Chapter 42
Chapter Forty-Two
Gracechurch Street was narrower than he remembered.
Five years away from London had compressed the city in his mind to its broadest strokes—the river, the parks, the squares—and he had forgot how the commercial streets crowded in upon themselves, how close the upper storeys leaned toward their neighbours, how many bodies a single pavement could absorb without yielding passage.
He walked the last quarter mile from where the hack had set him down, his new calling cards in his breast pocket, their edges sharp against his fingers through the linen.
The printer had delivered them only that morning.
The engraver in Jermyn Street had studied the name on the order form and then studied Darcy’s face with the scrutiny of a man who dealt in the currency of reputation.
The cards were plain—his name, the Berkeley Square address, nothing more.
He had not yet left one anywhere. The tray in the entrance hall held six invitations he had not answered and a note from Lady Matlock he had answered too briefly.
The cards sat in their case like ammunition he could not bring himself to load.
Number forty-seven was a solid brick house, taller than its neighbours by half a storey, with clean windows and a painted door that had been recently sanded and sealed against the late February damp.
The railings were black and well-oiled. A tradesman’s house, kept with the practical pride of a man who had earned what he maintained.
Elizabeth had described the Gardiners’ home with the kind of offhand affection that revealed more clarity, probably, than she realised—the green curtains in the front parlour, the study her uncle kept locked not from secrecy but from his nieces’ talent for redistributing his correspondence.
She had not said she loved this house. She had not needed to.
He took the card from its case and mounted the steps.
The servant who opened the door was a woman of perhaps fifty, brisk and grey-haired, who looked at the card and then at Darcy with the swiftness of someone accustomed to sorting callers by category before they crossed the threshold.
He was still composing his request—a card left, nothing more, the correct gesture for a first approach—when, from somewhere beyond the entrance hall, a young woman coughed.
Not the dry clearing of a throat. A deeper sound, low in the chest, followed by the gasping silence of someone who had been coughing long enough to have learned the discipline of suppressing it in company.
Kitty. Elizabeth’s voice came to him as clearly as if she stood beside the servant—Kitty does not complain of it, which is how I know it troubles her.
She has our father’s talent for silence on the subjects that matter most.
A piano began in another room. Not well, but with conviction—someone practising rather than performing, the same passage attempted twice, corrected, attempted again with the dogged persistence Elizabeth had described with a tenderness she would not have called tenderness.
Mary believes that diligence is a form of prayer.
I have never had the heart to tell her that it ought occasionally to sound less like a siege.
The servant waited for him to speak the proper formalities.
He should leave the card. He should incline his head, descend the steps, and wait for a return call that might or might not come.
That was what the card was for—a name placed on a tray to be considered at leisure, accepted or declined without the awkwardness of a face in the doorway.
Then a voice from the room beyond the piano, raised in good-natured complaint about the volume, and the cadence—not the words, which he could not distinguish, but the shape of the sentence, the rising note of amusement caught and held just short of laughter—went through him like a hand pressed flat against his chest. That sounded so like her. ..
“Is Mr or Mrs Gardiner at home?” He took the card back from the tray. “If so, I should be grateful to be received.”
The servant’s expression adjusted by a degree—the caller had been sorted into one category and had just moved himself into another.
She asked him to wait and disappeared into the house.
The piano continued. Kitty coughed once more, quietly.
A woman’s voice trickled from somewhere down the hall and was answered by another, and the whole house breathed with the warmth of a family in the middle of its afternoon, undisturbed and unsuspecting.
He stood in the entrance hall with his hands behind his back and the card pressed between his fingers.
He could still leave it, if they declined to receive him, but that was a thing he could not conceive of just yet.
The stone from Blackscar was heavy in his coat pocket as he waited for the people who had sheltered her since Longbourn to decide whether they would admit him.
It did not take long. The servant returned and led him to the front parlour, and then a woman entered whom he recognised from no physical description Elizabeth had ever given, but from something less definable, a quality of direct attention that met him at the door and did not look away.
