Page 25 of The Marriage Articles

Elizabeth took up her soup spoon and considered, not for the first time, that a great deal of human misery was conducted over dinner, and a great deal of human happiness too, though the difference between them was rarely the soup. Every marriage she had ever observed at close quarters, her parents’ chief among them, might be read entire in the conduct of two people at opposite ends of a table. Here she sat at hers, a wife of one day. The candles burned steady. The covers had been laid with an exactness that would have made her mother weep with admiration. Nobody was shouting. Even the cold silence she had steeled herself against all afternoon had failed to appear, and it was this small absence, this lack of the thing she had armed for, that she noticed first.

The turtle soup was a rich affair, thickened and creamed and garnished past all recognition. It was excellent. She could manage only half of it.

The remove came in next, a great joint of roasted beef with a rich sauce that had clearly taken the better part of the afternoon. All very fine. Elizabeth served herself modestly of the beef and observed that her husband did much the same. Georgiana took a spoonful of sauce and moved it about her plate with an air of great occupation. Mrs Annesley, being a sensible woman, ate with the steady moderation of somebody who had dined in other people’s houses for twenty years and learned the art of it.

Then the haunch of venison appeared, and after it the two elaborate puddings and the dish of forcemeat with the French name that Mrs Fenwick pronounced with visible respect. Elizabeth took a little of the venison and left the puddings and the forcemeat to those with stronger stomachs.

It was a great deal of food.

“You mentioned at breakfast,” Elizabeth said, “that we are to go into Derbyshire for the summer. I find I know almost nothing of Pemberley except its name, and that my aunt Gardiner speaks of the country there with rapture.”

“She has seen it?”

“The country, yes, not the house. She was raised in Lambton, I think, not five miles away. She will be insufferable when she learns where I am to spend my summer, and I intend to enjoy it enormously.”

Georgiana’s head came up a fraction at that, and went down again.

“The house stands in a valley on the Derwent. The park is ten miles round. The Derwent itself runs through the grounds as a broad, quiet stream, and there is a wood on the northern side that keeps its bluebells late.”

“And the house itself?”

“Elizabethan, in part. My grandfather added the west front. The rest has been altered by degrees, as each generation found necessary.” He paused. “It is a good house. To me it has always been less a property than a home.”

She found she had nothing to answer to that, and let it stand.

Mrs Annesley, who had been quiet in the way of a woman practised at being quiet, turned to Georgiana with the gentle persistence of long habit.

“Miss Darcy, your sister will be glad to hear your opinion of the park in Pemberley. You told me last autumn that the ride by the stream was your favourite in the country.”

Georgiana’s fork stopped. “Yes,” she said. “It is very pretty.”

“She rides it most mornings when we are there,” Mrs Annesley offered to the table.

“I should like to see it,” Elizabeth said, and she meant it, and she said it to Georgiana rather than to the room. “I am a poor horsewoman, I warn you, but a great walker. Derbyshire will give me something worth walking to.”

Georgiana looked up then, properly, for perhaps the first time that evening. A nod. Nothing more. The moment closed as quietly as it had opened, and Elizabeth, who had been accused all her life of pressing where pressing did no good, let it go and returned to her food.

The conversation drifted, as conversations will, to London, and to what London required of them.

“I suppose,” Elizabeth said, “that a married lady cannot hide in the country in the spring. Lydia has already informed me that I must do the London season, which is apparently the thing to do, and that I am not to spend it all indoors like a sensible mouse.”

“You are at liberty to dislike it,” Mr Darcy said.

“Am I?” Elizabeth said. “Lydia assures me I am not at liberty to stay away.”

He was quiet a moment. “I have always considered it a duty. I cannot pretend it is one I relish. The town is full of people I have no wish to see, assembled for the purpose of seeing one another, and I have never understood the transaction. But it is expected, and Georgiana will come out in a year or two, and the family must be seen.” The glass turned slowly under his fingers. “I had hoped,” he added, “that you would not find the prospect intolerable.”

“Intolerable is a strong word for a season of parties, sir. I have sat through Meryton assemblies. London can hardly do worse, whatever its ambitions.” She took a sip of her wine. “I do not mind a duty, Mr Darcy. I mind when a duty is dressed up as if it were all pleasure. If we are agreed that it is a duty, we shall do very well together.”

“Then we are agreed.”

Mrs Annesley smiled into her plate. Georgiana had gone back to moving her sauce about, but she was listening.

The pudding course was a monument, an architectural arrangement of pastry and preserved fruit flanked by a moulded jelly that trembled when the footman set it down, and behind it the promise of fruit to follow. Elizabeth managed three bites of the jelly and a segment of orange and put down her spoon with finality. Her husband, she noted, had done no better. The four of them sat in their island of candlelight, surrounded by abundance, eating like sparrows, and the thought came to her unbidden that her mother would have called it a sinful waste.

The drawing room was lit for them, the fire built up, the pianoforte open. Georgiana went to it without being asked. She arranged her music and began to play something soft and undemanding, one of those pieces that asks nothing of the listener yet gives a good deal in return. As she played, her shoulders came down. Her hands were sure where her voice was not. Elizabeth settled into the sofa with her tea and thought that here at last was the girl’s true speech, fluent and calm. It made the silence at dinner stranger rather than less so.

Mrs Annesley took up her work. Mr Darcy crossed to the window and stood looking out at the square, where there was nothing to see but lamplight on wet pavement and the dark fronts of other people’s houses. He looked anyway, his hands behind his back, studying the dark street as though it held something worth remembering.