Chapter 20 #2
Elizabeth looked back at her book. “I am very happy to be here,” she said after a moment. “It was foolish of me to think of Pemberley merely as a respite from my mother’s anger. Your home deserves to be valued on its own merits. I have never been anywhere so lovely, or so peaceful.”
“I am glad you are here,” Mr Darcy said simply. “I have not seen Georgiana like this in a long time.”
“She is wonderful company.”
“She thinks the same of you.” He paused. “Nor have I enjoyed a spring so much myself.”
The words seemed to surprise him. For a moment he looked as though he might continue, then merely glanced down at the book in his hands.
Elizabeth felt something shift unpleasantly near her heart. “Then I am glad to have contributed to your enjoyment of the season,” she said lightly.
His eyes returned to hers. “There is something I had wished to ask you,” he said after a moment.
“Please do,” Elizabeth managed after a moment. It was foolish of her to imagine that he might ask that question, surely. She ought not to even think of it.
“I was thinking we might have a ball. To mark the occasion of your visit, and to introduce you and your sister to the neighbourhood. Would you would enjoy that?”
Elizabeth looked at him with unalloyed pleasure. If not the question of her secret dreams, it was still a very welcome suggestion, and almost too great an honour. “A ball?”
“If you would like.”
“I should like it very much,” she said. “I shall have to be very careful in how I write to my sisters. If Lydia hears that Mary and I have had a private ball in our honour, there will be no living with her.”
Mr Darcy smiled crookedly. “From a lady as shy and retiring as your youngest sister? Surely not.”
She laughed, and he looked quietly pleased in the way he had when she laughed at things he said, and the pianoforte continued from further in the house, and the afternoon light moved through the library windows, and Elizabeth thought she had never been so happy anywhere.
Afterward, walking back to her room before dinner, she reminded herself that she should not read too much into any of it.
Pemberley was Pemberley. Mr Darcy was a man of great wealth and consequence, and she was the daughter of a missing gentleman, with an irrational mother and a family currently making themselves conspicuous in Brighton.
He had been kind to her. He had been kind to Georgiana through her, which was the more natural explanation for all of it.
She was grateful for his friendship. She should be content with his friendship. She was nearly entirely content with his friendship.
Elizabeth changed for dinner, told herself not to ruin everything by wanting too much, and went downstairs.
∞∞∞
The days at Pemberley had a quality she had not expected. She had thought a great house would impose itself, require something of its guests, make them conscious of what it was. Instead, Pemberley simply absorbed them all into its rhythms, and the rhythms were good.
Mornings, Mary and Georgiana disappeared into the music room after breakfast and emerged only for meals, in the state of people who are very absorbed in something they both care about.
Elizabeth could hear them from all parts of the house, the same passages repeated, the laughter when something went wrong, the increasingly magnificent music that meant something had gone right.
They were very good for each other. Georgiana’s shyness was melting day by day, as frost melts under the spring sun. Mary had stopped lecturing people, or at least had found a more willing audience for the things she cared about, which amounted to the same thing.
In the afternoons, Elizabeth walked. The grounds of Pemberley were large enough to spend days in without covering the same ground twice, and she spent several afternoons doing exactly that, discovering the paths along the stream and the old kitchen garden, the formal gardens and the woods.
Best of all was the ridge walk above the house, where you could see the hills stretching away north and west and understand, in a way that was almost physical, how far you were from London and everything that London contained.
Mr Darcy joined her sometimes, and sometimes did not, and both were comfortable.
When he did come, the conversation moved in the easy way it had in Kent, ranging from one thing to another with little rhyme or reason.
She told him about the books she had been reading in his library.
Mr Darcy had read them all, and the only thing more enjoyable than agreeing in their views proved to be arguing over them.
He told her about the estate and the work of running it, not as a man who wishes to impress but as one who is genuinely interested in what he is talking about.
Evenings were for the whole party together, in the drawing room after dinner, and these were the hours she liked best. All three of the young ladies played and sang, with any thought of shyness quite forgotten, and the music filled the large room in the way music does in a house where it is truly welcomed.
Mr Darcy sat to one side and listened with the complete attention he brought to everything, and Elizabeth sat near the fire and did not allow herself to look at him too often, only when the temptation was too much to resist. Then she quickly looked away again, thinking about being content with friendship and finding it somewhat less convincing each time.
He was so thoroughly himself. That was what she kept coming back to.
He was not performing anything. He was not presenting a version of himself arranged for an audience.
Mr Darcy was simply present, in the same way the house was simply present, without requiring anyone to be particularly impressed by it.
She had known very few people like that.
She sat in the firelight on a warm June evening while Georgiana played something slow and lovely, and she thought that she had been very wrong about Fitzwilliam Darcy, and that she was glad to have been wrong.
For one foolish moment she allowed herself to imagine that this was not a visit.
Georgiana at the pianoforte. Mary beside her.
Mr Darcy in his accustomed chair with a book in his hand.
The familiar comfort of the room around them.
Home. The thought startled her so badly that she immediately banished it.
Pemberley was Pemberley. Mr Darcy was Mr Darcy. A man of immense fortune and consequence, who knew every humiliating detail of her family’s situation and had shown her nothing but generosity despite it.
She ought to be grateful for his friendship. She ought to accept that even that was more than anyone could have expected him to offer. Still, she could not entirely regret the dream.
Impossible as it was, it was too beautiful to regret.