Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Charlotte was in the small sitting room at Lucas Lodge, doing accounts, when Elizabeth arrived. She looked up, assessed the expression on Elizabeth's face with the accuracy she had been deploying since they were fifteen, and put the accounts aside.
"Sit down," she said. "Tell me."
Elizabeth told her. The Collins letter, the Lady Catherine letter, Darcy's plain refusal to offer his aunt the assurance she demanded. Charlotte listened without interrupting, which was one of the things Elizabeth valued most about her.
"Lady Catherine," said Charlotte, when she had finished, "is not merely an impolite aunt."
"I know that."
"I want to be certain you know it. She is rank, and habit, and the expectations of thirty years, and a social order that does not naturally admit correction." She set her pen down. "She will not simply be displeased and subside. She will act. She may come herself."
"I think she will."
"Then you need to be ready not for a quarrel — you can manage a quarrel, you have been managing quarrels with quick wit since you could talk — but for something harder.
" Charlotte looked at her steadily. "You need to be ready to stand in a room that is trying to reduce you and not perform yourself into a false shape in response. "
Elizabeth was quiet for a moment. The fire was low; the room smelled of cold air and the particular kind of afternoon that has no ambitions.
"That," she said at last, "is what I am most afraid of."
Charlotte waited.
"Not that he will fail me," Elizabeth said.
"I do not think he will. Not that Lady Catherine will succeed in separating us — I do not think that either.
" She looked at the fire. "What I am afraid of is becoming something smaller inside his world without knowing it.
Learning to smile where I once would have spoken.
Finding, in five years, that I have become very accomplished at being his wife and have somewhere mislaid the rest."
Charlotte was quiet for a moment. "That is a real fear," she said.
"It is also the fear of a woman who has spent her entire life in a house where she was not taken quite seriously enough, and is therefore alert to the possibility everywhere.
" She paused. "Darcy has spent the better part of two months reading your unguarded arguments about Cowper and calling on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
He held his own against your father on Johnson.
He told your mother your family was charming and meant it simply.
" She looked at Elizabeth with the particular gentleness she kept for the things that mattered.
"He is not looking for a woman to reduce. "
"No," said Elizabeth. "I know."
"The question is whether you trust that knowing, when Lady Catherine is in your mother's parlour making it difficult."
Elizabeth looked at the window, where the cold November garden was doing nothing useful. She thought about the margin of the garden poem, and the word sufficient, and whether sufficiency was a form of courage or a form of concession.
"The margin note," she said, "that he left in the Cowper. I had not considered it so. I should have. He wrote it about a poem that argues the garden is enough. I think he meant that sufficiency is not the same as settling." She turned back. "And I think I agree."
Charlotte said nothing for a moment. Then: "Good. Then when Lady Catherine arrives — and she will arrive — you already know what you are defending."
"Not a hope," said Elizabeth. "Evidence."
Charlotte looked at her for a long moment with the expression she wore when she had been hoping for a particular answer and has received it.
"Good," she said. "Hold onto that. When Lady Catherine is in your mother's parlour and the room is very large and very loud and all of it is arranged to make you feel small — hold onto what you know, not what you feel.
Feeling can be managed by the right atmosphere. Knowing cannot."
"She is very good at atmosphere," said Elizabeth.
"She is." Charlotte rose to add coal to the fire — a small, ordinary action, the kind that punctuated Charlotte's serious conversations the way other people used pauses.
"I have been to Hunsford. I have been to Rosings.
I know what she does to a room. She does not raise her voice.
She does not make scenes. She simply — occupies.
She uses the space as though it were hers, which it usually is, and it has an effect on people who are uncertain of their own ground.
" She looked at Elizabeth. "You are not uncertain. "
"I am somewhat uncertain."
"Of the life," said Charlotte. "Not of the man, and not of yourself.
There is a difference. Uncertainty about the life is simply good sense — it is large and new and will require things you have not been required before.
But you know who you are inside it. You have been working that out for months.
" She sat back down. "Lady Catherine cannot take that from you.
She can only take it from you if you hand it to her. "
Elizabeth was quiet. The fire was warmer now. The accounts sat on Charlotte's side table, patient, waiting for the conversation to conclude.
"Collins's letter said no family, no fortune, no connexion adequate to the situation," Elizabeth said. "I have been saying those words to myself since Tuesday. Not to agree with them. To make sure I know where I stand when they are said to my face."
"And where do you stand?"
"I stand on what I know. His honesty in private.
His corrections. His willingness to call alone and sit in my mother's parlour and mean what he said about my family being charming.
" She looked at Charlotte. "I stand on the fact that he gave me his aunt's letter, because silence was no longer his method.
A man who will not hide the insult is a man who trusts you with the whole picture. "
Charlotte nodded. "That is the thing to say to Lady Catherine, if she pushes you on it. Not the estate, not the income, not the connexion. What you know about the man."
"Yes," said Elizabeth.
"Go home," said Charlotte. "Be ready. And when it is over, come and tell me."
"I will," said Elizabeth. "Whatever the outcome."
"The outcome is not in question," said Charlotte, with the serenity of someone who has assessed the situation thoroughly and made her calculations.
"I have been watching this since the ball.
The outcome has not been in question for some weeks.
" She picked up her pen. "I merely want to hear the details. "
Elizabeth laughed, which was the right note to leave on, and went home through the cold bright lane to be ready.