Chapter 17
Elizabeth Bennet
Springtime in Kent was beautiful. In a trying season of life, and during a visit that had both its pleasures and its pains, Elizabeth felt that a little natural beauty could not have come at a more welcome time.
She had taken to walking every morning before Charlotte’s household properly woke, following the lanes south of Hunsford where the hedgerows were thick with hawthorn blossom.
The fields beyond them were so green they made the winter seem like something she had imagined.
After being at Longbourn with its anxieties and its silences, being here felt like setting down a weight she had not fully noticed until she put it down.
She intended to make the most of every morning.
This morning required more than walking. It required thinking. The evening at Rosings had given her a great deal to sort through.
She had been roughly prepared for Lady Catherine.
Charlotte’s letters had described a woman of strong opinions and no great interest in whether they were shared, and the reality had borne this out faithfully.
Over dinner, Lady Catherine had delivered judgments on Elizabeth’s complexion, on the musical education available in Hertfordshire, on the correct management of a clergyman’s garden, on the current fashion for long sleeves, and on the design of the new chimney in the east wing.
All of this without leaving much room for reply and without appearing to expect any.
Elizabeth had answered politely where required and spent the rest of her attention watching Charlotte, who, over four months of marriage, had developed a truly remarkable technique.
A single word of agreement, delivered at precisely the right moment, committing to absolutely nothing beyond its own existence.
Too little, and Lady Catherine noticed. Too much and you had to defend it.
Charlotte had found the exact middle ground and planted her flag there.
It was rather impressive, Elizabeth thought.
Thankfully, the other members of the party were more pleasant than Lady Catherine.
Colonel Fitzwilliam was a man of civil manners and considerable charm.
Better still, he had spoken with her at dinner as though her opinions were worth hearing.
After the winter at Longbourn, that had meant a great deal.
She had liked Georgiana Darcy immediately.
Mr Darcy’s sister was obviously a sweet-tempered girl of considerable perception and almost painful shyness.
Oddly, there was something in Miss Darcy that made Elizabeth want to be careful with her in return.
Some quality she could not quite name, something a little fragile underneath all the sweetness.
And then there was Mr Darcy.
Elizabeth paused at the stile at the edge of the meadow and rested her arms on the top bar, looking out at nothing in particular.
Mr Darcy had been surprising. She kept returning to that word, unable to improve on it, though she had been trying since she woke up.
Was he the man who had once tossed a shilling toward her with such careless disregard, or the man who had later apologised for that same behaviour and insisted upon seeing her safely to London? The two impressions sat uneasily together, and she could not decide which was the truer.
He had entered the drawing room almost at the moment she had thrown herself at the pianoforte to rescue Miss Darcy from her aunt’s too persistent attentions.
He had known what she had done, and why; even a single glance at his expression told her that much.
It was full of an almost painful gratitude, and an affectionate concern for his sister that showed him to be a most loving brother.
No man could look like that and be entirely consumed with status and pride.
But if this were the real Mr Darcy, what on earth was she to make of everything Mr Wickham had told her?
She had once believed Mr Wickham’s story completely and without much thought.
He had told it with the patient dignity of a man who has been genuinely wronged and is too gentlemanly to make a scene about it.
The living promised by old Mr Darcy and denied by the son.
The years of suffering the consequences quietly, for what else could a man in his position do against a man of Darcy’s wealth and consequence?
She had felt indignant on his behalf almost before he finished speaking.
She climbed the stile and walked on, the lane curving south between the hedgerows, sweet with blossoms in the cool morning air.
The problem was that the man she was beginning to know did not match the portrait.
Not in any single dramatic way, but in the weight of many small things.
The way he talked about his sister, not with vague fondness but with specific care, as though her wellbeing were the most important consideration in any room he entered.
The way he had suffered discomfort and inconvenience, not to mention the risk of scandal, only to protect her. His dry, quiet humour that surfaced occasionally when he was at ease, which she suspected most people never saw because most people never got past being put off by his reserve.
