Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Darcy called on Wednesday.
This was not unusual. Wednesday was one of the days she was at home, and he had been reliable about Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays with the consistency of a man who has found a schedule he intends to keep.
He arrived at eleven, alone, and was shown to the parlour, and Elizabeth came down to find him already standing at the window — not the defensive window, not the waiting window, but the window of a man who has been thinking in the carriage and has not quite finished.
"You have had a letter," he said, before she had entirely sat down.
She looked at him. "From Mr. Collins."
"Yes." A pause. "I have also had a letter."
She had suspected this. Lady Catherine would not have been content with a single flank. "From your aunt."
"From my aunt." He produced it — not hesitated over it, not kept it in his pocket to spare her, but brought it out directly, with the manner of a man who has decided that the time for managing information on her behalf is finished. "I would like you to read it."
Elizabeth took it. It was shorter than Collins's, which was a function of Lady Catherine writing her own letters rather than employing a proxy.
It was also considerably more direct. Lady Catherine had heard.
Lady Catherine was displeased. Lady Catherine found the reported attachment a matter of the gravest impropriety, an insult to the memory of his father's wishes, a disservice to his family, a disservice to Anne, and a disservice to his own position — which required a woman capable of sustaining it, a quality she found it impossible to attribute to any daughter of a Hertfordshire family whose mother's connexions were in trade.
The final paragraph: I require only your assurance that this report is without foundation, and that you have not so far forgotten yourself and your duty as to have formed any intention in that direction. I trust you will not make it necessary for me to take further steps.
Elizabeth handed it back. "She requires your assurance."
"She does."
"Will you give it?"
"No." He said it without heat, without particular emphasis — simply as the answer to a factual question. "I will not, because I cannot give it truthfully, and I am done with giving my aunt answers that are designed to manage her expectations rather than reflect my own."
Elizabeth looked at him. He had the stillness again, the grounded kind. "You said — done with silence."
"I said silence was no longer my method.
" He met her gaze directly. "I should tell you — the expectation she names was real.
I allowed it to persist because it was convenient, and because I did not then have a clear reason to end it that did not seem unkind.
" A pause. "That was a failure of honesty. I am aware of it."
She appreciated this. She appreciated it specifically because it was not a defence — it was a correction, offered plainly in the manner she had come to recognise as his particular form of trust. I had not considered it so. I should have.
"And now?" she said.
"Now I have a clear reason." He looked at her with the directness he had been working toward since October — not the Netherfield look, careful and defended, but the look of a man who has revised himself into something more honest. "I intend to write to my aunt and tell her so."
"She will not be pleased."
"No." The corner of his mouth. "She will not."
Elizabeth looked at the letter in her lap — Lady Catherine's hand, firm and angular, not a woman who had ever written a tentative line. "What will you say to her?"
"The truth. That my intentions are fixed. That they are mine to determine." He paused. "That Anne has my respect and my genuine concern for her health and happiness, but that she has never had a claim on me that I established — only one that I permitted to exist by failing to correct it."
"And she will receive that."
"She will not receive it well." He said it without self-deception.
"My aunt does not receive correction easily.
She considers the dispensing of direction to be her role in the world, and has held it for long enough that the role has become, for her, indistinguishable from the natural order.
" He looked at the fire. "She will be angry. She may come."
"Charlotte thinks she will come."
"Charlotte is probably right." He looked at her.
"I should tell you — if she does come, I would like you to know in advance what she will say, so that you are not surprised by it.
She will say that you are unsuitable. She will say it at considerable length and with considerable specificity.
She will mention your family's circumstances and your mother's relations and the expectations that have attached to Anne for thirty years.
" He paused. "She will mean it to sting. "
"I imagined she would."
"And?"
Elizabeth considered the question. Outside, the lane was quiet — a cart, a robin, the ordinary sounds of a Wednesday. She thought about the letter, and Collins's ledger, and the word unsuitable deployed like a weapon.
"I have been called unsuitable for Darcy since the Meryton assembly," she said.
"By Miss Bingley, by Wickham in his way, by my own mother for different reasons.
I am not unacquainted with the argument.
" She looked at him steadily. "What I needed to know was whether you had received the same argument, and what you intended to do with it. "
"You have my answer."
"I have your answer." She met his eyes. "Then let her come."
He was quiet for a moment — the satisfied stillness, the kind that had nothing to defend. Then: "I will write tonight. She will have my letter before she could arrange travel. Whatever she does after is her own choice."
"Yes," said Elizabeth. "It generally is."