Chapter 22
Darcy woke in the chair a little after seven with a crick in his neck, a blanket about his shoulders he did not remember acquiring, and Elizabeth’s hand still in his, and he held very still for a long moment before he so much as turned his head, because she was asleep, truly asleep, deep and even and unafraid.
She slept on through the morning. The house moved quietly around her, with every door eased and every voice dropped. Darcy, persuaded at last by Mrs. Gardiner to leave the chair, came down and washed and borrowed a razor and a clean shirt of Mr. Gardiner’s that fit him.
He was sitting in the back parlour looking ten years younger and entirely undone when the Colonel was shown in, come from Belgravia with the night’s account.
They spoke low, the two cousins and Mr. Gardiner, over a breakfast none of them did much with. Richard told it plainly, as he told everything.
It was settled, and settled without a sound that would ever reach the world. Lady Catherine had left London before midnight, in her own carriage, north, and would not come south again.
She had gone to Inverness, on a fixed allowance, in a silence the whole family would keep. Anne had gone with her, but on her own portion paid to her own hand.
"She told us why she did it," Richard said, "at the end, when no one could have made her.
She did it as a way out of Rosings, and you were the door.
She has never wanted you, Darcy, not for an hour, which I find I believe entirely and which does not make any of it better.
I thought you had better hear that from me than work it out for yourself in ten years' time. "
Darcy turned his cup. "It would have been easier to hate her for wanting me," he said at last.
"Yes," said Richard. "That is generally how it goes. And last of all, Rosings will become mine to manage, on the family’s account.”
Darcy nodded his agreement on that count.
“It galls me,” Richard said, turning his cup.
“I will be honest with you, it galls me to the bone, that she sleeps tonight in a feather bed in Scotland and not on straw where she belongs. A soldier likes an account squared. It is not the justice I wanted. It is the justice that costs Elizabeth nothing. I have made my peace with the trade, and so must you.”
Darcy was quiet a moment. “I find I do not care, this morning, whether Catherine is on straw or down,” he said.
“I wanted to take that house apart with my hands, and I sat all night in a chair, and somewhere in the night the wanting simply went out of me, because Elizabeth was sleeping and I was with my love at last. I found I had no room left in me for Catherine. Let her have the north. Elizabeth is in that bed. The two facts do not seem to me to be on the same scale at all.”
Richard stood and said his goodbyes to the men who had sat with him through the ordeal and Georgiana came in through the front door as he went out, her face flushed and eyes darting around for her brother.
“He is in the back parlour,” Richard said as he gave her a small hug, “Elizabeth is resting.”
“Brother must be at once the happiest and most exhausted man in all the kingdom,” she said.
“Indeed,” said the colonel, “go into him now before he nods off.”
As she came into the parlour, Darcy stood and welcomed his sister into his arms. “She is upstairs, and she is safe and whole,” Darcy said. "She is asleep. She is not hurt, or not in any way that will not mend, and you may see her when she wakes."
Georgiana held him tightly. Being alone with him at Darcy House she knew exactly the strain he had endured.
"And it was not an illness,” she said
"It was not an illness." Darcy knew what was coming.
"I have known that since the morning I asked you," she said. "I should like, if you please, to be told the rest of it now, all of it, and not the version that is fit for me."
So he told her, standing in a merchant's front parlour in another man's shirt, of the cordial and the room and the bar on the windows, and who had done it, and Georgiana heard the whole of it without sitting down.
When he came to their aunt’s visit on his ruined wedding day, she put her hand out to the back of a chair and held it.
"She came to me,” Darcy said. "The Tuesday. She sat in our drawing-room and drank our tea and took my hand and told me that Providence had been very kind to this family by putting off the wedding, and I thanked her for coming."
“How could you have known, how could any of us? She deeply disliked Elizabeth but this was beyond the pale, Brother. I wish that I had done more to help you find our Lizzy.”
"You did what I asked of you," Darcy said. "You lied to every caller in London and asked me nothing, and you were the only person I did not have to manage, and if you are looking for the part of this you are answerable for, you will not find it, because I have looked, and it is not there."
Georgiana was quiet a moment. Then, "I said to leave them nothing."
"We have left her the name," Darcy said. "She has gone north with Anne. They will not come south again, nor be told when Elizabeth and I marry."
Georgiana nodded once, and did not say that it was enough, because it was not, and they both knew it, and neither of them had the smallest wish to say so on the morning Elizabeth was asleep upstairs.
Then she took off her bonnet, at last, and sat down in the Gardiners' parlour to wait, and would not be persuaded home, and was still there in the afternoon when the house came awake.
Lady Matlock came in the early afternoon, and she and Mrs. Gardiner met in the hall and looked at one another, the countess and the merchant’s wife, ans went into one another’s arms and wept, openly, at last, the held tears of those days.
They wept, and were not ashamed, and were the better for it. Jane drew Mr. Bingley quietly into the next room and pulled the door to and left them to it, and stood there in the dim with her hand in his.
There was a thing to be said before the brooch, and Lady Matlock said it standing in the hall, because she had carried it a fortnight and would not carry it up any stairs.
"You told me, the morning after that terrible, lost wedding day, that somebody had meant that girl a kindness in her last easy hour, and that you would give a year of Sundays to find the woman and thank her."
She took Mrs. Gardiner's hands in both of hers.
"There was no such woman. I never sent a cordial, nor a card, nor one word about my mother and my wedding, for I never had a mother at my wedding to write of.
