Page 5 of Miss Bennet is Gone

"You came," Lady Catherine said. "I was not at all sure you would. I am not certain I should have, in your place."

Her daughter, Anne de Bourgh, sat by the window with her hands in her lap, smaller and stiller than Elizabeth remembered her, and she neither rose nor spoke.

They sat. The tea was poured by Lady Catherine's own hand, a courtesy as improbable, in its way, as the rising had been, and when the footman had withdrawn and the door was shut, she set down the pot and looked at Elizabeth directly.

"I will not insult you with a long speech," she said. "You are expecting one, and you are right to. So I will be brief, and you may believe as little of it as you find you can. I came to your father's house and I was abominable. I told you that an alliance with my nephew would be a disgrace, and that your name would never afterward be spoken by anyone connected to him. I told you that you would pollute the shades of Pemberley. I walked you up and down your father's little wilderness and said each of those things to your face. No woman of any breeding says such things to another. I told myself I spoke for the family. I did not. I spoke for my own pride and dressed it as duty, which is beneath me, and I am ashamed of it. There. That is the whole of it. I find that shame is briefer in the saying than I had supposed. I had expected it to take longer."

Elizabeth was moved, and was furious with herself for being moved, and could do nothing about either.

She had come armored against grandeur, against condescension in the mask of reconciliation; she had not thought to armor herself against plainness, and plainness was precisely what she was being handed.

"That is a great deal handsomer than I came prepared for," she said, when she could. "I confess I hardly know what to do with it. I had an answer ready for nearly everything but this."

"You had an answer ready to be insulted, and to bear it gracefully, so that I should come off the worse of the two of us."

For a moment the old Lady Catherine looked out through the eyes of the new, dry and clear-sighted, and not at all humble. "Yes. I should have armed myself the same way.”

She paused and something moved in her face and was mastered. "I am aware I have given you no reason to trust in me. I am asking for the chance to furnish one."

Elizabeth turned to bring Anne into it, some ordinary remark about the road up from Kent, and Anne answered her in four words, with a small smile that arrived late, as though she had to remember to produce it.

Then her gaze settled back on Elizabeth's face and stayed there, patient and unreadable. Elizabeth let her be, some people were only shy in company.

The tea went cold while they talked, and somehow the morning began, against all of Elizabeth's intentions, to feel like an ordinary call. Lady Catherine asked after the wedding the way an aunt asks, wanting the answers, not merely the credit for having asked.

"St. George’s?" she said.

"The first week of April. Family only."

"A spring wedding." Something passed over her face, a thing remembered rather than performed. "I was married in April myself. It rained straight through the vows, and my mother declared it the luckiest sign in the world, which I am fairly sure she invented on the spot, to keep me from weeping in the carriage."

She asked then whether the gown was silk or muslin, and whether Elizabeth had let the modiste talk her into short sleeves, because brides who took a modiste's advice about sleeves were often cold in the church.

It was so exactly the sort of fussing an aunt was entitled to that Elizabeth laughed before she realized it.

What Lady Catherine's face did then, Elizabeth had not anticipated. It eased. For a moment she did not look like a great lady performing her penance, she looked like a woman who had been lonely a long while without the manners to say so, and who had just, unexpectedly, been laughed with rather than at.

When the Gardiners were mentioned, her interest sharpened into something nearly shy.

"Your Aunt Gardiner is in Gracechurch Street," she said. "I should like to call on her, if you will permit it, and bring Anne with me. Tomorrow, perhaps, if it is not indecently soon? I have a great many years of poor manners to make good, and not many days before the wedding in which to begin them. After which you will have a household and a husband and no patience to spare for an old woman's amends." She said it lightly, but her hand had closed on the arm of her chair. "Will you allow it?"

Elizabeth said she was sure her aunt would be glad to receive them. Beside her she could feel what it cost Darcy to say almost nothing, to let the morning be whatever it was without prodding at it to learn whether it would hold.

When they rose to go, Anne rose too, at last, and came to Elizabeth, and stood a moment as though gathering the courage for something considerable. What she said was, "I am glad you came, Miss Bennet."

Elizabeth pressed her hand and thanked her and put the oddness of the young lady down to a shy discomfort, and they went out.

In the carriage Darcy said nothing until they had turned out of the street. "I had given her up entirely. I want you to know I did not bring you here out of hope. I came because you wished to, and I could not find the argument against it."

"And now?"

"And now I do not know what I have just sat through, which is a sensation I neither enjoy nor trust." He turned from the glass to her. "You were moved. I watched it happen."

"I was moved. I am still moved, which is worse, since it has had a quarter of an hour to wear off and has not."

She studied her gloved hands. "I keep combing it for the false note, the place where a lie ought to show. I cannot find it. And I do not know whether that is because there is none to find, or because she is better at this than I am at the looking."

"That is precisely the trouble." Darcy's voice was quiet. "I have never in my life known my aunt to do a thing she did not believe was owed her. And I cannot, for my life, see what she imagines this morning buys her."