Chapter Thirty-One
The Earl of Matlock
The call was arranged for the following afternoon, Fitzwilliam having sent word ahead that morning, and Jane spent the intervening hours in a state of composed but genuine nervousness that she found herself, rather to her own amusement, comparing unfavourably to the calm she had managed through two proper battles.
“You are pacing,” Elizabeth observed, watching her sister cross the guest room for perhaps the tenth time in as many minutes. “I do not think I have ever once seen you pace, in the whole of our lives together.”
“I have never once been about to meet an earl before.”
“You have run an evacuation from a burning building. I heard the whole account from Richard last night, and I confess I could not entirely credit it, our own Jane, who used to faint at the sight of a dead mouse, directing grown men through smoke with the calm of a general.” Elizabeth came and took her sister’s hands, stilling the pacing.
“I do not think this particular earl, whatever his rank, is likely to test you half so severely.”
“It is not the rank that frightens me,” Jane admitted. “It is the not knowing what he expects, nor what he will think of me, having married his son without the smallest notion of who that son actually was.”
“Then let him think what he likes,” Elizabeth said, “and be entirely yourself regardless, since I have found, watching you these past months, that being entirely yourself has served you rather better than any performance you might attempt in its place.”
?∞?
The Earl of Matlock arrived at Darcy House promptly at three, and Jane, standing beside Fitzwilliam in the large drawing room to receive him, found her first proper look at her father-in-law revealed a tall man in his middle sixties, precise in his dress and his bearing, with Fitzwilliam’s own dark eyes set in a face that carried a great deal more formality than his son’s had ever shown her, and none of Fitzwilliam’s easy warmth, at least not on the surface of things.
“Father,” Fitzwilliam said, and something in his voice carried a carefulness Jane had not often heard from him, the guardedness of a son long accustomed to a difficult relationship. “May I present my wife, Jane.”
The Earl’s eyes moved over her with an assessment Jane recognised, having endured something similar once before, from Sir Walter Ashby across a Longbourn dinner table, though this examination, she noted, was of an entirely different character, weighing not her person but something less tangible, her bearing, her composure, the particular quality of a woman meeting an earl for the first time and declining to be visibly overawed by the occasion.
“Mrs Fitzwilliam.” He bowed, correctly, and Jane curtsied in return, and found, straightening, that she met his eyes directly, without flinching, which she understood, from some small shift in his expression, had registered with him rather more than she might have expected.
“My lord.”
“My son informs me you have spent some months in Portugal, tending the wounded of General Blythe’s brigade.” It was not quite a question, and Jane understood she was being given, in the asking of it, a kind of opening.
“I have, my lord. My uncle by marriage General Blythe commanded the brigade. I found the work necessary, and I found, in the doing of it, that I was rather better suited to necessary work than I had previously had occasion to discover.”
Something crossed the Earl’s face, brief and difficult to properly name, and he inclined his head slightly, and moved on to enquire, with a directness Jane had not expected, after the particulars of the campaign, the state of the roads, the conditions of the field hospitals, questions that Jane understood, answering them plainly and without embellishment, were being asked not as polite conversation but as a genuine assessment of her own competence and character.
?∞?
They took tea in the smaller drawing room, Georgiana present and, Jane noted, considerably less anxious than she had been the previous day, having evidently decided, in the course of one long conversation about a book’s disputed second chapter, that both Jane and Elizabeth were friends rather than the alarming strangers she had initially feared.
“You have not asked, my lord,” Jane said, when the tea had been poured and a lull in the conversation presented itself, “why your son did not tell me of your position before we married.”
The Earl looked at her a long moment, something assessing in his gaze that Jane met without looking away.
“I had wondered it, though I confess I thought it perhaps not my place to raise the matter directly.”
“He was afraid,” Jane said, plainly, “that I would refuse him for his family’s sake rather than his own, or think myself unequal to the world his family moved in.
I have told him it was very poor logic, and I stand by that assessment.
But I should like you to know, my lord, that I did not marry your son for his prospects, having been entirely ignorant of them, and I do not think that ignorance reflects poorly on either of us, whatever else it might have cost in the way of proper preparation for this particular tea. ”
Something moved across the Earl’s face that Jane, watching carefully, understood to be the beginning of something considerably warmer than the careful formality with which he had arrived.
“That,” he said, “is a rather more direct answer than I generally receive from anyone in this family, my own son included.” He glanced at Fitzwilliam, who bore this observation with the stillness of a man uncertain whether he was being praised or gently reprimanded.
“I will tell you plainly, Mrs Fitzwilliam, since you have been plain with me, that I had rather different expectations for Richard’s marriage, when I permitted myself to think of it at all.
A younger son’s marriage is generally expected to mend what a younger son’s portion cannot properly provide.
I had assumed, receiving word of this match, that I should find a woman calculating rather more than loving in her approach to the business. ”
“I understand the assumption, my lord, though I hope this afternoon has begun to correct it.”
“It has corrected it rather more thoroughly than I expected, in the space of a single tea,” the Earl said, and Jane saw, watching him, something that might almost have been the ghost of Fitzwilliam’s own dry humour, buried deep beneath decades of formality.
“Georgiana tells me you sat with her a full hour yesterday discussing a novel’s failings with more genuine interest than half the fashionable young ladies of my acquaintance manage in an entire Season. ”
“That was my sister, my lord, though I confess I share the sentiment.”
“Ah. The famous Miss Elizabeth Bennet, of whom my nephew did not stop talking of this morning.” The Earl’s eyes moved, with evident amusement, to where Darcy stood near the window, engaged in what appeared to be a perfectly ordinary conversation with Elizabeth that neither of them showed any particular inclination to conclude.
“I find myself increasingly curious what else this family has been quietly arranging without my proper knowledge of it.”
The afternoon continued in this vein, the Earl’s questions growing steadily less formal and more genuinely curious as the hours passed, and it was toward the end of the visit, as he was preparing to take his leave, that Jane understood the whole of the day’s business had, without any dramatic turning point she could properly point to, settled itself into something considerably warmer than the wary correctness with which it had begun.
“You will bring her to Matlock,” the Earl said to Fitzwilliam, at the door, in a tone that was not quite a request. “Both of you. I find I should like my wife to properly meet the woman who has managed, in the space of eight months, to accomplish what I confess I had rather given up hoping any woman would manage with my second son, namely making him entirely, unmistakably happy.”
He looked, once more, at Jane, and something in his formal bearing eased, just slightly, into what she understood to be, from an earl of sixty-odd years who had plainly not expected to feel it, genuine approval.
“Welcome to the family, Mrs Fitzwilliam. I think you will do very well indeed.”