Chapter Five
Elizabeth was on her knees beside the kitchen settle, counting clean linen against the day’s wants, when the carriage came up the lane—and she knew it was from Rosings before she saw it, because nothing else in Kent announced its arrival with quite so much harness.
She heard Sarah gasp at the window. She heard, half a second later, the sound of Mr. Collins discovering that his patroness had come to him in his hour of usefulness, which was a sound rather like a kettle being snatched off the boil.
“That will be my aunt,” said Mr. Darcy.
He had come down not a quarter-hour before with the second mattress and the low chair she had asked for, and he stood now near the door with the chair still in his hands, uncertain whether a gentleman delivered furniture within sight of Lady Catherine de Bourgh.
Elizabeth got to her feet and brushed the chaff from her skirts.
“You sound,” she said, “like a man hearing the dinner bell at a funeral.”
“I sound like a man who knows his aunt.” He set the chair down. For a moment the corner of his mouth moved, there and gone. “She will wish to be useful. It is only that her notion of usefulness and yours may not, at the first, agree.”
“Then it is fortunate I have such practice at being managed by people certain they know best.” She heard the words leave her and did not, on the whole, regret them—until she saw him take them and hold them a beat too long.
She turned for the passage before he could make anything of the fact that she had as good as told him she had been thinking of him.
Lady Catherine came through the parsonage door the way weather comes through a gap in a wall.
“Collins. Where is the boy? No—do not tell me, take me to him, and on the way you shall tell me everything that has been done, that I may tell you what has been done wrong.”
She had been, it emerged, scarcely a day in possession of the news, and had spent the interval not in idleness but in the formation of opinions.
Rosings would open. The rooms would be aired, and the still-room would give up its stores.
Her own cook would send down whatever the parsonage cook had failed to think of, which Lady Catherine took to be a great deal.
She did not offer these things. She decreed them.
“Aunt.” Darcy had come in behind her. “The parsonage is grateful. If the still-room can spare more barley, and any quantity of clean linen, those are wanted tonight. The rooms are a kindness the boy cannot use. He is not to be moved.”
“Not to be moved! A laborer’s child, in a parson’s box of a back room, with Rosings standing not a mile distant—”
“The carrying would cost him the leg.” He said it without heat, the way a man lays down a card he has been holding. “Miss Bennet has it set and splinted. To move him now is to break it and set it a second time. The barley and the linen will do more good than the bedchamber.”
And there he was, managing Lady Catherine exactly as Elizabeth managed her mother.
She had spent her entire life learning to steer Mrs. Bennet’s enthusiasms clear of the cliffs—yes, Mama, Mr. Bingley is very amiable.
Shall we wait to see whether he calls again before we order the wedding clothes?
—and here was Mr. Darcy performing the same service upon a far more formidable engine, with the same patience and the same careful hands.
She did not want to like it. She would have given a good deal, in fact, to dislike it.
Mr. Collins, meanwhile, had discovered a calling.
It was not, alas, the calling of carrying timber, though he had lately decided that it was.
Lady Catherine’s arrival had kindled in him the conviction that a clergyman ought to be seen to labor in a crisis—seen, in particular, by his patroness—and he had gone out to the men at the bank with his coat off and his sleeves turned back and an expression of Christian fortitude arranged upon his face.
He was returned within the half-hour, because Mr. Dawes’s men had run clean out of tasks that could survive his assistance.
A man came up from the bank while Elizabeth stood at the door—one of Dawes’s, mud to the knee—and pulled his cap and began, “Begging your pardon, sir, Mr. Dawes says if the gentleman would step down and look at the long timber—” and got no further, because the gentleman had already set down what he held and gone to see what Dawes wanted.
No speech. No production of himself. He simply went.
Mr. Collins observed this with the keen attention of a man taking notes for later. “You remark,” he informed Elizabeth, “how a person of true breeding will stoop to the common labor. I have remarked it in myself. Indeed I have been remarking it all the afternoon, with my own two hands.”
“I had noticed your hands, Mr. Collins.”
