Chapter Three
The lanterns came down from Rosings on a hand-cart, and Darcy walked the whole quarter-mile beside it because he could not make himself stand in the house and wait for them to arrive.
He had been useful tonight. He told himself so, the way a man tells himself a thing he is not sure of.
He had ridden to Rosings while the light held and come back with lanterns, blankets, a cask of small beer, two of the kitchen women, and a footman who knew how to splice a rope.
He had asked the carpenter, Dawes, three questions and given him no orders at all, and he had stood at Dawes’s shoulder in the failing light while the man paced off the abutments and named what timber he would want and from where.
He had not commanded a single thing he did not understand, which, he was discovering tonight, was a great many things.
The cart rolled into the parsonage yard.
The Colonel was there before it stopped, lifting lanterns off the bed two at a time, calling cheerful nonsense to the footman, entirely in his element.
Fitzwilliam had spent six years learning how to move frightened men and supplies in the same direction at once, and a broken bridge was, to him, only a smaller war. Darcy envied him the ease of it.
Then he looked through the lit parsonage window, and the envy went out of him like a snuffed wick, because Elizabeth Bennet was inside, and she had organized the whole house.
He saw it in one glance and could not stop seeing it.
She had the villagers sorted—the old by the kitchen fire, the children bedded along the passage where the warmth reached, the able-bodied set to tasks that kept their hands busy and their fear quiet.
She had a slate, of all things, propped on the dresser, and names chalked on it in a column.
She moved among them without hurry and without softness, and where she stopped, the fear in a face eased a degree, and she moved on before anyone could thank her, because thanks would have cost time she did not mean to spend.
She knew their names. All of them. He had been in Kent three weeks longer than she had and could not have named the carpenter without prompting.
The knowledge got under his ribs and stayed there. Every fine thing he saw in her made the shame worse.
He had stood in Charlotte Collins’s parlor not five hours ago and told this woman that he had struggled against his attachment to her, that her family was beneath him, that he had overcome every objection of rank and connection to make her his offer—as though the offer were the gift and she the fortunate ground it fell on.
He had catalogued her inferiority to her face.
And here she was running a relief effort out of a parson’s kitchen with a slate and a steady voice while he carried lanterns and felt, for the first time in his life, precisely the size he was.
Not large enough. Nothing near.
Collins came into the window-frame then, hands aloft, plainly bent on consoling someone, and Darcy watched her take him in hand before he could fasten on a frightened child.
She said a few words, set her hand to a stack of folded blankets, and steered the whole bustling weight of the man toward the passage with what looked, even through glass, like a request for his particular assistance.
Collins went, swelling, persuaded he had been singled out for a trust. She had turned the most useless instrument in the house to account and left him feeling honored for it.
Darcy could not have done that with Collins. Darcy could barely do it with himself.
“That’s the lot of them lit,” Fitzwilliam said at his elbow, wiping his hands. “Darcy. The beer—does it go to the kitchen or the barn?”
“The kitchen,” Darcy said, and did not know, and went on watching her through the glass like a man with no manners at all.
He did not go in.
There was a reason ready to hand, and it was a good one, and it was also a lie of the most contemptible kind.
The reason was that the house was full and the doorway narrow and a tall man in the way of working women is worse than useless.
The lie underneath it was that he did not enter because he could not yet stand in a room with her and be looked at, or worse, not looked at, by a woman who had refused him five hours ago and owed him nothing now.
So he sent things in instead.
He sent the blankets in by the footman. He sent the small beer in by one of the kitchen women.
When the surgeon’s want came up—for the boy would need more than a splint before the night was out, and the surgeon was a half-day off behind a vanished bridge—he did not carry the question to Elizabeth, though Elizabeth was the one who had set the leg and would know best what the boy could bear. He carried it to Charlotte.
Mrs. Collins took it without comment, which was its own small mercy.
