shone. The windows gave back the gray morning without a single candle behind them. Nothing about it suggested anyone had ever been happy there.
"You are turning it over," Darcy said. "I can see you doing it."
"I am admiring the housekeeping. Your aunt keeps a very bright knocker."
"My aunt keeps everything bright. It is among the more bearable of her qualities." He was watching her and not the house. "You need not do this. We are not yet at the door. I can give the man a direction and we will be in Gracechurch Street within the half hour, and no one the worse."
"And you would spend that half hour wondering whether you had let her off too easily, and I would spend it wondering the same of myself, and we should arrive in a far worse humor than we are in now."
She drew her gloves smooth over her knuckles. "No. I would rather know."
He did not answer at once, but when he did, he said it plainly and a little to one side, in the way she had learned meant he had held a thing a long while before letting it out.
"She was cruel to you at Longbourn. I have not forgotten it, and I do not ask you to. If this morning is what it claims to be, it does not cancel that. It only comes to sit beside it."
"I know." It was, in fact, the most useful thing he had said all morning. "I am not going in to forgive her, Fitzwilliam. I am going in to look at her. Forgiveness may decide for itself afterward, once it has seen the evidence."
That earned the slight easing at the corner of his mouth that, in Darcy, did duty for a smile.
Inside, the house was warm, and silent in the way of houses kept by a great many more servants than there were people to serve. A footman took their coats and they were shown up the staircase that smelled of fresh beeswax and fresher paint.
The drawing room they were brought into had the same just-finished air as the street outside. The upholstery was uncreased, the fire too lately lit to have reached the corners of the room, and a French clock on the mantel ticking out the hour.
Elizabeth caught herself thinking that it was less a room than a stage set for one, and then put the thought away as unworthy of a woman who had come to be generous.
Lady Catherine rose when they came in.
It was the first wrong note. Lady Catherine de Bourgh did not rise for callers, unless her visitor was another peer.
Callers stood for her until released. She rose now, and came a step toward them, and there was an expression on her face that Elizabeth had never once seen there. It was uncertainty.
"You came," Lady Catherine said. "I was not at all sure you would. I am not certain I should have, in your place."
Her daughter, Anne de Bourgh, sat by the window with her hands in her lap, smaller and stiller than Elizabeth remembered her, and she neither rose nor spoke.
They sat. The tea was poured by Lady Catherine's own hand, a courtesy as improbable, in its way, as the rising had been, and when the footman had withdrawn and the door was shut, she set down the pot and looked at Elizabeth directly.
"I will not insult you with a long speech," she said.
"You are expecting one, and you are right to.
So I will be brief, and you may believe as little of it as you find you can.
I came to your father's house and I was abominable.
I told you that an alliance with my nephew would be a disgrace, and that your name would never afterward be spoken by anyone connected to him.
I told you that you would pollute the shades of Pemberley.
I walked you up and down your father's little wilderness and said each of those things to your face.
No woman of any breeding says such things to another.
I told myself I spoke for the family. I did not.
I spoke for my own pride and dressed it as duty, which is beneath me, and I am ashamed of it.
There. That is the whole of it. I find that shame is briefer in the saying than I had supposed. I had expected it to take longer."
Elizabeth was moved, and was furious with herself for being moved, and could do nothing about either.
She had come armored against grandeur, against condescension in the mask of reconciliation; she had not thought to armor herself against plainness, and plainness was precisely what she was being handed.
"That is a great deal handsomer than I came prepared for," she said, when she could. "I confess I hardly know what to do with it. I had an answer ready for nearly everything but this."
"You had an answer ready to be insulted, and to bear it gracefully, so that I should come off the worse of the two of us."
For a moment the old Lady Catherine looked out through the eyes of the new, dry and clear-sighted, and not at all humble. "Yes. I should have armed myself the same way.”
She paused and something moved in her face and was mastered. "I am aware I have given you no reason to trust in me. I am asking for the chance to furnish one."
Elizabeth turned to bring Anne into it, some ordinary remark about the road up from Kent, and Anne answered her in four words, with a small smile that arrived late, as though she had to remember to produce it.
Then her gaze settled back on Elizabeth's face and stayed there, patient and unreadable. Elizabeth let her be, some people were only shy in company.
