Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Darcy had told himself, on receiving the parcel, that he would set it aside until evening.
He set it aside until noon, which was, for him, a significant deterioration.
He had been given, he understood, the original manuscript.
He sat down with it.
He had read Cowper, naturally; he had a library.
But reading Cowper in a handsome Pemberley edition was a different operation from reading him through the running commentary of Elizabeth Bennet.
Beside the famous passage on retirement and the quiet pleasures of a country life, she had written: This man has never had sisters.
Darcy paused, read the line again, and turned the page.
The poem about the dog — affectionate, domestic, Cowper at his least guarded — had a single mark beside it: the faintest line drawn under the last stanza, and below it, in very small letters: too honest for the poem to deserve it. Darcy sat with that for longer than he could entirely account for.
By the third poem he had stopped conducting himself as a borrower should.
She argued with a poet dead thirty years as though he were seated across from her and had made a questionable claim at dinner. Her disagreements were brief and pointed; her agreements were few and more revealing still. She underlined what moved her and said nothing beside it.
It was, he found, perfectly impossible to read and not answer.
He held out against it until the fourth poem.
Then, beside her note — I think he is wrong about solitude; it is not peace but the practice of it that is wanted, and those are not the same thing — he found himself reaching, with the full awareness of a man doing something inadvisable, for his own pencil.
He wrote: The distinction is just. He confuses the condition for the discipline.
He set the pen down. He looked at the ink drying on her page.
This was, he acknowledged, exactly as bad an idea as it had appeared before he did it. A gentleman returned a borrowed book untouched, in the condition he'd received it. He was — he looked at the note — apparently not that gentleman today.
He turned another page.
The poem on domesticity, which Cowper handled with his characteristic blend of warmth and mild melancholy, had attracted Elizabeth's longest note: He is happiest writing about enclosed spaces — rooms, gardens, the rectory — as though the world beyond wants containing.
Does he think so because he believes it, or because he never quite dared not to?
And then, in smaller writing beneath: I do not know if I pity or envy him.
Perhaps both. Some days the garden is enough.
Darcy read it twice.
He picked up the pencil. He held it over the margin — not beside her note, but above it, where there was a narrow strip of white paper and room, technically, for three or four words.
He could say something about Cowper's enclosures, or the rectory specifically, or the question of whether the world beyond wanted containing was more interesting than whether the writer believed it did.
He put the pencil down.
He picked it up again and turned three pages forward, to a passage she had marked only with a single underline and no comment at all — Cowper at his most plainly melancholy, the lines about loss and distance and the particular quality of winter afternoons.
She had not argued with it. She had only drawn one thin line beneath it and turned the page.
He held the pencil over that margin for longer than he had held it over the other.
He put it down again. He moved on.
By the end of the afternoon he had made eleven marks, all in pencil, all restrained, and he had left perhaps fifteen places unmarked where the pencil had been in his hand and had been put down again.
When Bingley knocked to ask if he meant to dress for dinner, he was on the second reading, checking the marks against each other like a man reviewing his own dispatches for consistency.
"You are still reading that book," said Bingley, with the mild surprise of someone who did not read for long but wished others well in the enterprise.
"I am returning it tomorrow." Darcy closed the volume and set it on the table. Then picked it up again and set it on the writing desk.
"Is it good?"
Darcy considered the question with the seriousness it deserved. "The commentary is excellent," he said.
At dinner, Caroline had arranged herself in the chair nearest to his sightline and was operating at full warmth — the warmth she deployed not because she felt it but because the alternative required an explanation she had not yet settled on.
She had seen the parcel arrive. She had assessed the handwriting.
She had drawn the correct conclusions and arrived, by a route Darcy understood perfectly, at the wrong ones.
"I understand you have been reading all afternoon," she said, over the soup. "Such dedication. I always say there is nothing that shows a gentleman's character so well as his reading habits. One can tell a great deal by what a man attends to."
"I believe that is so," said Darcy.
"Cowper," she said lightly, having apparently been saving it. "An unusual choice for this time of year. Rather melancholy, is he not? All those winter interiors."
"He is underestimated."
Caroline let a small smile perform its office. "You are very generous. I confess I find the rural verse — confined. Very particular to a certain kind of reader. A country reader, perhaps." She lifted her glass. "Though I am sure the edition had its own recommendations."
Darcy set down his fork. "The edition," he said, with a patience that had been costing him something since the soup, "was annotated.
The margins were the point. I have rarely encountered a reader who engages with a text so directly, or reasons with more precision.
" He looked at her with perfect courtesy and nothing else.
"It was not confined in the least. It was exactly the opposite. "
Hurst asked for the port.
Bingley said something about the partridges.
Caroline let the conversation move around her, and said nothing more about Cowper; and Darcy, returning to the writing-table after dinner with the book still in front of him, went back to the page he had not been able to mark.
Some days the garden is enough.
He picked up the pencil. He held it over the margin for a long moment. Then, very lightly, in letters small enough to be almost not there, he wrote: I had not considered it so. I should have.
He set the pencil down.
Writing in the book, he thought, was more dangerous than speaking to Elizabeth at a distance of three feet.
He also thought, more quietly, that he was going to go on doing it.