She heard him out in the passage, nodded once, and went to confer with Elizabeth at the dresser; and Darcy stood where he could see and not be seen, and watched his own question reach Elizabeth secondhand, and watched her answer it.
He could not hear her. That was the punishment he had arranged for himself, though he had not known he was arranging it.
He could see her mouth move, see her lift two fingers and tick off points against them—what the boy had taken, what he had refused, how the leg sat, what she feared by morning if the heat came up in it—and he could see Charlotte nodding, retaining it, turning to bring it back to him.
But the words crossed the room without him.
He had the report of her competence and not the sound of it.
He had set that distance there himself, between him and the one voice in Kent he most wanted to hear, and he kept it there, and that was justice, and he hated it.
Charlotte returned. “She says the boy must not be moved tonight on any account, and she does not think the fever certain, only likely. She asks whether your express to the upper crossing has gone.”
“It went an hour ago. A mounted man, with money, and a second horse waiting at the ford.”
“I will tell her.” Charlotte paused. She was a clear-eyed woman and she had plainly taken the measure of the whole arrangement—the questions routed through her, the man who would not cross his own threshold—and she said nothing about it, which was somehow worse than if she had.
“She will be glad of it,” Charlotte said, with the faint dryness of a person declining to say a great deal more, and went back.
He had been managed. By Mrs. Collins, gently, and by his own cowardice, completely.
It could not hold, of course. Cowardice on that scale requires the cooperation of everyone in the house, and Charlotte Collins withdrew hers within the hour.
She found him in the yard, where he had retreated to be useful at a distance.
“Mr. Darcy. I am sorry to send you, but I have a child being sick in the scullery and Sarah’s hands are full, and I cannot leave either.
Eliza is at the boy. She needs to know whether the surgeon, when he comes, can be lodged here or must go up to Rosings—it bears on where she settles the boy for the night.
Will you ask her? I cannot spare the legs. ”
There was no version of no that a gentleman could speak. He went.
The boy had been laid in the small back room on a made-down pallet, the splinted leg propped, and Elizabeth knelt at the side of him with her sleeves still turned back and a smear of dried mud along her jaw that no one had told her about.
She looked up when Darcy’s shadow fell across the doorway, and for a moment—
No, it was gone. Or maybe what he had thought he had seen had never been there at all. Now, her expression was only level, and tired, and waiting.
His jaw set so hard it ached. He made himself speak plainly, because plain was the only register he had any right to.
“Mrs. Collins asks—when the surgeon comes, is he to be lodged here, or sent up to Rosings? You would know best where you want the boy.”
“Here.” No pause at all. “He stays where the boy is. I will not have the man a half-mile off when the fever turns in the night, if it turns. There is the box-room above. It will do.”
“I will see a bed put in it.”
“Thank you.”
That was all. Correct, complete, and it gave him nothing.
He had braced for contempt and would have been grateful for it—a man can stand against contempt, can deserve and bear it.
She had none to spare him. He ranked below the boy and the fever and the slate, and she had set him there without heat, and the want of heat was worse than any cut.
“Was there anything else?” she asked. Not unkindly. That was the worst of it. Not even unkindly.
“No,” Darcy said. “Nothing else.”
He went to find a bed for the box-room.
He nearly walked into Mr. Collins in the passage, which was a thing that happened to people in that house at a rate of about once an hour.
The parson had spent the early evening discovering tasks too large for him and abandoning them with relief, and had now settled the most pressing question of the crisis, which was where Mr. Collins himself should sleep.
“For I have given it a good deal of thought,” he confided to Darcy, falling into step with the energy of a man who has solved something, “and I believe the front bedchamber is best kept for myself and Mrs. Collins. One does not like to seem to grasp at comfort in a season of affliction—nothing could be further from my wishes—but a clergyman must preserve his health and his faculties above the common run, his parish having such particular need of him at present. You take my meaning, I am sure. You of all men understand the duties of position.”
