Chapter 10 #2
“Elizabeth,” I cut in, “you should not have made that promise before we knew the facts.”
My tone was sharper than I had intended. Mrs. Hewson’s face closed. So did Elizabeth’s.
“We will discuss this at Pemberley,” she said.
She remained perfectly courteous until we left. In the carriage, she removed her gloves finger by finger, with a precision that announced a storm far more dangerous than the one that had damaged the roof.
“You corrected me in front of your steward the way one corrects a child playing at being mistress of the house.”
“You had committed the estate without knowing the lease.”
“Then you could have explained the lease to me. You did not need to remind them that my authority ends where yours begins.”
“That was not what I meant.”
“Yet that is what you showed.”
I felt my own defenses rise.
“Pemberley cannot be administered by impulse, however generous.”
“While we verify the registers, two children will sleep under a leaking roof.”
Silence fell. She was looking out the window, her jaw set. Her father’s words came back to me with cruel clarity: when her mind disturbs your habits.
He had not warned me that it would hurt. Nor that it would come so soon.
“You admired my frankness when it was directed at Lady Catherine or Caroline Bingley,” she continued more quietly. “I am beginning to wonder if you admire it as much when it contradicts you.”
I had no honorable answer to offer her.
When the shelf feels a little empty, try a simple search.
Type Lokepub into Google to find more books.
We spent an hour on opposite sides of the house.
They were the longest sixty minutes since the night at the Swan, and for an entirely different reason.
I had feared failing her in person. I was discovering that one could miss someone who stood thirty paces away, behind a closed door, in the same house.
Then I found her in the mistress’s study, standing before the window, arms crossed. I had brought the Hewsons’ lease and the repair register.
“I was right about the procedure,” I said. “And wrong about the way I spoke to you.”
She turned.
“I was right about the roof. And wrong to promise before knowing who should act.”
We sat side by side before the register. Mrs. Hewson’s letter was there, received eight days earlier and filed without follow-up during Mr. Sutton’s absence. The damage stemmed from a chimney whose maintenance did indeed fall to the estate.
“The roof will be repaired tomorrow,” I said.
“Because I demanded it?”
“Because you saw what my papers had failed to show me. And because we have just verified the facts together.”
She placed her hand on the register.
“Next time, do not correct me as if I were an embarrassing guest.”
“Next time, do not promise half of Derbyshire before luncheon.”
Her eyes narrowed.
“I never promise more than one county before noon.”
Laughter escaped us at the same instant. It did not erase the disagreement; it only allowed us to draw close enough to finish it.
She did not move from her chair. Neither did I.
Our shoulders touched above the open register, and I remained there, motionless, measuring the distance traveled since Rosings: this woman had refused me, had told me to my face what no one had dared to tell me, and now sat beside me in my mother’s study, discussing a chimney.
“You are looking at me again,” she said without raising her eyes from the register.
“I am getting used to it.”
The next day, we returned to the Hewsons' with Mr. Sutton. Elizabeth asked the questions. I listened. And for the first time since our arrival, Pemberley was neither my estate nor her new home: it became a responsibility we were learning to share.
?
One morning during the second week, I searched the entire house and couldn't find her.
Not in the library. Not in the small east sitting room that had become her refuge.
Not in the guest room in the east wing, which she had rechristened her secret reading office.
Not in the service rooms with Mrs. Reynolds. Not at the pianoforte with Georgiana.
I found her in the garden.
She sat on the stone wall that ran along the lake, her shoes beside her, her stockinged feet resting in the grass.
She was reading. Georgiana's collection—the one I had given her in the lane at Longbourn an eternity ago, when our fingers touched on the leather cover and the world tilted.
The same book. The same brown leather. The same gilt on the spine.
She hadn't heard my footsteps.
The Derbyshire sun fell on her face, on her hair loosened by the lake wind, on her shoulders where the shawl was slipping. Her stockings were damp with dew. The image was so utterly simple that it became perfect.
A year ago, almost to the day, I had crossed this same garden telling myself that an alliance with this family would be a degradation. The memory passed through me without mercy. I welcomed it as one welcomes a debt paid.
She looked up. Saw me. Smiled.
“I'm unshod,” she said. “Mrs. Reynolds would be horrified.”
“Mrs. Reynolds will recover.”
“You're not going to tell me it's improper?”
“It is absolutely improper. Continue.”
Her laughter crossed the garden and was lost over the lake, carried by the wind, mingling with the cry of crows and the rustle of leaves. The most alive sound Pemberley had heard since my mother's death.
I sat beside her on the wall. The stone was cold beneath my palms; it must have been cold beneath hers for an hour, and she had said nothing.
I took her bare feet and placed them on my lap, over the cloth of my coat, with the seriousness of a man settling an estate matter.
She made no comment. She leaned her shoulder against mine and resumed her reading, and we stayed like that, watching the lake, until the wind turned and she consented to go inside.
?
That evening, I led her to the room I had prepared for her.
The mistress's study. She had entered it twice already: the first time to stand her ground about a roof, the second to check a register beside me. She had never looked at its walls.
A small room on the second floor, with a window overlooking the park, a mahogany secretary, an armchair, a lamp.
My mother had kept her accounts there, written her correspondence there, governed the estate from there with that quiet authority I remembered only from childhood.
Lady Anne's portrait in the great drawing room showed only the surface. This room was her true territory.
Elizabeth entered. Looked. Touched the wood of the secretary, the binding of the account book, the new blotter I'd had placed there. Then her fingers stopped.
On the secretary, in the left corner, a brass plate. Two engraved letters.
E.D.
Elizabeth Darcy.
She stood motionless. Her fingers touched the engraved letters, traced them one by one, slowly, as if the metal could answer her. Then she raised her eyes to me.
“Why?”
Her voice was lower than usual. Slightly hoarse.
“Because this room is yours,” I said. “Not my mother's, which you would merely be keeping for her memory. Yours. I wanted it written somewhere, spelled out, before you crossed the threshold.”
She didn't answer. Not immediately.
“I commissioned it in April,” I added. “In London. Before I knew whether you would accept me.”
Her eyes shone in the lamplight, and I saw her lips tremble for a second before she pressed them together to regain control.
Elizabeth never cried, or almost never. She laughed to defend herself, mocked to protect herself, retorted rather than give way.