Chapter Fourteen The Grove
She had not intended it as a private arrangement.
The grove at Rosings existed along the eastern border of the park, accessible from the parsonage by a stile that had been placed in the boundary wall at some point in the previous century by someone who had understood that the people who lived at the parsonage would need to go somewhere that was not the parsonage.
The grove itself was beech and ash and old enough to have closed its canopy, which meant that in April, with the leaves just coming in, it had the quality of a place that was becoming itself again after the winter, and she had found it on the second morning and returned to it on the third and the fourth because it was quiet and there were no social obligations in it and she could think there in the particular way that required being outside and moving.
She had not advertised this habit.
She had not concealed it either. She had simply walked to the grove in the mornings before the day required her, and she had not said to Charlotte where she was going because Charlotte did not ask and because the going and the returning were both unremarkable activities that did not warrant narration.
On the fifth morning, Darcy was there.
She became aware of this approximately twenty yards before she reached the main path of the grove, and she had a moment, a brief and honest moment, of considering whether the stile she had come through might be used in the other direction.
She had the moment and she looked at it plainly and she did not use the stile, because retreating from a walk in a grove because a man she had spoken to at dinner the previous two evenings was also walking there was the kind of thing that implied a state of feeling she was not prepared to have implied.
She walked in.
He saw her at approximately the same moment she saw him.
He had been standing near the largest beech, which was at the centre of the grove where the canopy was densest, and he had the look of a man who had been thinking rather than looking at anything in particular and had been recalled from the thinking by her arrival.
"Miss Bennet," he said.
"Mr. Darcy." She kept her pace easy and settled into the walk the path offered. "I did not know the grove was occupied."
"I come here most mornings," he said.
She looked at him. "As do I."
There was a brief pause in which they were both registering the same information and doing it with the composure of two people who had considerable practice at composure.
"Then we have been here at different hours," he said.
"It seems we have adjusted them," she said.
He said nothing for a moment, and then he fell into step beside her with the ease of a man who had decided to walk and found the decision made before he had formally made it.
She attended to the path and the grove and the quality of the morning light through the new leaves and thought: this is manageable. She was very good at managing things.
They walked in silence for a while.
It was not an uncomfortable silence. This was its own piece of information, and she filed it without examining it, because examining it would have required her to account for when silences with him had become the kind she did not feel required filling.
"The grove is well placed," she said eventually, because the silence had reached the point at which she preferred conversation.
"My aunt had it planted when she came to Rosings as a bride," he said. "Her husband considered it impractical. She considered it necessary."
"She sounds," Elizabeth said, "like a woman of excellent judgment."
"She was. It is perhaps the quality most diluted in subsequent generations."
She looked at him. He was looking ahead at the path, his expression the careful one she had learned to read as honest rather than concealing, and the sentence had the quality she had been hearing increasingly in their conversations, which was the quality of a man who said what he thought and found the saying of it neither easy nor possible to avoid.
"That is," she said carefully, "a candid opinion of your own family."
"It is an accurate one. I find the two converge more often than people suppose."
"Most people do not find that a comfortable convergence."
"No," he said. "I have observed that."
They walked the length of the grove and turned at the boundary wall and came back along the other side.
The morning was very fine. She could hear birds in the upper branches doing the specific noisy work of birds in April who had views on the state of things that they felt compelled to express at volume.
"I should like," he said, at the point in the return path where the beech tree was behind them and the stile was visible ahead, "to say that I hope the neighbourhood has been agreeable to you."
She stopped walking.
It was a simple sentence. A polite sentence.
The kind of thing people said to each other in the course of social conversation about the pleasures of visiting a new county, and she had heard variations of it a hundred times in a hundred drawing rooms and had received them all with the easy courtesy they were designed to produce.
She stopped walking because it was not a simple sentence in the mouth of this particular man on this particular morning, and she knew it, and the knowing of it was the specific uncomfortable knowledge of someone who had been attending to a thing for months with the intention of not attending to it, and the thing had spoken.
"It has been very agreeable," she said, after a pause she hoped was not as long as it felt. "The park is beautiful."
"Yes," he said. He was not, she was aware, talking about the park either.
They reached the stile and she took her leave with the ease that cost her, and she walked back to the parsonage through the morning and had breakfast with Charlotte and Maria and attended to Mr. Collins's opinion on the rainfall last evening and the state of Lady Catherine's gravel paths, and she was present and responsive and entirely herself on the outside.
He came to the grove again on the seventh morning.
This time she had been there first. She heard him before she saw him and she kept walking because she was not going to perform surprise she did not feel.
"Good morning," she said, when they were close enough.
"Good morning," he said. He fell into step with the ease that was already becoming familiar and that she was finding, which was itself the problem, more comfortable than it had any right to be.
They talked. This was what happened when they were in the grove, which was that they talked in a way that was different from how they talked at Rosings in the evenings, where Lady Catherine provided the structure and the structure provided the distance.
In the grove there was no structure except the path, and the path was a circle, and a circle provided no comfortable destination at which the conversation could be concluded.
He said something on this second morning about Pemberley's grounds.
She asked a question. He answered it with the specificity she had come to recognise as his version of genuine engagement: not the general answer but the particular one, the one that required him to have actually thought about the subject rather than to have an opinion about the category of subjects.
She said something about Longbourn's smaller scale and what it produced in the way of detailed knowledge of a particular place.
He said, with the quality she had heard in the bookshop and not entirely recovered from: "There is something to be said for knowing a thing thoroughly rather than largely. "
"You are arguing against the advantages of Pemberley."
"I am observing them from the correct distance," he said. "Which is not the same as arguing against them."
She looked at him. He looked at the path.
"I owe you," he said, in the deliberate way of a man choosing the phrasing carefully and not finding the choice easy, "some acknowledgment of a failure of ease."
She kept walking. "You are very precise for a man who is, by your own account, finding something difficult to say."
"I am always precise," he said. "The difficulty is not the precision. The difficulty is the direction."
She waited.
"At Meryton," he said. "In the early weeks of our acquaintance. I was not easy in company, and I was aware of it, and I made no particular effort to correct it, which I might have done and chose not to, which is not a matter of temperament but of judgment. And my judgment was poor."
She was quiet for a moment.
She thought: he is apologising for something he does not know I know.
She thought: he is apologising for the general manner, the pride, the quality of standing apart.
He is not apologising for the doorway, because he does not know about the doorway, and if he knew about the doorway he would not be standing here in this grove having a conversation with me about the general failure of ease.
She thought: what would he apologise for, if he knew?
She did not complete this thought.
"The general impression in Hertfordshire," she said, in the careful voice she used when she was being honest and not all the way honest, "was that you were proud. I think you are aware of that."
"I am."
"And you do not dispute it."
"I dispute only the completeness of it as a characterisation," he said. "Pride is the quality visible from outside. The reasons for it are less visible."
She looked at him. "What are the reasons for it?"
He was quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet she was learning to identify as thinking rather than avoidance.