Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Darcy did not leave with Lady Catherine.
He stayed, and Mrs. Bennet — who had processed the last hour's events with the speed of a woman who has an excellent instinct for what they meant — suddenly remembered something she needed to discuss with Hill, and took Kitty and Lydia with her, and Mr. Bennet returned to his library with the unhurried satisfaction of a man whose work is substantially done.
Which left Elizabeth and Darcy in the drawing room, in the particular silence of a room from which a storm has recently passed, with the fire still going and the afternoon light coming in cold and clear through the window.
"I owe you an apology," said Darcy.
Elizabeth looked at him. "You do not."
"I brought Lady Catherine here by writing to her without sufficient clarity. Had I said plainly in my first letter what my intentions were?—"
"She would still have come," said Elizabeth. "Lady Catherine comes when Lady Catherine decides to come. You could not have prevented it." She looked at him steadily. "You gave me the letter. You did not try to manage the situation without me. That is all I required."
He was quiet for a moment. The fire ticked.
"I should like," he said, "to say something clearly.
Without the management." He was standing very still — not the defended stillness of the man she had met at Netherfield, but the stillness of a man who has spent several months becoming less defended and has arrived at something real.
"I have been — I have spent a considerable portion of the last year being corrected.
By you, by your father, by the fourth volume of Cowper, by Longbourn in November with the seedcake and the fire-tongs.
I have been corrected into a better understanding of what I was looking for and what I was not.
" He looked at her. "I was looking for someone who would read me honestly.
I have found her, and she is standing in front of me, and I should like, if she is willing, to have the conversation I have been composing since October. "
Elizabeth's heart was doing something it was undignified to examine too closely.
"You have been composing it since October?" she said.
"Since the garden walk," he said. "I have revised it several times."
"I should be alarmed if you had not."
The corner of his mouth. "Miss Bennet. Elizabeth.
" He did not kneel — that was not his manner, and it was not required.
He simply looked at her with the full attention she had come to know as the opposite of performance.
"I am a man who spent the better part of a year being proud of things that were not worth pride, and correcting that required more help than I am comfortable admitting, and a great deal of the help came from you.
I am asking you to marry me. Not because you are everything convenient, but because you are the one person in my considerable acquaintance who has ever told me the truth and trusted me to be worth telling.
" A pause. "I believe I am, now. Largely because you believed it first."
Elizabeth was quiet for a moment. She looked at him — this specific man, in this specific room, in the middle of this specific life — and found, as she had been finding for some weeks, that the weight of all the reasons was considerably less than the weight of what she knew.
"You have revised the speech since October," she said.
"Several times."
"The version you are giving me now is better than the version you would have given me in October."
"Considerably."
"Then I am glad we waited." She met his eyes fully.
"Yes, Mr. Darcy. I will marry you. Not because of Pemberley, and not to spite Lady Catherine, and not because my mother will be insufferably delighted, though she will be.
" She felt the full gravity of the moment and did not try to lighten it entirely.
"Because you sent me a marked book, and called alone, and sat in my mother's parlour with Lydia and the fire-tongs and looked like a man who wished to be exactly where he was.
Because you told me silence was no longer your method, and you meant it.
And because the man who wrote I had not considered it so.
I should have in the margin of a poem is a man I find I want beside me. "
He looked at her for a long moment. What happened was not quite a smile — it was the thing at the corner of his mouth and in his eyes and in the particular quality of a man who has been let all the way in and knows it.
"The garden poem," he said.
"It has done a great deal of work in this courtship."
"It has." He crossed the room. He took her hand — held it with the same deliberateness with which he did everything, the precision of a man who means what he does. "I should like to show you Pemberley," he said. "In spring. There is a library."
"I had heard," said Elizabeth, "that there might be."