Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Friday was fine and cold, and at a quarter past ten, a single horse came up the Longbourn drive.
One horse.
Elizabeth was in the upstairs hall when she heard it, and she crossed to the window before she had decided to, and looked down, and saw Darcy dismounting and handing the reins to the groom with the composed efficiency of a man who has not been thinking about this ride for four days.
No Bingley. No excuse.
She stood at the window for a moment with the particular clarity of a person watching something that cannot be undone, and found that she did not want to undo it.
She came down the stairs as Hill was already leading him to the parlour.
Her mother was somewhere above; her father was in the library; Jane had gone to Netherfield with the Bingley carriage an hour ago.
Lydia and Kitty were in Meryton. Mary was at the pianoforte, which meant she was available but not attentive.
Elizabeth walked into the parlour and found Darcy already standing at the window, turned toward the door when she entered — as though he had been listening for the step.
She had recognised, by now, that he always listened for it.
"Mr. Darcy," she said.
"Miss Bennet." A pause, in which he appeared to be taking an inventory of the situation and finding it exactly what he had intended. "I did not bring Bingley."
"I noticed."
"I expect you have also noticed that I have been finding reasons to come to Longbourn with considerable frequency."
"The Cowper alone would account for several visits."
"The Cowper," he said, "has been finished for a week."
She looked at him. He was standing very still in the way he stood still when he was not using stillness as a defence but as a ground — the way he had stood in the library at Netherfield, in the garden with the folded paper, at the ball's edge watching the room with his intention already decided.
"Then I am at a loss," she said, "for what brings you."
He looked at her steadily. "No you are not."
The acknowledgment settled between them in the particular way of things that have been understood for some time and are only now being named.
"I have been," said Elizabeth, choosing her words with the care she used when the words mattered, "at home on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays."
"I noticed."
"I was aware that you noticed."
"Then we have been," said Darcy, with something in his voice that was as close to wry as he allowed himself, "conducting this understanding very efficiently."
"We have had practise," said Elizabeth. "At efficiency."
He looked at her for a moment with an expression she recognised: the look that preceded the thing he had been working out how to say. She waited, because she had learned that waiting was worth it.
"The book," he said at last, "the Cowper — your father's fourth volume — I have read it.
There is a passage in it about a man who makes a home in a place not chosen for him, and finds it more his than the place he would have chosen.
I have been thinking about it since Monday.
" He paused. "I do not think it is about a garden. "
Elizabeth was very still.
"I think," he said, "it is about deciding."
The fire ticked. Mary produced a tentative chord and then stopped, apparently having thought better of the key. Somewhere above them a door opened and closed.
Elizabeth felt, in the silence, the full weight of the last several weeks — the rainy morning and the library, the struck-through letter, the eight pencilled words, and Thursday's parlour with its seedcake and scrutiny, and Wickham's careful map of obstacles, and Charlotte's question about bravery, and Jane's arithmetic of absence — and felt all of it resolve into something simpler and heavier than any single part of it.
"No," she said. "I am not."
Darcy let out a breath that had been held, she suspected, for some considerable time.
"I should like," he said, carefully, "to call. Regularly. With your father's knowledge and, if you are willing, with your encouragement. I am not asking — it is not the right moment to ask what I intend to ask. But I should not like you to be uncertain of my direction."
"I have not been uncertain of your direction," said Elizabeth, "for some time."
"I suspected as much." And then, with the quality she had first seen in his face on a landing at Netherfield — the unguarded look, the one that preceded and survived the bow — "Are you uncertain of your own?"
She considered the question with the seriousness it deserved. Outside, the frost was melting off the south-facing hedgerow, and the garden was precisely as it had appeared in the poem they had argued over in the margins: enclosed, cold-bright, sufficient for this hour.
"Less so than I was last Thursday," she said. "And considerably less so than I was last October."
He did not smile. He was, she had learned, a man who reserved his smiles carefully, so that they arrived with full weight when they came.
What happened instead was the thing at the corner of his mouth, and his eyes, and the particular quality of stillness when it belongs to a satisfied man rather than a defended one.
"Then I will call on Monday," he said, "with your father's knowledge."
"He will require a further volume of Cowper. I suggest bringing the fifth."
"I have the fifth. I brought it on Thursday and forgot to produce it."
"You forgot."
"I was occupied," said Darcy, with great composure, "by other matters."
Elizabeth laughed — at him, at herself, at the whole improbable earnest business of it — and at that moment her mother appeared in the doorway and took in the scene with the unerring social intelligence of a woman who has been waiting for this particular arrangement of her parlour for the better part of a month.
"Mr. Darcy!" she said, advancing with great warmth.
"We did not hear you arrive. Jane is not here, I am afraid — she has gone to Netherfield — but Lizzy is here, as you see, and I am sure you will not mind—" she settled herself in the best chair with an air of someone who intends to remain— "shall we have tea? "
"Please," said Darcy, with perfect gravity.
Elizabeth caught his eye over her mother's head and found there the exact expression she had expected — composed, patient, and privately entertained in a way that he was becoming less careful about concealing.
"I notice," she said quietly, while Mrs. Bennet organised the tea things, "that you did not bring Bingley."
"I noticed that you noticed." He was very still. "I did not bring Bingley."
There was a pause in which the tea things rattled and Mrs. Bennet directed Hill in a low urgent voice about the arrangement of the cups.
"He would have talked," said Darcy.
"And you prefer not to."
"I prefer," he said, choosing the word with precision, "to be here on my own terms. On a day I named. With a question I said I would bring." He looked at her directly. "I think it is fairly clear that I did not come about Cowper."
Elizabeth regarded him for a moment. "What did you come about?"
"I think you know."
"I think," she said, "I should like to hear you say it."
Mrs. Bennet reappeared with the tea tray, and Darcy received his cup with the grace of a man who has conducted one conversation and can wait to continue it.
Elizabeth poured her own tea and said nothing, because some things could be said in the half-hour after her mother found something to do in another part of the house, and some things required her father's library and the fourth volume of Cowper returned, and she had learned, in the past several weeks, to have patience with the shape of a sentence that was still being composed.
Her mother lasted twenty minutes before she remembered something Hill needed to know about supper. It was the most tactful thing Mrs. Bennet had ever done, and Elizabeth suspected she had done it entirely on purpose.
The room quieted. From the garden, a robin.
"I came," said Darcy, into the silence, "to tell you that I intend to speak to your father. If that is something you — if the question I brought is one you are willing to answer."
Elizabeth set down her cup with the careful deliberation of a woman who trusts herself to do it without rattling.
She had turned this moment over in her mind in various forms for some weeks.
She had imagined it differently — more complicated, perhaps, more argumentative, in the way their conversations generally were.
She had not expected it to feel quite this simple.
"Less uncertain than I was last October," she said. "Considerably less uncertain than I was last Thursday."
Something moved in his expression. "Then I will call on your father on Monday."
"He will enjoy it," said Elizabeth. "He has been waiting."
"I suspect he has been waiting since the third Cowper," said Darcy.
"The second," said Elizabeth. "But he is patient."
A pause. The robin again. Outside, the long cold light of a November afternoon on a garden that was still, and quiet, and exactly sufficient.
"Miss Bennet," said Darcy. "Elizabeth."
"Yes," she said, which was not quite an answer to a question he had not quite finished asking, and was also, she decided, exactly the right thing.