Chapter Eight
By the next morning the new span held.
Dawes walked it first, alone, with his hands in his pockets and his weight thrown deliberately wrong, the way a man tests a thing he means to trust other men’s lives to; and it did not so much as creak.
He came back across grinning under his beard and said it would carry a loaded cart by Friday and a careful man on foot now, and the bank, which had held its breath, let it out all at once in a noise that was half cheer and half weeping.
On the far side, a knot of people had gathered to cross. And at the front of them, already at the planking with a dog winding between his legs, was a big fair man who could only be Jem’s father.
Darcy stood at the near end with Elizabeth beside him. They had ended up there together without arranging it, the two of them having become, across the worst of it, the people the village turned to when something wanted deciding.
“He’ll want to come at a run,” Elizabeth said, low, watching the far man. “And it will only bear one.”
“Then he should be told before he sets foot on it.”
“He won’t hear it from me across that water.” She glanced up. “He’ll hear it from you. Tell him one at a time, and the boy is mending. In that order.”
So Darcy cupped his hands and sent it across the gap—one at a time; your boy is mending; come slow—and watched the big man check himself at the very edge of the planks, visibly, with effort, and start across one careful stride at a time with the dog slipping over ahead of him, and the whole bank counted him over without meaning to.
He came off the planks onto the near bank and did not stop for the hands held out to him.
He went straight up the lane to where they had carried Jem out on a hurdle to see it, and went down on his knees in the mud beside the boy, and put one big hand flat and shaking on his son’s chest as though to be sure of it.
The dog got there first and washed the boy’s face.
“Tip,” Jem said, and then, because his father was looking at him and his chin had gone, fiercely, “I wasn’t crying, Papa.”
“Of course not,” said Mr. Holt, whose own face was running freely, and gathered the boy up against him, splint and all, with enormous care.
Darcy looked away to give the man his privacy, and found there was a great deal of looking away to be done that morning.
The far side had begun to come over now, one careful soul at a time, into the arms of the near—a daughter, a brother, a man with a sack of meal he had been holding on the wrong bank since the bridge fell—and each crossing emptied a little more of the dread the village had been carrying, until the lane was loud with the particular foolish joy of people who have frightened themselves badly over a stretch of water and lived.
Mrs. Poole went last of the morning’s first crossing, and she would not go until Elizabeth walked her to it.
Darcy watched it from the bank. The old woman had her basket on one arm—the basket he had watched her pack and unpack for three days—and Elizabeth had the other, and they came down to the planking slowly, the two of them, talking of something Darcy could not hear.
At the edge Mrs. Poole stopped and gripped Elizabeth’s hand in both of hers, hard, the basket swinging, and said a few words, and Elizabeth answered them, and then the old woman stepped out alone over the water with her face set toward the far bank where, somewhere up a road, her daughter was waiting to be told she needn’t be brave.
Elizabeth stood at the near end and watched her go. Her mouth trembled once before she mastered it. No wit came to cover it. No quick glance aside. Only gladness, fierce and tired, as Mrs. Poole crossed toward the road where her daughter waited. Darcy’s chest tightened.
I want to be equal to her.
The thought hurt. Not to be admired by her—he had wanted that in the parlor, and see what the wanting had made him say.
Not to be forgiven, as though forgiveness were a prize a man could win by getting cold and wet and calling it penance.
Equal to her. Worth the trouble of her good opinion, if she ever chose to give it.
His hands were raw from the rope and his boots were past saving. Four days ago he would have sent money and called himself generous. now he had mud to the knee and no promise of being thought the better for it. He wanted, past all sense, to deserve the mud.
She turned from the water then, and her face closed again as she came back up the bank, and she was Elizabeth again, brisk, dry-eyed, ready to be useful. She did not know he had seen it. He kept it.
The crisis, having held them all in its fist for days, let go of them by degrees over the rest of the morning, and the village remembered how to be a village.
Mr. Collins reclaimed his parsonage with the air of a general reoccupying ground that had been held in his absence by inferior officers, and was heard to wonder aloud whether the bishop ought not to be informed of the fortitude with which its incumbent had borne the late trial.
Charlotte, beside him, folded blankets into a basket with the particular evenness of a woman who has learned exactly how much of her attention her husband requires and gives it precisely that and not a grain more.
She caught Darcy’s eye over a folded blanket.
She did not smile. But the corner of her mouth moved, once, as though it meant to, and was still.
Darcy and Elizabeth came back down the lane a little apart from the rest, in the plain sight of the yard, where two people might speak without impropriety and without being overheard.
She spoke first.
“I was wrong about Mr. Wickham.” She said it the way she did everything that cost her—straight on, no flinching at the fence.
“Not partly. Wrong. I took his account whole because it flattered my judgment of you, and I have been ashamed of it since you told me the truth of it in that kitchen, and I wished you to know I had not let it sit comfortably.” A short breath.
“That is all. I do not ask you to say any more of it than you wished to say then.”
“Thank you,” Darcy said, and meant it past what the words could carry. He did not reach for the rest—the wrong done to someone who was not there to be named. Holding it back cost him, as it always did.
He thought that was the end of what she had come down the lane to say.
It was not.
“There is the other thing.” Her chin came up, and he saw what it cost her to hold his eyes while she said it, and made himself hold hers. “My sister.”
His stomach dropped the way it had been waiting to drop since the night in the kitchen.