None of it was impossible to reconcile with what Mr Wickham had described. A man could be kind to his sister and still behave badly elsewhere. She was not na?ve enough to think otherwise. And yet his description did not quite seem to fit.
Elizabeth was still working through all of it when she came around the bend and was forced to stop abruptly, lest she walk directly into the gentleman approaching from the other direction — Mr Darcy!
He, too, looked surprised at the encounter. “Good morning, Mr Darcy,” Elizabeth said. “Do excuse me for so very nearly running you down.”
He smiled a little at that. “Good morning to you, Miss Bennet. I will forgive you gladly if you will do the same. The path is not more mine than yours.”
Elizabeth thought to herself that Lady Catherine would not agree, but she could hardly say as much to the woman’s nephew — even if he did seem to have a clear-eyed view of the woman’s foibles.
There was a brief pause. “You are an early riser,” Mr Darcy observed at last.
“The mornings here are too fine to waste.” She meant it entirely. Then, because she was curious and had never been good at leaving a test unmade, she added, “I do not wonder you walk this way. It has already become one of my favourite lanes.”
It was simple, and it was deliberate. If he were the man she had once believed him to be, cold, indifferent, and privately contemptuous of her, he would take the hint for what it was and leave the lane to her thereafter. She waited to see whether he would.
He said, “Yes. The south lane is always the finest walk on the estate in spring.”
And he fell into step beside her. For several minutes they spoke of nothing more consequential than the neighbourhood itself.
Then the conversation lagged a little, and Elizabeth looked at him curiously.
It did not seem as though he had tired of the conversation, or wished to leave her, but rather as though there were something on his mind. The pause lengthened.
“I should like to thank you for last night,” Mr Darcy said abruptly.
“For protecting Georgiana. My aunt is not — she does not understand what it is to be shy. If you had not intervened so elegantly, I should have had to speak up myself. And I could not have done it without creating a scene that Georgiana would have disliked almost as much as being forced to perform for strangers.”
“You are very welcome,” Elizabeth told him. “Your sister seems a gentle soul. If I have helped to secure her comfort, I am glad of it.”
“You did,” he told her. “I am in your debt.”
At that, Elizabeth laughed aloud. “Hardly, Mr Darcy. I am in yours. Have you forgotten that you picked me up and conveyed me to London in your private carriage, risking considerable scandal to do it?”
“I have not,” he said. “But that cannot be considered an obligation on your side. As you obliged me by doing as I thought best, it is rather another instance in which I am in your debt.”
The answer was so unexpectedly dry that she looked at him in surprise. To her astonishment, he appeared faintly amused. It occurred to her that Mr Darcy possessed a sense of humour.
He asked about the parsonage, and she described Charlotte’s garden with genuine admiration.
As she spoke, she saw something shift in his expression, some small, settled assumption quietly revised.
She asked about the Rosings grounds in return, and he described them with more care and attention than she had expected.
When they parted at the fork in the lane, Elizabeth walked back toward the parsonage, feeling pleasantly off balance in a way she could not quite account for.
“A fine morning?” Charlotte said, not looking up from her sewing.
“Very fine,” Elizabeth said.
Charlotte’s needle did not slow. Elizabeth sat down and picked up her book, and they said nothing further on the subject, which was exactly right.
He was there the following morning, and the one after that.
On the third day he brought Miss Darcy, which was a pleasure of a different sort. Miss Darcy was freer outdoors than she was inside, less hesitant, more willing to ask questions and venture opinions of her own.
She asked about Meryton with a level of interest that showed her brother’s dedication in writing letters, for it was plain that she already knew a great deal.
Miss Darcy listened to her answers with such genuine curiosity that Elizabeth found herself answering at more length than she usually did about her home with people she did not know well.
It was easy to talk to Miss Darcy. It had been easy almost from the first.