“Mr Darcy.” She curtseyed with the composure of a woman who had been raised near enough to great houses to know their customs, though her hands, when she clasped them before her, pressed together more tightly than courtesy required.
“I am Mrs Gardiner. Forgive me—we have not been introduced, but I grew up in Lambton, not five miles from Pemberley, and your family’s name is well known to me.
Please, come in.” She stepped aside to admit him to the parlour—the green curtains were there, faded to sage at their edges—and gestured toward a chair.
Two young women occupied the far end of the parlour.
One sat at a small upright piano with her hands still resting on the keys, a piece of music propped before her that she had evidently been working through with more discipline than ease.
She had Elizabeth’s colouring—the dark hair, the firm line of the brow—but none of her sister’s quickness in the face.
Her expression, turned now toward Darcy, carried a gravity that belonged to someone who had decided early what she thought of the world and had not yet been given reason to revise it.
Mary. He was certain of it before Mrs Gardiner spoke her name.
The other was curled in the window seat with a shawl drawn close around her shoulders and a book open in her lap that she had not been reading.
She was fairer than her sisters, thinner, with the fine translucence of someone whose health had been unkind to her for longer than a single winter.
She stared at Darcy with open, undisguised curiosity—her lips slightly parted, her book forgotten entirely—and did not look away when he met her gaze.
Neither of them had Elizabeth’s composure.
Elizabeth had never once looked at him as though he were something unexpected that had wandered into her parlour and required cataloguing.
She had looked at him as though he were already explicable, and she had simply not yet decided whether the explanation interested her.
Mrs Gardiner performed the introductions, and he had been correct. Elizabeth had described them too well to mistake their identities. Darcy inclined his head to each, then assumed the seat Mrs Gardiner offered.
“My husband is in his study, Mr Darcy. He will be with us directly. May I offer you tea while we wait?”
“You are very kind, Mrs Gardiner. I must apologise for calling without prior notice. I should have left my card.”
“Not at all. We are happy to receive you.” The courtesy was genuine, though it sat alongside something more watchful. “I hope—that is, there is nothing amiss in Derbyshire? No trouble at Pemberley?”
His brows raised. “Trouble, madam?”
A line formed between her eyes, though her smile remained fixed. “Forgive me for assuming, sir. I was trying to account for the pleasure of your call, and that was the nearest connexion I could conceive.”
He looked down and shook his head faintly. “I fear I have caused you unnecessary alarm. No, I am aware of no troubles in Derbyshire.”
“Oh. That is well.” She folded her hands on her lap and nodded faintly to her niece. “Mary, will you call for tea?”
The younger woman rose to cross to the bellpull just as Mr Gardiner’s step sounded in the passage.
He entered the parlour with a pair of spectacles pushed up onto his forehead and a pen still in his hand.
He was smaller than Darcy had imagined, trimmer, with the kind of compact frame that suggested a quickness of character not unlike his niece.
He looked at Darcy the way he might look at a column of figures that did not yet balance.
“Mr Darcy.” He set the pen on the mantelpiece without looking at it, then came forward, offering Darcy his hand in greeting. “Edward Gardiner. This is a pleasant surprise.”
Darcy rose to accept Gardiner’s hand, and beside him, Mrs Gardiner stood as well. Probably expecting to pass their unusual caller off to her husband and bid her pleasantries as he departed.
“Mr Gardiner,” he said. “I regret calling without prior notice.”
“Not at all.” Gardiner’s tone was cordial, but not warm. “You must be acquainted with Mrs Gardiner.”
“Only by proximity. Mrs Gardiner has just informed me that she was raised near my home.”
She inclined her head. “I confess it has been many years since I have visited.” She hesitated—the restraint of one who wished to ask a question and was deciding whether courtesy or urgency ought to govern.
“My sister still lives there, and it was mentioned that the master of Pemberley had recently returned. We understand you had been abroad for several years, and your return, naturally, was a matter of some remark in her letters.”