“One does what one can.” He flexed them, wincing with some satisfaction. “I have also, in the intervals of toil, found leisure to improve my discourse for Sunday. You will recall my sermon upon the affliction. I have given it a dedication.”
He delivered the title the way other men deliver the news of a son’s commission.
“On the Salutary Humbling of Worldly Reliance, with Reflections upon the Duties of a Parish in Adversity, Respectfully Submitted to the Superior Judgment of the Right Honourable Lady Catherine de Bourgh.“
“That is,” said Elizabeth, with perfect truth, “a great deal of title.”
“It wants only the sermon beneath it,” he agreed happily, and went to lay the homage at his patroness’s feet—who received the tribute as her due and the interruption as an impertinence, both in the same instant, and dispatched him to discover why the barley had not yet come down from Rosings.
Lady Catherine settled into the front room and began to inspect the management of the crisis, which proved, very shortly, to mean inspecting Elizabeth.
“You are the Bennet girl. The one who pleaded a headache.” She examined her as though the headache were yet detectable, and discreditable.
“And I am now informed that it is you who directs the care of the child. You. A guest. A young woman with no establishment of her own, no experience of a sickroom beyond what any girl picks up at random, and no standing in this parish whatsoever.”
“Miss Bennet set the leg,” said Darcy, from the window.
“I am aware that something was done to the leg. I am asking why the parish appears to take its orders from a visitor.”
“Because Miss Bennet knows which families have been taken in and which have not.” He said it plainly.
“She knows which children are accounted for and which are still being looked for. She has it all in her head. It would be a poor economy to set that knowledge aside for the sake of who ought, by rights, to be in command.”
It was not gallant. It was the flattest possible report of her usefulness, offered to settle a question of administration, and that was worse. Warmth she could have distrusted. Flattery she could have disliked. This gave her nothing to dismiss.
Lady Catherine regarded her differently after that. Not kindly. With the close attention a great lady reserves for a young woman her nephew has just troubled himself to defend—an attention that files the young woman under a heading she had not previously warranted, and fully means to return to.
“Hm,” said Lady Catherine, which from her was an entire paragraph.
Elizabeth escaped the front room on the pretext of the barley—which had, by then, in fact arrived—and found Mrs. Poole in the passage with a basket on her knees that she had plainly packed and unpacked three times.
“There was a lad shouting across at noon,” Mrs. Poole said, before Elizabeth had quite sat down.
“From Wickett’s. My Nan is well, he says.
She is well, and the pains have not come on.
” She smoothed the linen in the basket flat.
“I have the caudle made. I have had it made since Tuesday. I have the swaddling, and the good sheets, and the little worked cap that was my mother’s, and they are all here, on this side, in this basket—and she is there.
” She did not raise her voice. “She sends the lad to tell me she is not frightened, but I know she is. She is frightened.”
Elizabeth sat down on the bench beside her and did not say it would all come right, because Mrs. Poole was a great deal too old to be insulted with it.
“How long since the bridge collapsed?” Mrs. Poole asked.
“Two days.”
“And the new one? When will it be ready to cross?”
“Mr. Dawes says a day more. Perhaps a day and a half.”
Mrs. Poole nodded slowly, as though adding the figure to a sum she had been carrying about with her. “A first child can be quick, or it can be slow,” she said. “There is no telling which beforehand. That is the trouble with them.”
Darcy found her there a few minutes after, with the look of a man who had been turning something over while he carried it. “The lad who shouted across at noon,” he said. “From Wickett’s. Could he carry word the other way, the same road, if there were word to send?”
Elizabeth looked up. “Across the gap? Shouted?”
“Shouted, or carried up to the upper crossing and round by the ford. I only—” He stopped, and took the plainer course.
“Mrs. Poole’s daughter is near her time, on the wrong side of the water, as we well know.
If there is anyone over there who might get to her before the new bridge holds, it would be worth knowing now, while there is yet a day to arrange it. ”
“I do not know,” she said, honestly. “I should have to think who is over there. There may be someone.” Elizabeth had no answer yet. Only the beginning of one. “Let me think on it.”
“Think on it,” he said, and left it with her.
