Page 14 of The Marriage Articles

Her father read slowly. One page he turned back and examined a second time. He signed where a wafer waited, sanded the signature, and set his pen down with great deliberate care.

For a long moment he said nothing at all.

“You have been generous, sir,” he said at last.

“I should have done no less,” Mr Darcy said.

Her father took off his spectacles and looked at Elizabeth over the desk. “Lizzy. You should read these. A woman ought to know what the law gives her, since it so rarely gives her anything else.”

Mr Darcy moved at once, gathering the sheets and bringing them to her himself. He placed them in her hands and stepped back a full pace, as though proximity might prejudice the reading.

“Mr Gardiner is named as trustee,” he said, “with your father. I understood they were the men you would wish to have oversight. If I have presumed, it may be altered.”

She looked down at the pages before her countenance could be examined more closely. The hand was a solicitor’s, round and measured, and the figures were set out with a plainness that defied all doubt.

The portions for any future daughters were secured upon Pemberley. Her children would be abundantly provided for. Four hundred pounds a year, pin money, her own, to be paid quarterly without application to any living soul. She read the clause twice. Her father managed the whole of Longbourn upon two thousand a year. One-fifth of that sum was henceforth to be hers alone.

The jointure stood below. Two thousand a year in the event of his death, secured upon the estate, hers without suit to any court, without petition, and without dependence upon the goodwill of an heir. She thought of her mother’s terrors, the hedgerows of her imagination, and the distant cousin who was ever expected to turn them out.

She looked up at him then. “You have been generous, Mr Darcy,” she said, and meant it.

“Nothing less would do for Mrs Darcy,” he said.

It was the first time she had heard the name spoken aloud as hers. Her father turned a paper knife over in his fingers and studied the grain of his desk. “When is the wedding to be?”

“I acquired a licence,” Mr Darcy answered. “A common licence, through Mr Philips and the surrogate at Hertford. The date I have left entirely to Miss Bennet’s convenience.”

“My convenience,” Elizabeth said, “is a generous allowance of its own, sir. It has never before been consulted by anyone.”

“Then I am happy to establish the precedent.”

She almost smiled. He saw it and looked away first.

“There is the question of notice to my wife,” her father observed. “I shall undertake it myself, at a moment of my own choosing, which is to say a moment when I am out of the house. Mr Darcy, you have my gratitude and my sympathy in unequal portions.”

“Sir.” A bow. Mr Darcy gathered the papers, folded them along their creases, and laid them once more on the desk. “I leave these with you. Miss Bennet may wish to read them again at leisure.”

He took his leave with no further ceremony. Elizabeth stayed in her chair and listened to his step in the hall, the door, the gravel. Through the tall window she watched him go down the drive between the elms, his hands hooked behind his back, his stride unhurried. A man walking back to a house opened for him by a friend, in a county where he had bought very little and been given a great deal.

Her father waited until the figure passed the gate before he spoke.

“Well,” he said. “Come and sit by me, Lizzy.”

She took the chair beside his desk. He had the papers open again, with his spectacles on, reading over the figures as another man might peruse the account of a race he had won against all expectation.

“The terms are very generous,” he said. “You will be a rich woman, Lizzy. Your children will not starve, and that is a comfort I could not have offered you a week ago.”

“You are satisfied with the match, then,” she said.

“I am satisfied with the settlement. The match I leave to you, as I have left everything else, in the hope that it may prove better than my management deserves.” He folded the papers and placed them in the drawer. “He is not what I took him for. I do not say he is an agreeable man. But I daresay he is a generous one, and that a generous man is a far better bargain than an agreeable one, for a woman in your position. It is a lesson I learned too late to be of use to anyone but you.”

She kissed his forehead. He submitted to it without pleasure and without refusal, and she was nearly to the stairs when he spoke again.

“Lizzy.”

“Yes, Papa.”

“Nothing less would do for Mrs Darcy,” he repeated, in a fair copy of Mr Darcy’s own gravity. “He spoke as though he meant it.”