Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Darcy stood in the doorway of the Longbourn drawing room with the expression of a man who has arrived in the middle of a scene and has read it with sufficient accuracy to know where it stands.
He looked at Lady Catherine. He looked at Elizabeth. He looked, briefly, at Mr. Bennet, who was watching from his chair with the attentive calm of a man at a very good play.
"Aunt," he said.
"Fitzwilliam." Lady Catherine's voice had changed — it was the voice she used for him, which had a different quality than the voice she used for everyone else.
It was still imperious, but it was also, underneath, the voice of a woman who had genuinely expected better and is genuinely hurt.
"I came because your letter did not satisfy me. "
"I know." He came into the room fully. He did not look at Elizabeth again yet — he was giving his aunt the full weight of his attention, which was, she understood, itself a form of respect.
He had not dismissed Lady Catherine from the room in order to manage the situation more tidily.
He was here, in it, with both of them. "I am sorry that you came this distance on a matter I could have resolved more clearly by letter. That is my failure."
Lady Catherine blinked. She had expected defiance, Elizabeth thought. She had not expected acknowledgment.
"However," said Darcy, "the matter itself will not resolve differently for the journey.
" He was very still — the grounded stillness, the kind that had nothing to defend.
"Anne has no claim on me. She has never had a claim on me.
I permitted that expectation to exist through silence and I should have corrected it long ago.
That is also my failure, and I am sorry for it.
But it does not change the present situation. "
"The present situation," said Lady Catherine, "is that you are proposing to attach yourself to a woman who is?—"
"Who is," said Darcy quietly, "exactly what I have been looking for since I understood what I was looking for.
" He looked at Elizabeth then — directly, without self-consciousness, the way he had looked at her across arguments and across parlours and across the margin of a garden poem.
"She has not flattered me. She has not managed me.
She has read me and argued with me and shown me my own corrections, and she has done it without ever asking me to be anything other than honest." He turned back to Lady Catherine.
"You asked me whether I had forgotten my duty.
My duty to Pemberley is to take it seriously.
A woman who is intelligent, principled, and genuinely capable of meeting a room on its own terms is not a failure of seriousness.
She is, in fact, the only kind of choice Pemberley deserves. "
Lady Catherine looked at him for a long moment. She was revising, Elizabeth could see — not her opinion, perhaps, but her understanding of how far this had gone and whether any of her remaining tools could reach it.
"She has bewitched you," she said at last. It was, Elizabeth recognised, the last available argument: that reason had been suspended, that he could not see clearly.
"No," said Darcy. He said it without impatience, without contempt for the suggestion.
"She has done the opposite. I see more clearly than I have in some time.
" He paused. "I am sorry, Aunt. I know this is not what you wanted.
I know you have held this expectation for a long time and that its disappointment is real.
But I cannot give you the assurance you have asked for, and I would not insult you by pretending otherwise. "
Lady Catherine rose. She was, in defeat, still formidable — she had the bearing of a woman who knows that her position survives her disagreements.
She looked once more at Elizabeth, and the look contained, Elizabeth thought, a complicated mixture: disapproval, something almost like recognition, and the particular frustration of a woman who has met an argument she cannot answer and knows it.
"I hope," said Lady Catherine, "that you know what you are choosing."
"I believe," said Elizabeth, "that I do."
Lady Catherine inclined her head — not a bow, not quite, but an acknowledgment — and left.
The sound of her carriage on the gravel was the loudest thing in the room for a moment.
Then Mr. Bennet said, from his chair by the fire: "Well. That was the finest Friday I have had since the business with Mr. Collins."