Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Charlotte was sitting with her mother at Lucas Lodge the following morning, and her expression when Elizabeth appeared in the doorway was the one she wore when she had been thinking for some time about something she had not yet decided whether to say.
Lady Lucas, mercifully, required only ten minutes before she was called away by the housekeeper, and left them to the window-seat and the cold clear morning outside.
"The Thursday call," said Charlotte.
"The Thursday call," Elizabeth agreed.
"He stayed three hours."
"The conversation was extended."
"He stayed three hours, Lizzy, at Longbourn, with Lydia and the fire-tongs and your mother discussing your hair, and he did not look for a moment as though he wished to be elsewhere.
" Charlotte turned from the window. "I have watched men endure Longbourn.
It has a particular look. He did not have it. "
"He was polite."
"He was interested. There is a difference, and you know it." Charlotte smoothed her skirt. "I am going to say something you do not want to hear."
"You usually do."
"Affection is not the only question." She said it plainly, without apology, the way Charlotte always said the things that wanted saying.
"He has ten thousand a year, an estate in Derbyshire, a place in society that your family has never occupied and cannot easily enter.
He has an aunt who is Lady Catherine de Bourgh, whose opinion of a match with a country gentleman's daughter I think we can safely imagine.
He has a world, Lizzy. And at present you are standing very pleasantly on the edge of it, exchanging questions about Cowper, and it is delightful.
But if this becomes what we both believe it is becoming, you will not be standing on the edge any longer. "
Elizabeth was quiet for a moment. Outside, a cart went down the lane toward Meryton.
"I know," she said at last.
"I know you know. I am saying it anyway.
" Charlotte's voice was not unkind. "I am also saying this: I have watched you with him — at the ball, at the Netherfield visits, yesterday — and you are not afraid of what he is.
You are afraid of what it would require of you.
That is a different fear, and a more manageable one. "
"Is it."
"You have been asking the wrong question for three weeks. You stopped asking whether he is proud ten days ago. What you have been asking since is whether you are brave enough."
Elizabeth looked at the frost on the window and considered this with the seriousness it deserved, because Charlotte's true things always deserved serious consideration, even the ones that were uncomfortable, and this one was both true and more uncomfortable than most.
She had spent, she could admit it now, a considerable number of weeks assembling reasons.
Not objections — she had run out of genuine objections some time ago, and the invented ones had not held up under any real scrutiny.
Reasons, rather, to go slowly. To be certain.
To wait for some piece of evidence that she had not yet turned over.
The evidence was, by now, rather complete.
She had seen him in every kind of Longbourn light: the ordinary light of morning visits, the complicated light of balls, the managing light of her mother's full attentions, the particular light of Lydia at her most clarifying.
She had watched him across rooms and across arguments about Cowper, and in the library doorway with her father's fourth volume under his arm, and she had found, at each point, the same thing: a man paying attention.
Not to what Longbourn ought to be. To what it was.
"He knew what it would be," she said slowly.
"He has been here enough times. He knew about Mama, and the seedcake, and Lydia and the fire-tongs, and my father in the library waiting to argue.
He could have called with Bingley, which would have meant Jane between us and the visit never quite his own.
He could have sent a note. He did none of those things. "
"No," said Charlotte.
"He came on Thursday, alone, to a house that had already heard about it from Mrs. Long and probably Lady Lucas, and he sat in the parlour for three hours and looked precisely like a man who wished to be exactly where he was.
" She turned from the window. "I have been treating that as evidence to be considered.
I think perhaps it is a decision to be made. "
Charlotte looked at her for a moment with the steady attention she gave to things that mattered.
"Yes," she said. "It is."
Elizabeth looked at the frost on the window. She thought about the garden walk, and the library, and the marked book, and Thursday's parlour with its seedcake and fire-tongs and her father's unhurried particular question about domestic life.
"He knew what Longbourn would be," she said. "He came anyway."
"Yes," said Charlotte. "He did."