You will NEVER credit what Mr Collins has done now. He has had thedrawing room papered in a GREEN so hideous that Charlotte cannot sit in it without squinting, and Mama will not enter it at ALL which I suppose was his PURPOSE. Mary will not stop writing about a Mr Percy who is a CLERK and who Mary says is Thoughtful which is Mary’s way of saying he is quiet and dull and probably has ink on his fingers. I do not see what is to be gained by marrying a clerk, but Mary is welcome to him.
Also, and this is the INTERESTING part, a man came to Meryton last week asking about you. Not at Longbourn, at the solicitor’s office. Mr Philips says he was very particular about his questions. He wanted your age, your education, our family’s situation. He did not give his employer’s name. Mama is CONVINCED it is an offer of marriage, which is ridiculous because who would propose to a woman through a Meryton solicitor, but she has already told Mrs Long, and I cannot stop her. I asked Mr Philips what the man looked like, and he said “respectable,” which tells us NOTHING.
Elizabeth set the letter down with an exasperated sigh and a shake of her head. Lydia would forever be Lydia, even when she was thirty. She opened the second letter.
Kitty’s hand was smaller, neater, more deliberate—the hand of a girl who had spent the last two years under Mrs Gardiner’s quiet influence and had begun, perhaps without knowing it, to take more care with her words.
Dear Lizzy,
I hope you are well and that the tower is not too cold. Aunt Gardiner says the Northumberland coast is bleak in winter, though she says it with a look that suggests she finds bleakness romantic, which I do not entirely understand.
I must tell you something that Lydia has probably already told you in her fashion, though I think she has only part of it. A solicitor did come to Meryton. Lydia is right about that. But a solicitor also called here, at Gracechurch Street, and the questions were the same. Your character. Your propriety. Whether you were, as he put it, “a woman of sound judgement and steady temperament.” Uncle answered very carefully. He did notgive the man more than was asked for, and he asked a good many questions in return, most of which the solicitor declined to answer.
I would not trouble you with this except for one thing. When the man had gone, Aunt Gardiner said nothing for a long while. Then she looked at Uncle with an expression I can only describe as knowing. Not alarmed, not confused, but knowing, as though the visit had confirmed something she had already been considering. She has not explained, and I have not asked, because I am learning that some things are better understood by waiting than by demanding.
If you know what this is about, Lizzy, I hope you will tell me. If you do not, then I suppose we must wait together.
Your loving sister,
Kitty
Elizabeth set both letters on the table. She stared at the wall.
Two solicitors. Meryton and Gracechurch Street. The same questions—her character, her judgement, her family’s situation—asked in two places that, together, would produce a complete portrait of Elizabeth Bennet from every angle available. Whoever had commissioned this enquiry was thorough. Whoever had commissioned it wanted to know everything.
She picked up Kitty’s letter again. She read the passage a second time.
A woman of sound judgement and steady temperament.
Her first thought was him.
She could not help it. The words arrived with the shape of a man sitting in his father’s study, instructing a man of law:Find out about her. Ask the family. Be thorough. Be correct.It was the thing a man of his station did when he intended to propose marriage to a woman whose station was beneath his own. Due enquiry. Formal assessment. The evidentiary foundation upon which a proper offer could be constructed.
Kitty had described Aunt Gardiner’s expression asknowing—and Aunt Gardiner had grown up in Lambton, close to Pemberley, close enough to know the name Darcy the way one knows the name of the hill one lives beneath.
Elizabeth stood and walked to the window. The harbour lay below, grey under grey sky.
Then the arithmetic caught her.
He had been gone twelve days when Kitty wrote. Six days’ ride to Pemberley—he would have arrived barely a week before. A solicitor engaged in Derbyshire would need days to arrange a London appointment. Days more to call at Gracechurch Street, to conduct the interview, to report the results. The timeline did not hold. He could not have set this in motion. Not this quickly.
If not him, then who?
She sat down. She picked up Kitty’s letter again and read it with different eyes.Sound judgement. Steady temperament.Those were not courtship words. Those were assessment words. Competency words. The vocabulary of someone building a case—not for marriage, but for removal. And the thoroughness of it—MerytonandGracechurch Street, her provincial connectionsandher London relations—that was not the work of a suitor.
That was the work of an institution. The trustees. The men in London who had released her endowment with reluctance, who had sent Norwood to inspect, who managed a trust they considered an inconvenience attached to property they would rather dispose of.
A young, unmarried woman of no particular fortune, tending a navigational aid alone while the keeper was absent—if they wished to challenge the stewardship, this was precisely the kind of enquiry they would conduct. Quietly. Through solicitors. Gathering evidence of unsuitability before presenting it to whatever authority could dissolve the arrangement.
She set the letter down. The interpretation was sound. It was logical. It was almost certainly correct.
But thealmostwould not leave her.
Because there was another possibility. Not thathehad sent the solicitor—the dates forbade it—but that his departure had occasioned the enquiry. His return to Derbyshire was not a secret. His family had called for it, probably long before it took place. A man of consequence reclaiming an estate after five years of absence would generate precisely the kind of attention that caused solicitors and trustees to revisit arrangements they had previously been content to ignore. The keeper had returned to his proper station in Society. The tower was now tended by a woman alone. The picture had changed, and the change had given the trustees their opening.
Hisleaving had exposed her. Not because he intended it. Because his world noticed when he moved through it, the way the sea noticed when a ship entered the channel.
She should have stopped there. The reasoning was complete. The conclusion was sound. But the mind, once started down a slope, did not always stop where reason built its wall.
