Page 20 of The Marriage Articles

The carriage door shut. They were alone.

Mr Darcy leaned forward and arranged the rug over her knees, without comment, tucking it in at the sides with a thoroughness the task did not strictly require. “Are you comfortable?” he asked.

“I am, thank you.”

He sat back. The carriage rolled out of the Longbourn drive and turned south.

For some miles she watched Hertfordshire go. The lanes she had walked all her life came up to the window and fell behind, the stile at Oakham Mount, the turn for Lucas Lodge, the smithy, the last cottage of Meryton, each one smaller than the one before. The country opened into fields she did not know the names of.

“Would you wish to stop for refreshments?” he asked, somewhere past the second milestone of their acquaintance as man and wife. “There is a tolerable inn at Barnet.”

“Are you hungry yourself, sir?”

“No, I am not hungry. Your mother keeps a very good table.”

“Then let us go on. I would rather see my new home.”

He smiled and nodded at that, and the carriage went on. She had said it without thinking, calling it her new home, and now she could think of nothing else.

❧ ❧ ❧

The fog in Grosvenor Square had swallowed the lamps whole, and Elizabeth stepped down from the carriage into a winter-coloured dark that no one had warned her London kept in spring. Then the door of the house opened, spilling light onto the steps. There were people. A great many people.

They stood in two lines down the hall, the women on one side and the men on the other, and at their head a woman of middle years with a ring of keys at her waist dropped a curtsey of precisely the correct depth. Elizabeth understood, with a sinking that she hoped did not reach her face, that she was being received. At Longbourn a visitor was met by Hill and possibly her mother. Here the whole population of a small village had turned out in livery.

“Mrs Darcy,” said the woman. “Welcome to Darcy House, ma’am. I am Mrs Fenwick, the housekeeper, if you please, and these are your household.”

The names began. Mrs Fenwick presented them in order of rank, the senior first. The butler was a tall man called Granger. Then came the chef, who was French, then a progression of maids and footmen, a stillroom maid, and a boy of no more than fourteen. The names washed over Elizabeth faster than she could hold them. She fixed on two with the desperation of a woman catching at a rail. Mrs Fenwick. Granger. The rest she resolved to learn by degrees, and prayed that degrees would be forgiven her.

“And this,” said Mrs Fenwick, “is Smith, your lady’s maid, ma’am, sent by Mrs Reynolds at Pemberley until you employ another.”

A young woman stepped forward and curtseyed, calm and unhurried about it. Elizabeth managed a smile. At Longbourn she and her four sisters had shared one maid among the five of them, and there had been mornings when the sharing had not been equal to the demand. Now she had one of her own, engaged before she had thought to ask. Her husband had thought of things she had not yet had time to want.

“Mrs Darcy,” Mr Darcy had come forward from wherever husbands stood during such ceremonies, and he turned to the two figures waiting a little apart in the hall. “May I present my sister. Georgiana, this is Mrs Darcy.”

The girl curtseyed low. Perhaps sixteen, Elizabeth judged, and tall, fair, very fine to look at. Her eyes stayed on the floor as though the pattern of the tiles had been newly fascinating. “Mrs Darcy,” she said, in a voice so quiet the fog might have carried it off.

“I am very happy to meet you at last, Miss Darcy,” Elizabeth said, as warmly as she could contrive. “Your brother has told me a great deal of you.”

“He has?” The eyes did not rise. A pace behind her stood a respectable lady of sensible aspect, introduced as Mrs Annesley, Miss Darcy’s companion, whose curtsey at least came with a smile.

Elizabeth took in the girl’s silence. It looked remarkably like dislike. She could hardly blame the child. A brother carried off by a stranger of no fortune and less connexion was a loss before it was anything else, and sixteen was an age at which losses were felt in full.

“Mrs Darcy,” Mr Darcy said again. “Would you care to be shown the house, or would you prefer to retire and dress for dinner? Dinner will be at seven.”

The tour of a house larger than Longbourn, conducted through unfamiliar rooms by a man she had married that morning, was a pleasure she felt equal to declining. “The tour may wait until tomorrow, sir, if you have no objection. I should not wish to keep Miss Darcy waiting at table.”

“As you wish.” Something that might have been relief crossed his face, quickly suppressed. “Smith will show you the way.”

Smith led her up a staircase wide enough for three abreast, past portraits of Darcys who all appeared to have disapproved of something, and into a bedchamber that Elizabeth’s first, startled assessment put at twice the size of her room at home. A fire burned in the grate. The bed was hung in pale silk. The dressing table held a looking glass without a single spot. Her trunk, which she had last seen strapped to the carriage in Hertfordshire, stood already open with her dresses airing on their hooks as though they had lived here always.

“Shall I help you change, ma’am? The green, perhaps, or the blue?”

“The blue, thank you, Smith.” Elizabeth submitted to hands quicker and gentler than her sister Jane’s, and reflected that competence, when it came unasked, was a species of kindness she had not learned to answer. “You have unpacked already. You must have been at it the moment we came through the door.”

“It is no trouble, ma’am.” Smith’s fingers made short work of the buttons. “Mrs Fenwick said I was to have everything ready.”

Mrs Fenwick, Elizabeth noted, had said. The whole house appeared to run on instructions issued before she had known she would need them.