“I understand them better tonight than I did this morning,” Darcy said, which was true, and went over Mr. Collins’s head entirely.
Charlotte had come back from the scullery in time to hear her husband’s thoughts on the warm bedchamber.
She did not argue. She crossed to the linen press, took out a folded blanket, and said, in the mild voice of a woman remarking on the weather, “Of course, my dear. You will want your rest. The children can have the passage floor, and Mrs. Holt and I will sit up with the boy, and the rest of us will manage as we can. You will sleep very soundly, I am sure, knowing how comfortably the rest of the house is arranged.”
It was beautifully done. There was not one word in it a man could take hold of and call unkind.
Mr. Collins received it as a compliment to his judgment and went off glowing with the rightness of himself.
Charlotte stood holding the blanket and watching him go, and her face did something brief and terrible and entirely private before she folded it away with the linen.
Darcy turned to the window so as not to have witnessed it.
His own throat had tightened on her behalf, the involuntary twitch of a man who had just seen, plainly, the daily cost of a bargain another person made with her eyes open.
He had thought he understood the Collins marriage.
He had understood nothing about it, and he was beginning to suspect this was a general condition.
Mr. Collins, restored, found the doorway again on his way to inspect his bedchamber. “I shall write upon it,” he announced to the passage at large.
“Write upon what, Mr. Collins?” asked the Colonel, who had come in for the beer and could never resist a man like Collins, the way some men cannot resist worrying a sore tooth.
“The visitation. The flood. I am composing a sermon, Colonel, which the occasion seems most particularly to demand.” Collins drew himself up, and delivered the title as another man might lay a foundation stone.
“On the Salutary Humbling of Worldly Reliance with Reflections upon the Duties of a Parish in Adversity. “
In the back room, a child with a broken leg whimpered in his sleep. In the kitchen, the women were boiling linen against a fever. And in the passage between them, Mr. Collins beamed at the splendor of his own title and waited to be admired.
“It wants a comma,” said Fitzwilliam gravely.
The Colonel found Darcy later in the yard, where the cold had come down hard off the water and the lanterns made small islands of gold along the broken lane.
“Sit a moment,” Fitzwilliam said, and dropped onto the upturned hand-cart with the boneless ease of a man who could sleep standing in a saddle. “You have been on your feet since the bridge went. You will be no use to anyone in the morning if you walk the skin off them tonight.”
Darcy did not sit. He found he could not. He stood with his hands locked behind him and looked at the lit window, and made himself look instead at the dark shape of the ruined bridge, which was at least an honest ruin and asked nothing of him.
“That Miss Bennet,” Fitzwilliam said, watching the same window.
“Lord, but she is a capable creature. Did you see her with the slate? My colonel had not half her head for it, and they gave him a regiment.” He stretched his legs out before him.
“Remarkably capable, that woman. A man could do a great deal worse for a wife than one who keeps her head when the bridge falls down.”
Every muscle along Darcy’s spine drew taut. The yard was very quiet. The right thing, the safe thing, the thing a guarded man would say, was yes, she seems sensible—three flat words, and the subject buried.
He said nothing.
He said nothing for one second, and then two, and the silence went on past the point where any indifferent man would have filled it, and he heard it go, and could not call it back.
His hands tightened behind him until the knuckles burned.
He kept his eyes on the bridge and his jaw shut and let the silence do the one thing he most needed it not to do, which was speak.
Beside him, the Colonel stopped looking at the window.
He looked at Darcy instead, slowly, the lazy good humor going still in his face, replaced by something quieter and far more attentive—the look of a man who has just heard, in the gap where an answer should have been, a great deal his cousin never meant to tell him.
“Darcy,” he began.
“The mounted man should reach the ford by midnight.” Darcy turned from the window and walked toward the stable, where the horses wanted seeing to and his cousin’s face did not follow. “I want fresh lanterns at the bridge by first light. Will you see to it, or shall I?”