CHAPTER TWO
She did not sleep well, the nights before her departure, and told herself it was the ordinary anxiety of travel, the disruption of routine, the strangeness of leaving Longbourn for a destination so unlike anywhere she had been before.
She did not examine too closely why, when she lay awake in the dark, it was not the ledgers or the debt or even her mother's transports that occupied her thoughts, but the particular memory of Mr. Darcy's face across a crowded room, his stillness, the way he seemed to observe everyone and reveal nothing of himself in return.
She had constructed, over the months since Meryton, an entire architecture of contempt for that man, and it had served her well.
It gave her something to be witty about at dinner.
It gave her sisters something to tease her over.
It gave her, she admitted to herself only in the very smallest hours of the night, a place to put a feeling she did not otherwise know what to do with, because contempt was so much simpler than the alternative, and the alternative, whatever it was, frightened her in a way she had no language for.
Her father, she thought, had built his whole character around comfortable irony rather than face the family's actual peril.
She wondered, lying awake, whether she had done something similar with Mr. Darcy: built an entire comfortable irony around him, so that she would never have to examine the less comfortable fact that he had unsettled her from the very first evening, not because he had insulted her, though he had, but because there had been something in his reserve that struck her as familiar.
A loneliness dressed up as arrogance. She recognized loneliness; she had felt the shape of it in her own house often enough, in a marriage gone sour between her parents, in the particular exhaustion of being the clever daughter in a family that did not always know what to do with cleverness.
It was easier to despise him. She had chosen to despise him, quite deliberately, somewhere in the weeks after Meryton, the way one chooses to close a door rather than risk what might come through it if left ajar.
She arrived at this realization with the particular clarity of three in the morning, and was appalled enough by it that she resolved, by breakfast, never to think of it again.
The journey to Derbyshire took the better part of three days, and Elizabeth spent the last of them watching the landscape change through the carriage window, the gentler hills of Hertfordshire giving way to something wilder and grander, until at last the carriage turned through a gate and the trees opened, and there it was.
Pemberley.
She had heard it described, of course, by Mr. Bingley, by Mrs. Gardiner who had grown up not far from it, by half the gossiping mouths of Meryton, but no description had prepared her for the actual fact of the house, rising honey colored from its valley, the lake catching the late afternoon light, the whole prospect arranged with such effortless, unselfconscious grandeur that it seemed less built than grown, as though the land had simply decided, at some point, to organize itself around this one perfect point of stillness.
She thought, unwillingly, that it suited him. Not in its grandeur, which she had expected, but in its restraint: nothing showy, nothing performed for effect, simply a great deal of quiet, careful beauty that did not announce itself and did not need to.
She was admitted by a housekeeper, a Mrs. Reynolds, whose warmth was so immediate and so genuine that Elizabeth found herself disarmed before she had even removed her bonnet, and was shown to a comfortable set of rooms in the family wing, an arrangement she noted with some private alarm, given the supposed nature of her visit.
"Miss Darcy is most eager to make your acquaintance," Mrs. Reynolds told her, settling Elizabeth's trunk with brisk efficiency. "She has had very little female company her own age, poor lamb, and Mr. Darcy thought it might do her good, your being here."
"Mr. Darcy thought of his sister's amusement, in the midst of arranging for me to audit his accounts?"
"Mr. Darcy thinks of a great many things, miss, more than he is generally given credit for.
" Mrs. Reynolds said this with a small, knowing smile that Elizabeth chose not to examine too closely.
"He will see you at dinner, if that suits.
He has been rather particular about the arrangements for your comfort, I will say. "
Elizabeth filed this away with mild suspicion, the way one files away any piece of information that does not fit comfortably into an established narrative, and resolved to ask no further questions until she had seen the man himself.
He was waiting in the drawing room when she came down, and the sight of him, after months of carrying around a flattened, two dimensional version of him in her memory, struck her with unexpected force.
He was taller than she remembered. Or perhaps it was simply that memory had reduced him, the way contempt tends to reduce a person to their worst single moment, and the actual man standing before the fire, in the actual room, in the actual gold and fading light of a Derbyshire evening, refused to be reduced.
"Miss Bennet." He bowed, correct and formal, and there was nothing in his face she could read, which she found obscurely irritating, as though his composure were a deliberate withholding rather than simply his nature. "I am glad you arrived safely."
"Mr. Darcy." She curtsied with equal correctness. "Your house is very fine."
"Thank you." A pause, just slightly too long. "I hope the rooms are comfortable."
"Entirely. Though I confess I expected to be lodged nearer the offices, given the nature of my visit, rather than the family wing."
Something passed across his face then, quick and gone before she could name it. "I thought it would be more comfortable for you. And Georgiana was eager for the company nearby. I hope that does not offend."
"It does not offend, Mr. Darcy. It merely surprises."
"I find," he said, with the faintest edge of something that might, in another man, have been called wryness, "that I surprise you rather often, Miss Bennet, given how confidently you generally seem to know exactly what to expect of me."
It was the first thing he had said that struck her as something other than perfectly correct, and she found herself, despite every intention to the contrary, rather wanting to know what else lay beneath the correctness.
"I had not thought my expectations of you were a particular subject of interest to you, sir."
"They are not," he said, "ordinarily." And then, before she could ask what he meant by ordinarily, the doors opened, and a slight, fair haired girl of perhaps sixteen came in with the particular awkward eagerness of someone unused to meeting new people and determined to do it well regardless.
"Miss Bennet, this is my sister, Georgiana."
The girl curtsied, color rising in her cheeks. "I have heard so much of you, Miss Bennet. My brother says you are the cleverest woman he has met in Hertfordshire."
Elizabeth glanced at Mr. Darcy, who had gone very slightly still, the particular stillness of a man wishing his sister had not repeated something said in confidence.
"Did he," Elizabeth said.
"He did not say it was a compliment, precisely," Georgiana added, with the guileless honesty of the very young, "but I assumed it must be, since he does not generally say anything at all about people he meets in Hertfordshire."
"Georgiana."
"I am only telling the truth, Fitzwilliam."
Elizabeth bit back a smile, and found, to her own considerable irritation, that some of her careful contempt had already begun, in this one small exchange, to feel less like armor and more like something she was holding up with both hands against a wind that had not yet decided to blow.