Chapter Thirty
London
They left for London three days later, Elizabeth persuaded to come along with a readiness that told Jane her sister had been half hoping for the invitation before it was even properly extended, and the journey passed pleasantly enough, Elizabeth full of questions about Portugal that Jane found herself, for the first time, properly able to answer at length, the two of them talking through most of the journey while Fitzwilliam, riding alongside the carriage for a good part of it, appeared content to leave the sisters to their own long-overdue conversation.
It was on the second morning, with London’s outskirts beginning to show themselves in the increasing traffic on the road, that Fitzwilliam grew noticeably quieter, and Jane, watching him from her seat in the carriage, understood that whatever business awaited him in town, it weighed on him rather more heavily than he had so far let show.
“You have grown very serious,” she said, when Elizabeth had dozed off against the carriage window, worn out by the early start.
“I have a call to make,” he said, “once we are settled, that I have been putting off rather longer than I ought to have, and I find, now that London is actually in sight, that I can put it off no longer.” He was quiet a moment.
“I should have told you this some while ago, Jane, and I find I have been rather a coward about the telling of it, in a manner that does not entirely become a man who has faced French cavalry without flinching.”
“Told me what?”
“My father,” he said, and stopped, and Jane saw him gathering himself in the way she had come to recognise, the same careful assembling he had brought to the proposal under the olive trees.
“I have let you believe, all this while, that I am simply a younger son of a normal family, making my own way as best I can. That is true, so far as it goes. It is not the whole of the truth.”
Jane waited, saying nothing, understanding that whatever this was, he needed the room to say it in his own time.
“My father is the Earl of Matlock,” he said, finally, plainly, and watched her face with an anxiety she had rarely seen in him.
“I am his second son. I have no expectation of the title, nor of the greater part of the family’s wealth, which will go, to my brother, and I have lived my adult life on precisely the terms I have described to you, a soldier’s pay and nothing more.
But my father is an earl, Jane, and I did not tell you, and I find I owe you a rather better explanation than simple cowardice for the not telling. ”
Jane sat with this a moment, turning it over, and found that her first reaction, examined honestly, was not alarm but a kind of bemused astonishment that she had married a man for eight months without once suspecting so significant a fact about him.
“Why did you not tell me?”
“I was afraid,” he said, simply, “that if you knew, before we married, you would refuse me, not because you did not love me, but because you would think yourself unequal to the world my family moves in, or because you would suspect me of expecting you to somehow perform a part you had not signed on for. I wanted you to choose me, Jane, the actual me, the soldier with the poor letters and the too-careful pride, before you knew anything about my father’s title that might complicate the choosing. ”
“That is a very poor piece of logic,” Jane said, though she found she was not, in truth, very angry, only rather amazed at the whole strange shape of it. “You do understand that, whatever you feared, keeping it from me was its own kind of dishonesty, however well-intentioned.”
“I do understand that now, rather better than I understood it at the time,” he admitted.
“I have turned it over a great many times since, and I have found no version of the reasoning that does not eventually arrive at the plain fact that I ought simply to have told you, and trusted you to manage the knowing of it properly, which I think, examining the whole matter honestly, you would have done without the smallest difficulty.”
Jane looked at him a long moment, this careful man who had ridden into a fire and sat by her sickbed against his own orders and had, apparently, been quietly concealing an earldom the entire while out of nothing more complicated than fear, and found she could not, in truth, stay properly cross with him for very long.
“I have nursed men through amputations, Richard. I have run an evacuation from a burning building. I think I can probably manage tea with an earl.”
Something in his face eased at that, relief plain and unguarded.
“I rather thought you might say something along those lines.”
“When do we call on him?”
“Tomorrow, I think, once we are properly settled. I have written ahead to Darcy, my cousin, whose house we are to stay in, explaining that I have someone he particularly ought to meet, and I expect he has already guessed rather more of the situation than I have plainly told him, being a man who generally guesses correctly about most things.”
?∞?
Darcy House, when they arrived at it that afternoon, proved considerably grander than anything Elizabeth had prepared herself for, and Jane watched her sister take in the tall fa?ade and the liveried footman and the whole general air of settled, ancient wealth with an expression that gave away nothing beyond a slight lift of one eyebrow, which Jane understood, knowing her sister, to be Elizabeth’s own particular way of declining to be impressed by anything on principle, whatever she privately felt about it.
They were shown into a large drawing room where a girl of perhaps fourteen sat near the window with a book she was plainly not reading, glancing up anxiously at every sound from the hall, and Jane understood at once, from the girl’s evident nervousness, that this must be Georgiana, and that she had been told, rather too thoroughly, about the cousin-in-law she was about to meet.
“Georgiana,” Fitzwilliam said, warmly, crossing to her at once. “You look as though you expected me to arrive with rather more ceremony than I have actually brought.”
“Richard.” The girl’s face eased considerably at the sight of him, though her eyes went, almost immediately, to Jane, and Jane saw the particular anxious calculation of someone who has heard a great deal about a person and is now terrified of somehow disappointing them, or being disappointed in turn.
“This is my wife,” Fitzwilliam said, “Jane, and her sister, Miss Elizabeth Bennet. Jane, Elizabeth, my cousin Georgiana.”
Georgiana curtsied, very properly, and said she was very glad to make their acquaintance, in a voice so carefully controlled that Jane understood at once how much effort the girl was expending simply to hold herself steady, and it was Elizabeth, watching this with the particular attentive interest she brought to anyone genuinely interesting rather than merely grand, who crossed the room first, before the introductions had properly settled, and sat down beside Georgiana on the window seat as though she had known her for years.
“What are you reading?” Elizabeth asked, nodding at the book still held, unopened past its first pages, in Georgiana’s lap.
Georgiana said the title, very quietly, plainly expecting it to mean nothing to a stranger.
“I have read that,” Elizabeth said. “I disagreed most violently with the whole of the second chapter, and I have never yet found anyone else who shared my objection to it.”
Something in Georgiana’s face changed entirely, surprise giving way to something warmer.
“I disagree with the second chapter too. I did not think anybody else had noticed how badly it was managed.”
The two of them were in proper, animated conversation within thirty seconds, and remained so for the better part of an hour, and Jane, watching from across the room, saw a tall gentleman enter partway through and stop in the doorway, taking in the scene with an expression of quiet, careful attention that told Jane, before Fitzwilliam had made any introduction at all, exactly who this must be.
“Darcy,” Fitzwilliam said, crossing to him. “I am glad you are here. I have someone I particularly wanted you to meet.”
Mr Darcy’s eyes, Jane noticed, had already found their way to the window seat, where his sister sat in genuinely easy conversation with a stranger, something Jane understood, from the small, unguarded surprise in his face, to be a rare enough occurrence that it commanded his full attention before Fitzwilliam had said another word.
“My sister,” Darcy said, still watching them, “appears to have found a friend.”
“That is my wife’s sister, Miss Elizabeth Bennet,” Fitzwilliam said, and Darcy’s attention shifted, properly, at last, to Jane, and then, following the direction of his own evident curiosity, back to Elizabeth herself, with an expression Jane could not entirely read, though she thought she caught, beneath its careful composure, something that looked rather like the particular attention of a man encountering, in person, a picture he had already, from some other source, begun assembling in his own mind.