“Jane,” she said. “You separated her from Mr. Bingley. You owned it in the parlor—you told me you had done it and were glad of it. So I will not pretend I have stopped minding it because you carried timber for a week. I have not. She is at home being brave about a thing that was taken from her, and I would not be honest if I sat across a bridge from the man who took it and said nothing.”
The old defense stirred in him out of long habit—Bingley’s wavering temper, Miss Bennet’s composure that he had once called indifference, and every other reason he had dressed his interference in.
“I believed—” He stopped. The word had the old arrogance in it, and he heard it, and shut his teeth on the rest.
“You are right to mind it,” he said. “I was wrong. I read your sister’s heart by its surface and called my own comfort discernment.”
“You called it her indifference, you mean.”
“I did.”
“She is not indifferent. She is quiet. There is a difference, and a gentleman who prided himself on his discernment might have troubled to learn it before he ruined her autumn.” Her voice did not rise. That was the worst of it. She did not need it to. “Go on.”
“I separated two people who had given me no cause but their connections—which were yours—which makes it the same insult I paid you in that parlor, only quieter and crueler, because she never knew to refuse me.” His voice was not quite steady, and he let it not be.
“I have written to Bingley. I told him I was mistaken in the lady’s regard, and that I had concealed from him that your sister was in town this winter and had wished to see him.
I posted it three days ago, the first morning a rider could get over the upper crossing. ”
That checked her. He watched it check her—and watched her decline, deliberately, to be bought by it.
“Writing is something. It is not the same as restoring what you interrupted.”
It struck exactly where she aimed it, and he did not duck.
“No. It is not. A letter is the least of what I owe, and I know it.” He looked down the lane toward the south road, the London road, as though Bingley might already be on it.
“If the letter does not bring him—if he reads it and is too proud or too hurt to act on it—then I will go to him myself and tell him to his face what I have told you. I will make it clear that I lied to him by my silence, and that the best woman of my acquaintance has a sister who deserved better than my management of other people’s affections.
I will keep going until he understands there is nothing standing between Hertfordshire and himself but his own nerve and my old interference.
I cannot make your sister happy. I can take myself out of the way of the man who might, and undo, as far as a thing like that can be undone, the harm of my getting into it. ”
“And the winter?” Her arms were still folded, but her chin had come up another degree.
“She was in town these four months. She called on his sister and was given the cold civility and sent home to puzzle out what she had done to deserve it. And you knew, the whole season, that she had done nothing—and you said not one word.”
“I knew.”
“For four months.”
“For four months.” He did not soften it. “I told myself it was discretion. It was cowardice in better clothes.”
She was quiet a moment.
He had no idea what she was thinking. That was the plain truth of it, and he held himself inside it.
He could see that her eyes were bright and her jaw was tight and that she had folded her arms hard across her chest, and he could not, for all his watching, tell whether he had moved her an inch or only handed her a fuller account of his crimes to be just about.
By now he had learned he could not predict a single thing she would do.
He was not going to start pretending he could now, when it mattered most.
“It will not mend it tomorrow,” she said at last. “Even if he comes. She has spent a winter thinking herself a fool for having hoped at all.”
“I know.”
“And I will go on being angry about it for a while yet. The being sorry of other people does not stop a thing hurting on its own schedule.”
“I would not ask it to.”
She turned her eyes on him then and held them there—steady, level, and not kind enough to explain themselves.
He could not read it. It was not forgiveness.
He knew that much, and it was not warmth.
It was a great deal more than the contempt she had brought up from the parlor five days ago, and where it went past that he could not follow.
An account he had thought long closed, opened again; the new figure not yet set down where he could see it.
He knew only that it was no longer the old one, and that she had let him stand there while she changed it, which she had not been obliged to do.
“Thank you for not making me a speech,” she said. “I have heard a great many sermons this week. I find I prefer a man who has already posted the letter.”
And she went up the lane to the house, and left him on the bridge.
He did not move for a while. The cold came up off the brown water and found him through his shirt, and he let it; his coat was somewhere up the bank, and he could not have said where.
The work was done. The water still ran high and brown under the new span, indifferent to the lot of them, and the planks Dawes had cursed and re-laid held steady over it, and somewhere on the far side an old woman was walking up a road toward her daughter, and a midwife was on that same road ahead of her, and a boy was mending in his mother’s arms; and Darcy stood in the middle of all of it and understood, plainly and without one ounce of comfort in the understanding, what he was going to do.
He was going to ask her again.
Not because she had softened—she had not.
She had told him to his face she was still angry and meant to stay that way a while, and he believed her.
Not because he had read encouragement in a look, though he had been weak enough to want to.
He did not know what she would say. He thought, on the evidence of five days, that she might very well say no, and that he would have earned the saying of it, and that having her answer in advance was not, in any case, the point.
The point was that he had stood in a parsonage parlor and held out his hand as though it were a thing she ought to be grateful for, and she had refused it, and been right to refuse it, and the beginning of a better man had been made in him over four days of hauling timber and holding a feverish child and being no one in particular.
That man could not ride back to Pemberley and let the parlor stand as the last word.
That man had to ask her properly, once, with everything laid open and nothing at all assumed, and then stand still and let her do with it whatever she judged right.
He would ask her tomorrow.
Not because he had any assurance of the answer. Because the alternative was to ride away in silence and call it dignity, and he had been a coward with her once already, and did not intend to be one twice.