Anne wrote it. In my hand, with my love in it, because they knew that child would drink down anything at all that came to her from me. "
Mrs. Gardiner stood very still. "Then it was not a kindness."
"It was not, and you urged her to drink it, and there is not a woman alive in that room or any other who would have done differently, because it came with my name on it and my name was safe."
Lady Matlock opened her reticule and took out a small, folded handkerchief, and from it the brooch.
“We took it back from her last night,” she said. “Off the chain at her waist, where she had been wearing it as though it were hers. It is going back to the young lady it was given to.”
She turned it in the light. “But not by me, I think, and not today, in a sickroom. You are the one who held her in your arms when she was small and homesick. You should be the one to send her up the aisle wearing it. Let it be your gift as much as mine. God knows we have both earned a share in that girl’s happiness. ”
And Mrs. Gardiner, who had thought herself wept out, took the brooch in both hands and was undone all over again and could only nod, and close her fingers over it, and put it away in her own keeping against a morning now very near.
Elizabeth woke in the middle of the afternoon to a square of pale sun on the counterpane and the ordinary blessed sounds of a house at work below her.
She lay a while simply taking the inventory of safety the way she had used to take the inventory of the other room, but every item now a comfort and not a threat.
A door she could open, a window with no bar, a fire someone had built without being made to, the smell of bread instead of the smell of the grey blanket.
She got up, and found she could. Dressed, slowly, in her own clothes and came to the top of the stairs and stood listening, not for locks, she noted, with a small private satisfaction, but for voices, for the dear ordinary racket of people she loved.
Georgiana was at the foot of the stairs, and had been for some while. So when Elizabath called her name and came down to her, she got out none of what she had spent the morning preparing.
What she managed, when Elizabeth reached the bottom step, was the one word she had been unable to finish at a dinner-table in Grosvenor Street a lifetime ago, and she said the whole of it this time, steadily, out loud, in front of everybody.
"Lizzy."
And Elizabeth, who had been given back a great many things in the past four-and-twenty hours, found that this one undid her, and put her arms round Darcy's sister and held on to her in the hall.
After, the whole family made a great fuss of caring for her and she let them, and she ate a proper meal at a proper table with her family round it, and it did her more good than any draught the doctor could have left.
Darcy was at her side, and did not crowd her, and could not quite stop looking at her.
She caught him at it, twice, and the second time reached over and put her hand on his without a word, in front of everyone, which in that house on that day passed without the smallest remark, the family having moved some hours ago past any pretense that these two needed watching for proprieties.
When the worst of the fuss had eased, she said what she had woken meaning to say. “I should like to write to my father,” she said. “Today. Or, Aunt, I should like you to write it, in your steady hand, for mine is not steady yet and he must not have it in a shaking hand or he will know.”
She looked round the table. “He is not to have the truth in a letter; that is a thing to do in the same room together and no other way, and I will not have it broken to him two days’ ride with no one by him but my mother.
So the letter is to say only that I am mended, that the long illness is past, and that Mr. Darcy and I mean to be married very soon and very quietly at Pemberley, as soon as I am strong enough to travel and that he is to come to us there, all of them, for it. ”
Elizabeth paused and thought of another thing she wished done.
“Uncle, there was a young woman at Madame’s, you will know I am sure. Her name is Sarah. She is the one who carried that bottle in to me and said the words she had been told to say. She has a mother who was dying then and may be so yet."
“I remember her, Lizzy. She was a timid creature but tried to help me and Darcy at the modiste that evening,” her uncle said.
Elizabeth went on, “She was chosen, you understand.
Not happened upon. She was chosen because she was poor enough and frightened enough and had too much already on her to look twice at a kindness.
I have thought about her a great deal in that room, more than I expected to.
She is at this moment going about her work believing she handed a bride her ruin, and nobody has troubled to tell her how it came out. "
She looked round the table. "So she is to be told.
Today, if it can be managed. Sarah is to be told that I am found, and that I am well, and that not one person in this family holds a thing against her.
And whatever her mother wants is to be had, and it is not to be called payment, because there is nothing whatever to pay her for.
She gave a bride a glass. That is the sum of what she did. "
Mr. Gardiner said that he would go himself, that afternoon.
“Then Let my mother have her wedding to crow about,” she continued. “Let it be at Pemberley, where I can be married among trees instead of stared at down a London aisle, and where the whole sorry season can be put behind us at the door.”
She turned her hand over under Darcy’s. “I find I have stopped wanting a grand town wedding entirely. I have had enough of being talked about by people I shall never meet. I should like to marry you quietly, in our own home, with only the people who love us to see it, and I should like it to be soon.”
“It can be as soon as you can sit a carriage to Derbyshire,” Darcy said, “and not one hour after, if I have any say in the matter, which I begin to hope I do.”
“You have a great deal of say,” Elizabeth said.
“You have rather more say, as of last night, than any other person living. Only do not imagine it will always be so. I mean to recover my health entirely, Mr. Darcy, and argue with you about everything, all the way to Derbyshire and the whole of our lives after, and you are not to look so pleased at the prospect, it is unnerving in a man.”
He laughed, the first easy laugh anyone at that table had heard out of him in a long while and the sound of it went round the room like warmth from a fire.
Mrs. Gardiner had to look hard at her plate, and Jane reached for Mr. Bingley’s hand under the cloth, and the long dread that had lived in that house got up, quietly, and went out, and did not come back.