Chapter 3 #3
Beside me. Not in the empty chair opposite. Not near the fireplace where Miss Bingley had had a chair brought.
“You didn’t rise to it,” he said in a low voice.
“I did rise to it. You weren’t listening carefully enough.”
The corner of his mouth moved.
“Fifty years,” he said.
“I may have been optimistic.”
“No,” he said, and something changed in his voice. “You were exact.”
He was looking at the fire. He was not looking at me, because an entire room was watching us—the two of us. But his hand rested on the armrest, two inches from mine, and he left it there all evening.
In the carriage, my aunt waited until we had turned the corner.
“Well,” she said.
“Say nothing, Aunt.”
“I said nothing. I only thought that for a man reputed to be cold, Mr. Darcy was remarkably talkative on the subject of a chicken.”
Jane laughed into her shawl. I looked out the window at the streetlamps of Grosvenor Street drifting past in the fog, and I said nothing at all.
?
That evening, Jane was brushing her hair in front of the mirror when I turned back to sonnet 29.
“Jane?”
“Yes?”
“Are you ever afraid?”
The brush stopped.
“Of Bingley?”
“No. Of everything that comes with him. Netherfield. His friends. Leaving Longbourn. The possibility of not being what they expect.”
Jane set the brush down on the dressing table.
“Yes.”
I looked up sharply.
“You?”
“Why not me?”
“Because the whole world seems made to welcome you.”
She came to sit beside me on the bed.
“The world isn’t always as kind as you believe. I simply choose not to give it the last word.”
“And how do you manage that?”
“I look at Charles.”
“That’s all?”
“It’s a great deal. He doesn’t ask me to be Mrs. Bingley before I can just be Jane. When I doubt, I remember that.”
I turned a page without reading it.
“At Darcy’s house, everything is perfect. The flowers, the servants, the portraits. His mother looked down at me from over the mantelpiece as if she knew exactly what a Mrs. Darcy should be.”
“And Mr. Darcy?”
“He put my books in his library.”
Jane smiled.
“Then his mother can stay in her frame.”
A laugh escaped me, then faded.
“I’m afraid of losing myself in a world too vast. Of loving a man whose name enters a room before he does.”
Jane took my hand.
“You’re not marrying a name, Lizzy. You’re marrying a man.”
“A man who knows the books I love.”
“But a man who knows which books you love.”
I thought of the white roses, of Johnson sacrificed without a fight, of his hand on my elbow, of his voice when he’d asked me to say his name again.
“Yes,” I murmured. “He knows.”
Jane rested her head against my shoulder.
“Then begin with him. The house will come after.”
We stayed like that in the low candlelight, while London murmured beyond the windows.
Soon the ball. In three weeks, the wedding. In a month, Pemberley.
The sonnet lay open on my lap. For the first time, it no longer resembled a letter written in an unknown language.
I already understood a few words.
?
He came for us the next morning, shortly after breakfast.
My aunt had decreed that young people needed air, that Hyde Park was a perfectly respectable place, and that she herself would walk behind with Jane. My mother, who would have given three petticoats to be part of the expedition, found herself providentially detained by a matter of ribbons.
We entered through Cumberland Gate. November had stripped the trees bare and the path was covered with leaves that the night wind had swept against the railings. It was cold, that dry, bright cold that is better than sunshine.
Darcy offered me his arm. I took it.
We walked for a while in silence. Behind us, my aunt was entertaining Jane with a subject she had clearly chosen for its length.
“You’re quiet,” I said at last.
“I was thinking.”
“About what?”
“About the first time I saw you walk.”
I turned to look at him.
“You had arrived at Netherfield after three miles of mud,” he continued, “your petticoats in a state that scandalized Miss Bingley for an entire week, and your cheeks red from the exertion. You had just crossed the countryside on foot to nurse your sister.”
“You thought me wild.”
“I thought you magnificent,” he said. “That’s precisely what put me in such a foul mood.”
