Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Wickham was waiting for her in Meryton on Saturday with a timing that had stopped feeling like coincidence two weeks ago.
He fell into step beside her as she came out of the draper's, and his manner was different — not the broad, easy warmth of their earlier meetings, but something quieter, more careful, the expression of a man who has revised his approach.
"Miss Elizabeth," he said. "I hope you are well. I have been concerned."
"Concerned," she repeated pleasantly.
"About — how shall I put this." He paused, and the pause was constructed with the same care she now recognised in all his constructions.
"You are intelligent, and you are not easily deceived.
But Darcy is — accomplished in his way. And when a man of his station singles out a woman of" — a delicate half-beat — "different circumstances, the neighbourhood will notice.
And neighbourhood notice can become neighbourhood narrative, and neighbourhood narrative can be very difficult to correct. "
"I appreciate the warning," said Elizabeth.
"I give it as a friend. I know Darcy's world rather well, as you know.
His family's expectations are fixed, and they are not flexible.
Miss Bingley is one obstacle. Lady Catherine de Bourgh — who has, I understand, intentions for her nephew that predate his arrival in Hertfordshire by some years — is quite another.
" His voice was gentle, practiced, full of reluctant candour.
"I would not see you made a subject of disappointment. "
Elizabeth listened to all of it. She observed the construction — the concern, the qualification, the compliment in the word intelligent, the well-placed allusion to Lady Catherine, and the very final disclaimer that left the listener feeling warned without technically being deceived.
It was excellent work. She recognised it as excellent work because she had seen its opposite: a man who could not construct anything so polished because he was too busy correcting himself in private.
"How very thoughtful," she said. "And how well you know his intentions."
Something flickered in Wickham's expression, almost imperceptible. "I know his family's intentions."
"Yes." She smiled with entire good will. "I am sure you do."
He tried once more — she had to give him that; he was persistent.
"Lady Catherine de Bourgh is a formidable woman, Miss Elizabeth.
She has expectations for her nephew that she has held for some years, and she does not revise her expectations easily.
I say this not to discourage you, only to — prepare you. "
"That is very kind," said Elizabeth. "Is there anything else I should be prepared for?"
He looked at her steadily. Something in his expression shifted, very slightly — a reassessment, she thought, of how this conversation was going. "Only that Darcy's good intentions and Darcy's family's good intentions are not always the same thing."
"I will bear that in mind," said Elizabeth, and bid him good morning.
She walked home quickly, through the cold sharp air, with Wickham's careful map of obstacles turning itself over in her mind.
He was not entirely wrong, and that was the most effective thing about him: he placed his truths at the centre and built the rest around them, so the structure held even when the purpose was not what it claimed.
But she found that every obstacle he had named, she had already considered.
Lady Catherine. Miss Bingley. The gap between Longbourn and Pemberley.
The neighbourhood's narrative. The social cost. She had turned them over for weeks, and the turning had not, at any point, made her want Darcy's calls to stop.
That was probably Charlotte's answer as well as her own.
She turned down the lane toward Longbourn and let herself think, for the first time without interruption, about what she actually intended to do.
The list of obstacles was real. Lady Catherine was real.
The gap between Longbourn and Pemberley was real, and it was not a gap that sentiment alone would bridge — there would be people in his world who would always measure it, and she would need to be the sort of woman who could stand in those rooms and not find herself diminished.
She had thought about this. She had been thinking about it since the ball, and before the ball, and if she were honest, since the afternoon in the Netherfield garden when he had offered her the evidence of his own uncertainty and asked to be trusted with hers.
She had concluded, on balance, that she was probably that sort of woman.
Not without effort. Not without the particular discipline of knowing when to be amused and when to be serious, and which battles were worth fighting and which were best smiled through.
But she had been doing that at Longbourn for twenty years, and Longbourn was its own kind of difficult.
What she had not concluded — what she was not sure she could conclude without one more conversation — was whether he had understood what he was asking.
Not the position, the title, the estate.
She had no anxiety about those. But Longbourn.
Her father's library and her mother's nerves and Lydia's complete indifference to the concept of propriety.
He had sat in the parlour with all of it for two months and he had not, she thought, been enduring it. He had been attending.
That was the thing. That was the thing she kept returning to.
She walked faster, which was not, she told herself, because she was particularly eager to get home, and was also, she acknowledged, exactly because of that.