Chapter Seventeen
The summer passed at Longbourn in a strange, suspended quiet, Jane's spirits slowly recovering by inches, Elizabeth's own thoughts returning, more often than she wished, to a letter she now knew nearly by heart and a man she had not seen nor heard from since the gate at Rosings.
She and Jane had begun, in July, to plan a tour of the Lakes with their aunt and uncle Gardiner, a scheme that promised distraction enough to occupy her thoroughly until autumn.
Business obliged Mr. Gardiner to shorten the trip considerably, and the Lakes were exchanged for Derbyshire instead, a substitution Elizabeth accepted with only the smallest private unease, knowing well enough whose home lay somewhere in that county, though she told herself the chances of encountering its owner were vanishingly small.
She was wrong about that too, though not in the way she feared.
Pemberley, when they came upon it after a morning's drive through some of the finest woods Elizabeth had ever seen, struck her with a force she had not expected.
It was not merely handsome. It was right, in a way few grand houses managed, its stone the color of honey in the afternoon light, its grounds arranged with a taste that suggested restraint rather than display, and she stood at the top of the rise looking down at it and felt something close to vertigo at the thought that she had once, at a gate in Kent, refused to be its mistress.
The housekeeper who showed them through spoke of her master with a warmth Elizabeth had not expected, calling him the best landlord, the best master, the sweetest tempered boy she had ever known, and Elizabeth walked the gallery afterward in a kind of daze, coming at last to a portrait of him that stopped her entirely still, painted with a faint, private smile she had only ever seen him wear once or twice, and always when he thought she was not watching closely enough to notice.
She was still standing before it when the real man came around the corner from the direction of the stables, entirely without warning, and the shock of it went through her like cold water.
He stopped as abruptly as she had. Color rose in his face, matching, she suspected, her own.
"Miss Bennet." He recovered himself with visible effort. "I did not know you were expected."
"We did not know you were at home, sir, or we should never have presumed to call. Your housekeeper told us you were not returning until tomorrow."
"My business concluded sooner than planned." He glanced past her toward the Gardiners, who stood a little apart, watching this exchange with poorly concealed curiosity, and something in his face steadied. "Will you permit me to be introduced to your relations?"
The introduction was made, and what followed astonished Elizabeth more than anything else that whole strange afternoon.
He was not merely civil to her aunt and uncle, tradespeople from Cheapside whose connections he had once, by implication, held in open contempt.
He was warm. He asked her uncle about his fishing, offered him free use of the stream that ran through the grounds, spoke to her aunt with an easy attentiveness that had nothing performed about it.
Elizabeth watched him do this, watched the careful, deliberate kindness of it, and felt something in her chest crack open further than the letter alone had managed.
He asked, before they parted, whether he might introduce his sister to her, and something in the request, its plainness, its lack of any performance at all, told her more clearly than the letter had that whatever he felt for her had not diminished in the months since Kent, whatever her cruel words at that gate might have led him to expect.