Chapter Thirty-Three
Matlock and Pemberley
They came to Matlock first, the great grey house rising up out of its own park with a grandeur that made even Elizabeth, Jane noticed, fall briefly and uncharacteristically silent, and the Countess, a small, sharp-eyed woman who plainly ran the whole vast household with the same brisk competence her husband brought to an army, received Elizabeth with a warmth that told Jane, within the first quarter hour, exactly how much the Earl had already reported home of Jane’s own visit, and what conclusions he had drawn from it.
“So you are the sister,” the Countess said, taking Elizabeth’s hands in both of hers.
“My husband has told me a great deal about your family, Miss Bennet, and my nephew, I am given to understand, has told my husband a very great deal more about you in particular, though the poor boy imagines himself considerably more discreet on the subject than he actually is.”
Elizabeth managed, with admirable composure, to say only that she was very glad to make the Countess’s acquaintance, and did not enquire further into precisely what Mr Darcy might have written to his uncle, though Jane, catching her eye across the room, saw the question sitting there plainly enough.
They stayed three days, the Earl’s household proving considerably livelier than its grand exterior suggested, Georgiana and Elizabeth resuming their easy friendship almost the moment the carriages had stopped, and it was on the second evening, walking in the long gallery after dinner while the rest of the party remained below, that Jane found Elizabeth in a mood rather more reflective than her sister generally permitted herself to show.
“I do not know what I am doing,” Elizabeth admitted, studying a portrait of some long-dead Fitzwilliam without any real attention to it.
“A month ago I had never properly spoken to the man beyond a handful of London drawing-room conversations, and now I find myself travelling halfway across England in his company, to stay in his own house, with his own family plainly hoping for precisely the outcome I have not yet permitted myself to hope for aloud.”
“What do you feel, when you are actually with him? Not what you think you ought to feel, nor what everybody else so plainly expects you to feel. What do you actually feel?”
Elizabeth was quiet a long moment.
“I feel as though I have finally found someone who argues with me properly, rather than simply agreeing or being offended, and who seems to like me rather better for the arguing than he would if I gave way. I have never felt that with anyone before.”
“Then I think,” Jane said, “you already know precisely what you are doing, whatever uncertainty you are presently permitting yourself to feel about the speed of it.”
?∞?
Pemberley, when they came to it at last, proved everything Elizabeth’s letters would afterward struggle properly to describe, a great house set above its own river in a valley that seemed, Jane thought, to have been arranged by nature specifically for the purpose of taking a visitor’s breath away, and Elizabeth, seeing it first from the carriage window as the road came round the final rise, went entirely silent in a manner Jane had not seen from her sister in the whole course of their acquaintance.
“Well,” Fitzwilliam said, watching Elizabeth’s face with open amusement, “I think that settles the question rather more plainly than anything you said in the gallery.”
The weeks that followed passed, for Jane, in a haze of genuine happiness, watching her sister and Mr Darcy fall, by unhurried degrees and always in company, walking the grounds with Georgiana or Jane herself never far distant, riding out together with a groom properly in attendance, into something that no longer required either of them to disguise it from anybody watching.
Darcy showed Elizabeth the house room by room, and the library, which Jane understood from Elizabeth’s own account afterward to have occupied the better part of an entire afternoon, and Elizabeth argued with him, cheerfully, about the placement of a particular painting in the long gallery, and won, and Jane watched Darcy concede the point with an expression of such open delight that she found she had to look away, feeling suddenly rather as though she were intruding on something private despite the whole party’s presence.
They stayed at Pemberley seven weeks in all, and it was toward the end of them, on a morning walk that had somehow, through no particular arrangement Jane could later account for, left Elizabeth and Darcy some considerable distance ahead of the rest of the party along the river path, that Jane, glancing back once from beside Fitzwilliam, saw Darcy stop, and turn, and take both her sister’s hands in his.
She did not hear what was said. She did not need to.
Elizabeth’s whole bearing, even at that distance, told her everything, and Jane felt Fitzwilliam’s hand find hers, and the two of them stood quite still a moment, watching, until Georgiana, coming up beside them and following the direction of their gaze, gave a small, delighted gasp and had to be gently restrained from calling out across the whole width of the park.
?∞?
They were married the following May, at Longbourn, the whole neighbourhood gathered and the church dressed with more blossom than Hertfordshire had apparently produced in a single spring in living memory, Mrs Bennet having taken personal charge of the flowers with an energy that left the poor gardener, by Elizabeth’s later account, thoroughly exhausted and privately resolved never again to plant so many roses within his mistress’s reach.
“Two daughters married,” Mrs Bennet was heard to declare, at rather regular intervals throughout the whole proceedings, to anyone within range who had not yet properly heard it, “two daughters, and one of them a Lieutenant Colonel’s wife with an earl for a father, and the other mistress of Pemberley itself, ten thousand a year if it is a penny, and I always said, did I not always say, that my girls would do very well for themselves, whatever anybody in this neighbourhood ever chose to think about it. ”
“I confess,” Fitzwilliam murmured to Jane, watching Mrs Bennet sweep past for perhaps the fourth time with a fresh audience for the same speech, “that I have never in my life heard a woman derive quite so much satisfaction from a sentence she has now said, by my count, above a dozen times this morning alone.”
Jane, watching her mother’s particular triumph, found it had settled into something rather different from the anxious, grasping energy that had once sent Sir Walter Ashby to their dinner table.
There was a genuine, easier contentment in it now, two daughters so grandly established that the old desperate arithmetic of the entail no longer pressed on her mother’s nerves quite so sharply as it once had.
“She is almost tolerable today,” Elizabeth observed quietly, drawing Jane aside a moment amid the general festivity. “I think she has finally stopped being frightened, for a little while at least, and I confess I had rather forgotten she was capable of anything other than that particular fright.”
But Jane, glancing across the churchyard to where Mary stood quietly at the edge of the gathering and Kitty and Lydia whispered together over some private joke, thought the relief had not spread quite so evenly as Elizabeth’s observation suggested.
Their mother’s eye had already found the three girls not yet spoken for, and Jane recognised, in the sharpness of that glance, the beginning of a fresh campaign rather than any lasting peace.
Two daughters married so well, she suspected, would prove to her mother not an ending but a standard, and she did not think Mary, or Kitty, or Lydia would find the coming seasons any less closely watched for it, whatever ease this one wedding morning had briefly bought the rest of them.
Jane stood beside her sister that morning exactly as Elizabeth had once stood beside her, in a very different country, on a very different kind of wedding day, and thought that whatever winding roads had carried each of them to this particular happiness, spring blossom and a proud, delighted, thoroughly unstoppable mother included, they had arrived, at last, at precisely the same understanding of what a marriage properly chosen ought to feel like.