Page 17 of The Marriage Articles

Third. My correspondence is to remain my own, without leave asked or granted.

Fourth. My family are to be ever welcome in our house, and I am to be at liberty to receive them and visit them at my pleasure.

Fifth. My husband shall consult my judgement in all matters of importance concerning our future and the governance of our children.

Sixth. I shall be treated with respect and dignity in private as in public. No violence, whether of deed or tongue, shall ever be offered. My husband shall not raise against me his hand, his voice, or his contempt.

Seventh. No variance or misunderstanding between us shall be carried past the setting of the sun, but settled before we sleep.

He read it twice. The pale sun moved a fraction across the wall. He was aware, with a part of his mind that seemed to have stepped back to observe, that he was being offered a definition of himself, and that the definition was far from flattering. It portrayed a man who might require a formal engagement not to abuse his authority or strike his wife.

“Would you think me as cruel and ungentlemanly as that?” he said at last. “Capable of hurting you? Of violence?”

“No.” She looked at him directly, and there was no apology in her face and no challenge either, only the patience of a person stating a fact she has already made peace with. “I have no reason to think so. I have also no reason not to. I do not know you, Mr Darcy. You are a stranger to me.”

The words landed where she had aimed them, which was not at his pride, he understood suddenly, but at the situation itself. She was not insulting him. An insult he could have answered. She was not describing his character. She was describing her risk. The risk existed because of Netherfield, because of an overheard quarrel and a county that had nothing better to do. The understanding went down very deep, to a place his pride did not reach.

He folded the sheet once, carefully, and unfolded it again, and looked at her.

“Then I shall give you my word. On the first article, I agree. I will not impose on you. I will say plainly that I hope you will one day open that door of your own will, and I will wait until you do, and I am capable of waiting longer than you might suppose. On the second, I agree, and I will observe, with some bitterness, that honesty is the quality whose absence arranged this engagement, so it is only just that it should govern the marriage. You shall have the truth from me, provided you return the favour, which I collect from this morning’s proceedings you will do whether I ask it or not.”

A sound escaped her, not quite a laugh. He went on.

“On the third, your correspondence is your own. I have a sister whose letters I would not open, and I see no reason a wife should rank below a sister in this. On the fourth, your family will be welcome in our house. I will not pretend to you that I have no opinions of your family. The second article forbids it. But they will be my family too, and I do not give my family the sensation of being unwelcome.”

He paused. “On the fifth.” He waited a beat, because the admission cost him more than he cared to show. “I have been master of Pemberley since I was two and twenty, and I have formed the habit of deciding things alone. It is an error I was not aware I was in the habit of making until this moment. I shall misstep, and I ask your patience in advance.”

She raised her eyes to meet his gaze, a quiet tension settling over her expression.

“On the sixth,” his voice dropped, and he did not trouble to raise it, “it grieves me that you think the article necessary. I understand now that you were not thinking of me when you wrote it. You were thinking of the law. But I will show you my character until you are tired of being shown it, and you shall have nothing to fear. On the seventh, I agree completely. If our quarrel at Netherfield is any guide to our temperament as a couple, we shall be settling disputes nightly, and neither of us will ever sleep.”

Her shoulders came down. He had not known he was watching them until they moved.

He took a breath. “I want a good marriage, Miss Elizabeth. I want you to be a sister to Georgiana, who has need of one and does not know it yet. I will make certain you do not regret this.”

She was quiet for a moment, looking down the path to where it turned at the old sundial.

“Then for the sake of the second article,” she said, “you are owed the rest of the truth. I was going to have my father write to you in London. To ask you to marry me.” The words came level and quick, as though she had decided to be as brave as the articles required and no braver. “Things were very bad at home. The rumours about my compromise had gone everywhere. People cut us in the street. My sisters’ friends were forbidden to call. My mother kept to her room for days at a time, which I grant you sounds like a mercy and was not. And then your letter came to my father, in which you said you stood by your offer, and it was gracious, Mr Darcy, more gracious than the occasion strictly required. It saved me the indignity of having to beg you to marry me.”

The last of this she said with a small dry smile, and the smile undid him more thoroughly than any of the bitterness had, because he understood all at once that she had given him the truth without flinching. She would have written to him, would have asked him to marry her, would have swallowed the last of her pride to save her sisters.

He said nothing. She tucked the sheet back into her pelisse. Her face eased then, for the first time since she had come into the drawing room with her bonnet already on, some tension leaving the corners of her eyes.

He smiled. “So, Miss Bennet,” he said. “You think me very handsome?”

She stared at him. Something changed in her face, the watchfulness loosening its hold all at once. She laughed. It was the laugh he had been listening for since the Meryton assembly, the laugh she gave her sisters, her friend Miss Lucas, the world in general. Never, until this morning, him.

The bare trees stood in their rows and the cold sun lay on the gravel and the whole shabby little garden looked, for that moment, unaccountably bright.

Chapter Ten

Elizabeth was securing the sleeve of her morning dress when her mind, disobliging as ever, turned to Mr Darcy, and to a wedding day fast approaching. A tap at the door preceded the maid, who had run out to meet the boy from Meryton as he came up the drive on his pony, and who now presented the post with the air of one delivering a treaty. There were two letters for Mrs Bennet and a bill for her father, which the girl wisely placed beneath them. At the bottom of the little stack lay a single sheet in a hand Elizabeth would have known anywhere, quick and level and entirely sensible, directed from Gracechurch Street.

Elizabeth took it up at once. A letter put into the post in London before noon reached Longbourn by the next morning’s messenger, so that these thoughts had been in her aunt’s mind no longer than four-and-twenty hours. The nearness of her aunt’s thoughts brought a sense of comfort. Elizabeth broke the seal and carried the letter to the window, where the light was clear and the house, for the space of a landing, remained undisturbed.

Her aunt was sorry, and said so in the first sentence with all her heart. Mr Gardiner had been obliged to go into Lancashire on business, to Liverpool itself, and would not be home again before the fourteenth. The children could not be left, and the journey could not be made, and so they must give up, with genuine grief, the wedding they had counted on attending.

You must forgive us, my dear Lizzy, her aunt wrote, and believe that nothing but necessity could keep us away. Your uncle talks of nothing else, and has twice been caught by his clerks drawing up a list of wedding presents when he ought to have been drawing up an invoice.