Chapter Eight Charlottes Choice
The news arrived on a Monday, which was as good a day as any for the arrival of news that required a complete rearrangement of how one understood a person.
Charlotte told her herself, which was the right way to tell a close friend something that the close friend would not expect.
She came to Longbourn before the morning was properly established and found Elizabeth alone in the breakfast room, and she said, sitting down with the composure of a woman who had made a decision and was not going to be apologetic about it: "I am to marry Mr. Collins. "
Elizabeth looked at her.
She said nothing for a moment because she was, which was uncommon, not in immediate possession of what to say.
Charlotte was sitting across the breakfast table in the particular posture of a person who has made themselves entirely legible and is waiting for you to look at them clearly enough to read them.
She was not defiant. She was not ashamed.
She was thirty-seven years old and the daughter of a baronet without the fortune that might have made the baronetcy less relevant, and she was looking at Elizabeth with the expression of a friend who was asking, without asking, for something more complicated than approval.
"Charlotte," Elizabeth said.
"I know what you are thinking."
"I am not certain you do."
"You are thinking that I cannot respect him.
That I am not in love with him. That the match is unequal in almost every way that matters to you.
" Charlotte said this without heat, with the precision of a woman who had thought through the conversation in advance and was not surprised to be having it. "You are correct on all three counts."
"Then why?"
Charlotte looked at her hands for a moment. Her hands, which were practical hands, the kind that had been useful in a household that needed them.
"Because," she said, "Mr. Collins is not a sensible man and I know it.
But he is a good-natured man, and he has a comfortable home, and Lady Catherine is very likely to be dead before the income and the house become properly his, which will make both more manageable.
" She looked up. "And because I am not romantic, Lizzy.
I never was. And I am not young enough to have the luxury of waiting for something I do not, in honesty, expect to come. "
Elizabeth felt the directness of this land in the way that true things landed when they were said plainly and without performance. It was not comfortable.
"You do not hope," she said, carefully, "for any real happiness?"
"I hope for a settled life. I hope for a home I am mistress of and work I am useful in and a husband who will respect my management and spend a portion of each day in his study so that I may have the rest of it undisturbed.
" Charlotte smiled, and the smile was the real one, the one Elizabeth knew.
"I believe I have negotiated all three."
Elizabeth sat with this.
She sat with it the way she sat with ideas that she could not immediately either accept or dismiss, which was with the patient honesty she applied to everything except, she was beginning to understand, the things that were closest to herself.
"You are not afraid," she said finally, "of finding him intolerable?"
"I am accustomed to making things tolerable," Charlotte said.
"It is a less thrilling skill than the one you prefer, which is to find everything interesting.
But it serves well over a long period." She paused.
"Not everyone has your capacity for finding the world interesting, Lizzy.
Some of us can only afford to find it manageable. "
Elizabeth looked at her friend. She thought about what she had said to Darcy, on the night of the ball, about obligation being the enemy of genuine feeling. She thought about what Charlotte's life had been and what it would have continued to be and what it was now.
She thought: I have been comfortable in my opinions because I have never had to test them.
"I think," she said, "that you are braver than I give you credit for. And I think I have been giving you a kind of credit that was more flattering to myself than accurate about you."
Charlotte looked at her for a moment with the expression of a person who has been properly seen. "That," she said, "is the most honest thing you have said to me in a long time."
It was true. Elizabeth felt it as true in the specific way of things you already knew but had not yet said aloud, and the saying of them compressed the knowledge into something solid that you would have to keep carrying from now on.
The engagement was announced at Lucas Lodge that evening.
Sir William was pleased in the way of a father who loved his daughter and was relieved to have discharged his obligation toward her future in a manner he could find, on balance, satisfactory.
Lady Lucas was more warmly pleased. The Lucas children accepted the news with the cheerful indifference of younger siblings who had not yet reached the point of understanding what it meant and its implications for themselves.
Mrs. Bennet, who received the news at the same gathering, passed through several emotional registers in quick succession: surprise, calculation, something very close to resentment that Charlotte had managed the thing with such efficiency, and finally a settling into a species of grudging acknowledgment that Mr. Collins was not, in retrospect, as eligible as she might have thought, and that Jane and Bingley were a far superior arrangement.
Elizabeth stood slightly apart from the main gathering and watched Charlotte receive the congratulations that were offered to engaged women regardless of the nature or enthusiasm of the engagement.
Charlotte received them well. She received them with the composure of a woman who had known exactly what she was deciding and had decided it with full knowledge, and there was a dignity in this that Elizabeth was finding increasingly impossible to locate the right way to hold.
She had thought that she would feel sorry for Charlotte.
She did not feel sorry for Charlotte. She felt something more complicated than that, which was a species of admiration that troubled her because she was not certain she admired the thing itself, or admired the courage it required to do the thing without pretending it was something else.
She wrote to her aunt that evening.
The letter began as a letter of Longbourn news and became, in its second page, something more like thinking aloud, which was what her correspondence with the Gardiners had always been at its best. She wrote about Charlotte in a way that was trying to be honest and kept arriving at places she hadn't expected.
She wrote about the question of what one was entitled to want and whether the entitlement was itself a function of circumstances that most people did not have.
She did not write about Darcy. She wrote around him in the way that you wrote around something that was taking up space on the page even though you had not put it there.
Her aunt wrote back within the week. The letter was warm and precise and contained, in its third paragraph, the confirmation that the Gardiners were planning their northern tour and intended to pass through Hertfordshire in the spring, and that she hoped Elizabeth might be persuaded to join them for part of the journey.
Elizabeth read this three times.
She thought about the northern counties.
She thought about distance. She thought about the specific quality of relief that the idea of distance from Hertfordshire produced in her, and she thought about why distance from Hertfordshire felt like relief when Hertfordshire was the only home she had ever had.
She did not think about which particular element of Hertfordshire she was relieved to be, in imagination, distant from. She was very deliberate about not thinking about this, which was itself a kind of answer.
She answered her aunt warmly and said she would be very glad of the visit, that Longbourn would receive them with every comfort it could manage, and that she hoped very much the northern counties would accommodate the tour.
She said nothing about the spring visit to Hunsford that Charlotte had already extended, which she had already accepted, and which would require its own species of courage that she was not yet ready to examine.
She sealed the letter.
She sat for a moment in her room in the early evening quiet with the sounds of the house going on below her and the sounds of the countryside going on beyond the window and the sounds of her own mind going on regardless of either, which was its permanent condition.
She thought about Charlotte in Sir William's sitting room, receiving congratulations on the decision she had made with full knowledge of what it was.
She thought: there are more kinds of courage than I have been accounting for.
She thought: and I have been accounting for only the kind that looks like my kind.
She blew out the candle. She sat in the dark for a moment before she went downstairs.
Darcy had called that afternoon, she remembered, while she was at Lucas Lodge.
The second call. She had been told by her mother on arrival home, and she had filed it in the place where she had been filing him, which was the same place she had filed the dance, the apology that was not quite an apology, the thing she had not said to Jane in the dark outside the Netherfield carriage.
The place was getting full.
She was going to have to do something about that eventually. She did not know what, and she did not know when, and she was not ready, and Hertfordshire was not giving her the distance she needed to think about it properly.
Spring, she thought. Hunsford. Charlotte.
She went downstairs to the noise and warmth of her family, and she was present among them, and she laughed at the right things and said the right things and was, by all observable evidence, entirely herself.
Only Charlotte, had Charlotte been there, would have seen the specific quality of effort it was costing.