Page 38 of Miss Bennet is Gone

“Where is Mr. Darcy?” she asked.

There was the smallest pause, the pause of a respectable household arriving all at once at a question of propriety it had not, in the rush, thought to settle.

Mrs. Gardiner looked at Jane, and Jane looked back, and some swift wordless conference passed between them and resolved itself, as such things did in that house, on the side of love over form.

“Downstairs,” said Mrs. Gardiner. “He has not gone, and I do not think wild horses could take him. He is standing in my front parlour wearing a track in the carpet and refusing every chair. Do you want him?”

“I want him where I can see him,” Elizabeth said, “or I shall lie here all night listening for locks. I am sorry. I know what it is to ask. But I have spent days learning the sound of that door, and I find I cannot yet be in a room I cannot see him in, and I would rather scandalize your house than lie awake afraid in it.”

“You will scandalize nothing,” said Mrs. Gardiner, with sudden decision, “that I do not give you full leave to scandalize. You are to be married within the month, you have both been through hell, and any creature who would make a tale of a frightened girl wanting her betrothed in her sight tonight may make it to my face and see how far it carries. The door stays open, and I shall look in when I please, and that is propriety enough for any house I keep.” And she went down herself to fetch him.

He came up still in his coat, he had not so much as taken it off, in three hours, as though to sit and be tended would have been a desertion of his post, and he stopped in the doorway and looked at her, clean and small in the white bed.

Her hair was loose and drying and her face scrubbed back to the girl he knew under the worn days, and something went out of him all at once that he had been holding since the cordial first entered the account.

Darcy did not say anything. He came and took the chair that someone had drawn up beside the bed, and sat down in it, and took her hand off the counterpane in both of his, and bowed his head over them and stayed.

Elizabeth slept, and woke, and slept. That was the whole of the night, and he kept it with her.

She would go down into sleep gratefully, greedily, as into warm water and then some while later come up out of it all at once with her heart slamming and the dark wrong around her.

For one terrible instant, not knowing where she was, certain only that she was in the room, that the locks would turn at any moment, that it was not over and the carriage and the steps and the lavender linen had been the dream and this, the dark, was the truth.

And every time, through the whole long night, before the terror could close over her head, there was his voice. “I am here,” he said into the dark the instant she stirred. “I am here. You are at Gracechurch Street. The door is open, and the lamp is by the wall and your aunt is down the passage. I will not leave you.”

The room would resolve itself and her heart would come down out of her throat, and she would go back down into sleep knowing he would be there at the next surfacing, and he was, every time, all night, the steady voice and the unmoving hand, holding the dark off her by patience the way he had held the search together by it.

Toward morning she slept at last without surfacing, a long deep dreamless sleep, the first true sleep in all those days, and somewhere in it his own exhaustion took him, the bone-deep arrears of sleepless nights coming due all at once. His hand stayed closed around hers on the counterpane, the two of them anchored to one another across the edge of the bed.

That was how Mrs. Gardiner found them at first light, when she came down the passage in her wrapper to look in, as she had said she would, as she had done quietly four times in the night and found him each time awake and watchful.

This time he was asleep. They both were. Elizabeth turned toward him in the bed, her face wholly at peace, and Darcy fallen back in the chair with the grey dawn coming up on the unmistakable, unguarded, undefended look of a man who has set down a thing he had carried past the limit of his strength.

Mrs. Gardiner stood in the doorway a moment and looked at them, and did not wake them, would not have woken them for the world, and only fetched a blanket.

She came in on stocking feet, and laid it gently over Darcy the way a mother covers a child who has fallen asleep where he sat and stood one moment more with her hand resting on the back of his chair, looking at the two of them safe and asleep.

Then she went out as quietly as she had come, and drew the door to its appointed inch, and left them to the morning, and went down to begin a day that had something other than dread in it.

22

Darcy woke in the chair a little after seven with a crick in his neck, a blanket about his shoulders he did not remember acquiring, and Elizabeth’s hand still in his, and he held very still for a long moment before he so much as turned his head, because she was asleep, truly asleep, deep and even and unafraid.

She slept on through the morning. The house moved quietly around her, with every door eased and every voice dropped. Darcy, persuaded at last by Mrs. Gardiner to leave the chair, came down and washed and borrowed a razor and a clean shirt of Mr. Gardiner’s that fit him.

He was sitting in the back parlour looking ten years younger and entirely undone when the Colonel was shown in, come from Belgravia with the night’s account.

They spoke low, the two cousins and Mr. Gardiner, over a breakfast none of them did much with. Richard told it plainly, as he told everything.

It was settled, and settled without a sound that would ever reach the world. Lady Catherine had left London before midnight, in her own carriage, north, and would not come south again.

She had gone to Inverness, on a fixed allowance, in a silence the whole family would keep. Anne had gone with her, but on her own portion paid to her own hand.

"She told us why she did it," Richard said, "at the end, when no one could have made her. She did it as a way out of Rosings, and you were the door. She has never wanted you, Darcy, not for an hour, which I find I believe entirely and which does not make any of it better. I thought you had better hear that from me than work it out for yourself in ten years' time."

Darcy turned his cup. "It would have been easier to hate her for wanting me," he said at last.

"Yes," said Richard. "That is generally how it goes. And last of all, Rosings will become mine to manage, on the family’s account.”