The defense came at dusk, over nothing, the way the worst of them do.
Lady Catherine had been prevailed upon to take tea in the front room—prevailed upon being the phrase Charlotte employed for the act of setting a cup where Lady Catherine might command it—and had spent the tea reviewing the afternoon’s expenditures with the air of a general totting up a battle won wastefully.
“It is a vast deal of trouble,” she observed, “for a parcel of cottagers who will have forgotten it by Michaelmas. The lower orders do not feel these things as we do. They are bred up to hardship. A washed-out bridge is, to such people, very nearly a holiday.”
“The man on the far bank has been calling his son’s name across the water for two days,” Elizabeth said. “If that is a holiday, I have been to duller ones.”
It was out before she had decided upon it.
The teacup was still in her hand. Across the room Charlotte’s eyes came up and widened—only that, a fraction—the look of a woman watching a friend step off a curb without glancing down.
Mr. Darcy, by the window, went still—unsure, it seemed, that he had heard her rightly, and unwilling to move until he had.
Lady Catherine set down her cup. “I beg your pardon?”
And Elizabeth heard, half a second too late, what she had done.
The villagers stood in no need of her defending, as they were not in the room. She had defended his afternoon—the barley, the linen, the man set to watch the road—against the charge that it had been trouble thrown away.
She had taken his part.
To his aunt.
Over the good china.
Heat climbed her throat and sat there. She held her face still by main force, kept her eyes on Lady Catherine, and would not, could not, look toward the window.
“I mean only,” she said, more evenly than she felt, “that they feel it as anyone would feel it. That is all I mean.”
“You mean a great deal,” said Lady Catherine, “for a guest.”
She had hoped to end the day without speaking to him alone. That hope turned out to be in vain.
He came into the kitchen when the rest had gone up—Lady Catherine borne off to Rosings at last, Mr. Collins away to compose the sermon beneath his title, and Charlotte to the children along the passage.
Elizabeth was banking the fire for the night.
She heard him stop in the doorway and did not turn around.
“You need not say it,” she said, to the coals. “Whatever it is you have come to say. I spoke out of turn and I know it. You may consider me to have apologized for it.”
“You have nothing to apologize for.”
“I contradicted your aunt at her own tea. Before the parson.”
“Yes.” He came a step into the room. “You were right to.”
She turned then, because that was not the line she had braced herself against. He stood just inside the door with his hands loose at his sides, looking like a man who had come to say a thing and was finding it harder in the saying than it had been on the stairs.
“It was not the parson I minded,” he said.
“Nor my aunt. She has said worse, and will again. I left off hearing it years ago.” He searched for it.
“It was that you said what was true when it was no place of yours to say it, and at some cost to yourself, for people who will never learn you did it. I had not expected to mind that you were sharp with her. I find I did not mind it in the least. I find I was glad of it.”
This was worse than if he had been offended.
Offense she could have used. Offense she could have set her edge against and gone up to bed comfortable in the old arrangement, where he was proud and she was right and the corners of the world all met.
Instead he had taken the worst she had done all day and called her right, and left her with nothing to push against.
“It was only the truth,” she said. “It cost me nothing.”
“It cost you Lady Catherine’s good opinion.”
“I never had Lady Catherine’s good opinion. One cannot spend what one was never given.”
That very nearly won her a smile. She saw it begin—the corner of his mouth again—and saw him put it away, because neither of them stood on ground sure enough for smiling.
“You should sleep,” he said instead. “You have had two nights of none.” He inclined his head, and went up.
Elizabeth turned back to the fire. There were a dozen things between her and her bed—the barley to see to, the low chair to carry through, the linen she had been counting when the carriage first came up the lane—and she knew every one of them by name.
She stood with the poker in her hand and did none of them.
The coals settled and gave a small sigh and ceased to need her.
Above her, faint through the boards, Mr. Collins’s voice rose and fell, reading himself the title of a sermon he had not yet written.
She ought to have laughed at that.
She set the poker down, very carefully, as though it might wake something, and stood in the middle of the warm and emptying kitchen with no notion in the world of what to do with her hands.