I nearly stopped in the middle of the path.
A year. An entire year of supposed disdain, biting remarks, triumphant conclusions about his character, and the man had spent that morning watching me arrive muddy to the knees thinking I was magnificent.
“You might have said so,” I observed.
“I might have said many things. I didn’t know how to say them.”
“You’re improving.”
“I’ve had a severe teacher.”
I laughed. The sound came out louder than I meant it to, and two riders turned their heads.
Darcy didn't look at them. He was looking at me, and he was smiling.
Not that barely perceptible twitch at the corner of his mouth that he granted the world: a real smile, one that reached his eyes and took ten years off him.
This is what no one sees. This is what they all miss—in Meryton, in London, in the drawing rooms where they call him haughty. This man smiles. He even laughs, sometimes.
The path curved toward a grove of beeches. My aunt, behind us, decided that Jane absolutely must see the swans on the Serpentine, and the swans were in the opposite direction.
That woman deserved a statue.
We continued alone. The noise of London faded to a murmur beyond the trees. There was nothing but the gravel beneath our feet, the crows in the bare branches, and his sleeve against mine.
“Elizabeth.”
He had stopped. So did I.
“In three weeks,” he said, “you will be my wife. And I realize I have never asked if you are happy.”
“You’ve asked me a hundred times.”
“I asked if you were anxious. If the house frightened you. If my aunt had written to you. That’s not the same question.”
The wind brought a leaf down between us. I watched it touch the gravel.
“I am happy,” I said.
I heard myself say it and knew, the instant the words left me, that it was true in a way I hadn’t yet dared to measure.
Not happy about Pemberley. Not happy to escape the fate of a girl without a dowry.
Happy with him. With this tall, awkward man who crossed counties to drink bad tea and who had just told me, in November, on a deserted path, that he had found me magnificent covered in mud.
“I am happy,” I repeated. “And if you knew how many times I told myself this autumn that I had nearly lost everything through pride, you would stop worrying about me.”
He said nothing.
He removed his glove.
The gesture was so simple, so unexpected, that I didn’t understand at first. He pulled off the right one, finger by finger, stuffed it in his pocket, and raised his hand toward my face.
“May I?”
Three weeks earlier, he wouldn’t have asked. He wouldn’t have done it at all.
“Yes.”
His bare palm came to rest on my cheek.
The November cold had claimed my skin; his hand was burning. I felt the callus in the hollow of his palm, worn there by reins held since childhood, and his thumb tracing my cheekbone with the slowness of a man who doesn’t dare believe what he’s touching.
I closed my eyes.
Nothing happened for a stretch of time I couldn’t have measured. Nothing but a hand on my cheek and the wind in the beeches.
Then his mouth touched mine.
It was slow. Infinitely slower than what I had imagined on the nights I let myself imagine such things, only to call myself an idiot come morning.
His lips touched, parted, returned, and I realized I had moved toward him without deciding to, that my hands had found the lapels of his coat and closed around them.
He smelled of soap, wool, and cold.
When he drew back, he kept his hand on my cheek, and his forehead came to rest against mine.
“That,” he said, “is what I’ve wanted to ask you since June.”
“June?”
“The lake. You had Derbyshire dust up to your ankles and introduced me to your uncle as if you hadn’t refused my hand a few months before.”
“You gave nothing away.”
“No,” he said. “I gave nothing away.”
He put his glove back on. I heard my aunt calling somewhere behind the trees, in that falsely distant tone women use when they want to announce themselves well before they appear.
We started walking again. His sleeve against mine, my arm through his, and on my cheek the sensation of his bare palm, which refused to fade the whole way back.
“Mr. Darcy.”
“Yes?”
“You’re walking too fast.”
He slowed at once.
He didn’t ask why. He made no remark, sought no advantage, said nothing at all. He simply slowed and matched his pace to mine for the rest of the way.
This is the man Hertfordshire finds haughty.