Chapter Thirteen Rosings
He had not known she would be here.
This was the first thing he established, privately, in the approximately four seconds between walking into Rosings's entrance hall and the moment Lady Catherine informed him, in the tone she used for items of neighbourhood intelligence that she considered relevant to his social calendar, that the new Mrs. Collins's particular friend Miss Elizabeth Bennet of Hertfordshire was staying at the parsonage and would be joining them for dinner on Thursday.
Four seconds was enough time to know that he had not known and to register what it meant that he had not known, which was that he had not asked, which was the thing he had been not-doing in relation to Elizabeth Bennet for several months now.
The not-asking was his primary management strategy.
It had been entirely ineffective as a management strategy, but he had maintained it because the alternative, which was asking, implied a state of affairs that he was not prepared to formally acknowledge.
He said something to Lady Catherine about being glad to have a wider party for dinner.
Lady Catherine took this as the appropriate response and moved on to her account of the parsonage residents, in which Mr. Collins received the majority of the description and Elizabeth received a single sentence characterising her as a tolerable young woman with a great deal of confidence for her situation, which was Lady Catherine's way of saying that a person had looked at her directly without adjusting the quality of the gaze to account for the distance between their respective positions in the world.
Darcy thought: yes.
He thought it with the specific quality of recognition that he had been applying to Elizabeth Bennet since Meryton, which was the recognition of someone who had a quality you had looked for in rooms and not found and then encountered unexpectedly and found yourself unable to stop seeing even when it would have been considerably more convenient not to.
He changed for dinner. He stood at the window of his room at Rosings and looked out at the park, which was familiar and well-kept and had the quality of all very well-maintained properties, which was that they showed you their best face without revealing anything essential about what they required to keep that face in place.
He had grown up understanding Rosings in its entirety, including what it required.
He had a similar understanding of Pemberley, and of the difference between the two.
He thought about Pemberley.
He thought about it with the specific feeling it always produced, which was not pride exactly but something more like responsibility held in a way that had become so habitual you no longer thought about whether you were holding it.
Pemberley was his. It had been his father's and his father's father's and it would be his children's, which was a thought he had been having since he was eight years old and which had only recently, for reasons he declined to examine directly, begun to have a specific associated image that was not architectural.
He thought: three weeks.
He was here for three weeks. Lady Catherine expected her customary spring visit and Fitzwilliam came in April and the arrangements had been fixed for the better part of a year and he had arrived today and Elizabeth Bennet was at the parsonage three miles from Rosings and he was here for three weeks.
The dinner at Rosings on Thursday had a social texture he was familiar with from twenty years of the same dinner at Rosings: Lady Catherine at the head, Miss de Bourgh at her right, the clergyman in his particular combination of obsequiousness and self-importance, the guests in their appropriate positions.
What was not familiar was the specific quality of attention the room acquired when Elizabeth Bennet was in it.
He had observed this at Meryton and at Netherfield and at two subsequent social gatherings in Hertfordshire and he was observing it again now: that a room with her in it was a different room from a room without her, not because she dominated it but because she attended to it with such genuine interest that the room seemed to organise itself slightly differently in response.
He looked at her once, across the expanse of Lady Catherine's table, at the moment between when he entered and when the full social machinery of the evening engaged itself.
She looked back.
It was not long. Neither of them permitted it to be long.
But in the not-long he registered the following: that she was composed, that the composure was real and not performed, and that there was something in the quality of her attention to him, some specific temperature to it, that he had been trying to read accurately for months and consistently found he was reading from the wrong direction.
Fitzwilliam helped him not at all.
Fitzwilliam had arrived the day before, which was his usual pattern, and had come to the parsonage the same morning Darcy had declined to come, on the grounds that arriving on the same day seemed precipitate in ways he could not explain to Fitzwilliam and did not attempt to.
Fitzwilliam had come back to Rosings at luncheon and given his account of the parsonage residents, in which Elizabeth received considerably more than a single sentence.
"She is excellent company," Fitzwilliam said.
"The Collins woman manages her husband with more skill than he deserves and makes the place remarkably comfortable.
But Miss Bennet is the one worth talking to.
She has a way of asking questions that makes you want to answer them honestly, which is an unusual quality. "
Darcy had said something about being glad the neighbourhood had something to offer.
"I told her you had mentioned her family," Fitzwilliam said. "When I said I had come curious."
"You said that to her?"
"She asked whether you had mentioned her family specifically or as part of the general neighbourhood.
I said specifically." Fitzwilliam looked at him with the particular attention of a cousin who had known him for thirty-two years and had a comprehensive understanding of his patterns. "Was that inaccurate?"
Darcy had returned to the papers on the library table without answering.
Fitzwilliam, whose social intelligence was considerably more immediate than Darcy's, had not pressed it. But the quality of his not-pressing was the quality of a man who had arrived at a position and was prepared to wait for confirmation.
Over the next several days at Rosings, Darcy watched Fitzwilliam with Elizabeth and experienced something he was honest enough to identify and uncomfortable enough to wish he could identify as something else.
It was not jealousy. He was clear on this.
Fitzwilliam was his cousin and his closest friend and had no interest in Elizabeth beyond the genuine enjoyment of good company, and Elizabeth had no interest in Fitzwilliam beyond the same, and none of this was the problem.
The problem was the ease.
Fitzwilliam was easy with her in a way that Darcy was not easy with anyone, in the way that people were easy with other people when their self-possession was not a project they had constructed and maintained but simply what they were.
Fitzwilliam made her laugh without trying.
He said things to her and she said things back and the exchange had the quality of two people who were enjoying themselves without the specific cost of deciding to enjoy themselves.