The tea went cold while they talked, and somehow the morning began, against all of Elizabeth's intentions, to feel like an ordinary call. Lady Catherine asked after the wedding the way an aunt asks, wanting the answers, not merely the credit for having asked.
"St. George’s?" she said.
"The first week of April. Family only."
"A spring wedding." Something passed over her face, a thing remembered rather than performed.
"I was married in April myself. It rained straight through the vows, and my mother declared it the luckiest sign in the world, which I am fairly sure she invented on the spot, to keep me from weeping in the carriage. "
She asked then whether the gown was silk or muslin, and whether Elizabeth had let the modiste talk her into short sleeves, because brides who took a modiste's advice about sleeves were often cold in the church.
It was so exactly the sort of fussing an aunt was entitled to that Elizabeth laughed before she realized it.
What Lady Catherine's face did then, Elizabeth had not anticipated.
It eased. For a moment she did not look like a great lady performing her penance, she looked like a woman who had been lonely a long while without the manners to say so, and who had just, unexpectedly, been laughed with rather than at.
When the Gardiners were mentioned, her interest sharpened into something nearly shy.
"Your Aunt Gardiner is in Gracechurch Street," she said.
"I should like to call on her, if you will permit it, and bring Anne with me.
Tomorrow, perhaps, if it is not indecently soon?
I have a great many years of poor manners to make good, and not many days before the wedding in which to begin them.
After which you will have a household and a husband and no patience to spare for an old woman's amends.
" She said it lightly, but her hand had closed on the arm of her chair. "Will you allow it?"
Elizabeth said she was sure her aunt would be glad to receive them. Beside her she could feel what it cost Darcy to say almost nothing, to let the morning be whatever it was without prodding at it to learn whether it would hold.
When they rose to go, Anne rose too, at last, and came to Elizabeth, and stood a moment as though gathering the courage for something considerable. What she said was, "I am glad you came, Miss Bennet."
Elizabeth pressed her hand and thanked her and put the oddness of the young lady down to a shy discomfort, and they went out.
In the carriage Darcy said nothing until they had turned out of the street. "I had given her up entirely. I want you to know I did not bring you here out of hope. I came because you wished to, and I could not find the argument against it."
"And now?"
"And now I do not know what I have just sat through, which is a sensation I neither enjoy nor trust." He turned from the glass to her. "You were moved. I watched it happen."
"I was moved. I am still moved, which is worse, since it has had a quarter of an hour to wear off and has not."
She studied her gloved hands. "I keep combing it for the false note, the place where a lie ought to show. I cannot find it. And I do not know whether that is because there is none to find, or because she is better at this than I am at the looking."
"That is precisely the trouble." Darcy's voice was quiet. "I have never in my life known my aunt to do a thing she did not believe was owed her. And I cannot, for my life, see what she imagines this morning buys her."
They sat with that a moment, the small wrongness of a generosity neither of them could explain.
"When I was a boy," Darcy said, "she gave me a watch.
A very fine one, that had belonged to her husband, Sir Lewis.
I was perhaps ten, and for the better part of a week I believed it meant she loved me.
Then I understood she had given it to me because Richard had wanted it, and she did not care for Richard, and the whole pleasure of the gift, for her, lay in pressing it on the wrong boy while the right one looked on. "
He frowned at the remembrance of the story. "Everything she has ever given has had a second person in it, someone meant to be wounded by the kindness. I have spent this entire drive trying to see who is meant to be wounded by today."
"And if there is no one?"
"Then she has truly changed, and I shall be glad of it, and I shall also have to make the acquaintance of an aunt I have never once met."
"I should like it to be true," Elizabeth said at last, and was startled to hear how much she meant it.
"That is what unsettles me, more than the apology did.
I came ready to be unmoved and glad of being unmoved, and here I am instead, wishing a woman I have every reason to distrust has truly changed, because the alternative, that she has not, and is merely this good at seeming to, is not a thing I wish to believe of anyone I am about to call family. "
Darcy took her hand. He did not hand her a verdict. He had the grace, which she loved in him, not to manufacture a certainty he did not feel. "We will let her prove it," he said. "Slowly. There is no harm in that."
"No," Elizabeth agreed. "There is no harm in that."