Darcy watched this and thought: I have never once talked to her without cost.
Not because she made it costly. The cost was entirely his own manufacture, produced by the same mechanism that had produced every other social difficulty in his life, which was that he cared too much about saying the right thing to be easy about saying anything, and the caring too much was itself the thing that made him say things badly or not at all or in exactly the wrong way at exactly the wrong moment.
He thought about what he had said in the Meryton assembly room.
He had not thought about this directly for several months. He had thought around it, managed it, stored it in the region of his recent history that he maintained with the minimum necessary attention, the way you maintained a room in a house you had made a mistake in and did not wish to enter.
He entered it now, because he was at Rosings and she was at the parsonage three miles away and he was going to see her for three weeks and something in the accumulation of all of this required him to be honest about what was in the room.
He had seen her across the Meryton assembly room.
He had noticed her in the first moment, before he had Bingley's commentary, before any social introduction had organised her into a category.
He had simply looked across the room and found her and experienced the specific, unwelcome sensation of finding someone in a room the way you found a solution to a problem you had been working on without knowing you were working on it.
And then Bingley had seen him looking.
And Bingley had done what Bingley did, which was to make his observations aloud with all the warm openness of a man who found concealment a wasted effort, and he had been caught, which was the word for what it was, and the catching had produced the specific response of a man who could not afford to be caught at something he had not yet admitted to himself.
He had said the first dismissal available.
She is tolerable, I suppose. But not handsome enough to tempt me.
He had believed it for approximately four hours.
He had not believed it since.
He thought about the Bingley situation with the same honest attention he was applying to the rest. He had advised Bingley to withdraw from Netherfield.
He had done this in November, in London, in the specific way he advised Bingley on things, which was to present his analysis as clearly as he could and leave the decision to Bingley's judgment, though he was aware that Bingley's judgment on matters of the heart tended to defer to his on matters of prudence.
His analysis had been: the family was unsuitable in connexion and in conduct.
Mrs. Bennet's design was visible to the entire neighbourhood and gave the impression of an engagement already decided before Bingley had properly decided anything.
Jane Bennet was very beautiful and very kind and showed every appropriate response to Bingley's attention, but the responses had the quality of warmth rather than particular attachment, and he had not been certain, observing her, that she was engaged in the way Bingley was engaged.
He had not been certain she felt for Bingley what Bingley felt for her.
He had told Bingley this.
Bingley had listened, because Bingley trusted him, and Bingley had withdrawn, because Bingley's characteristic confidence in his own instincts was offset by a corresponding confidence in Darcy's judgment, and the combination of the two had produced a result that Darcy had, at the time, considered prudent.
He thought now, in the late April afternoon at Rosings, about Jane Bennet's face at the Netherfield ball.
He had been wrong about the warmth.
He was not certain of this in the way he was certain of most things.
He had not had the opportunity to revise his assessment with new observation.
But he thought, with the particular honest attention he was applying to everything this spring, that what he had identified as warmth of manner rather than specific feeling had perhaps been exactly what it was in Elizabeth: a composure that was real, a restraint that was habitual, and underneath it something considerably more engaged than the surface showed.
He had misread it.
He was not accustomed to misreading people. He was not a man who did it often, and when he did, he preferred not to have done it in ways that had consequences for people other than himself.
He went out into the park at Rosings in the late afternoon because the park was large and he needed to think in a space that had more room in it than the Rosings drawing room, which had Lady Catherine and Miss de Bourgh and the specific atmosphere of a room where all the furniture had been arranged around the assumption of Lady Catherine.
The park at Rosings was very fine in April.
He knew every inch of it. He walked the main path without attending to it and came around the east boundary to the ridge that looked down over the lane, which ran between the park wall and the fields that belonged to the parsonage living, and he stopped there because the view was long and the air was cleaner at the ridge.
In the lane below, Elizabeth was walking.
She had not seen him. She was walking in the specific way she walked when she was thinking, which he had observed at Netherfield and recognised now: a pace that was purposeful but not hurried, her attention directed inward or at the middle distance rather than the immediate ground.
She had her coat and her bonnet and the late afternoon light was coming at an angle that caught the colour in her cheeks, which were bright with the cold and the exercise, and she was wholly, entirely herself in the way she was entirely herself in every room he had ever been in with her, which was to say that she was not performing anything for anyone.
He stood at the ridge and looked down at her for a moment.
He thought: I have made an error somewhere.
He thought: I have been making it for six months and I have not yet correctly identified where it began.
He thought: it began in a room in Meryton, in a dark corner, with a man I trusted and a sentence I said because I was afraid and have not said the truth of since.
He did not know she had heard it. The thought did not occur to him, because there was no reason for it to occur to him, because the dark corner of the Meryton assembly room had been dark and private and he had said what he said to Bingley and believed himself unheard.
He watched her walk the length of the lane and turn the corner below the parsonage wall and disappear from view.
He stood at the ridge in the April evening with the park at Rosings going quiet behind him and the long view in front of him and the persistent, uncomfortable knowledge of a man who had said a false thing and done an imprudent thing and had not yet accounted for the cost of either.
He thought: three weeks.
He thought: I am going to have to do better than I have been doing.
He turned back toward the house. The evening light was going. Lady Catherine would be expecting him for dinner. Everything would be expected, and organised, and exactly as it always was at Rosings in the spring.
He walked back toward it and thought, with the specific quality of a decision not yet fully formed but no longer entirely without shape: that there were some errors you could not correct from a distance, and that the first step toward correcting them was standing close enough to see them clearly.