Page 26 of The Marriage Articles

Georgiana’s eyes came up from the keys once, found Elizabeth watching, and dropped at once. Elizabeth pretended to study the fire.

Later, Elizabeth lay in her bed. She reviewed her first day as Mrs Darcy. Home was a word she could not yet apply to this house, and she would not pretend it, even to herself. The room was wrong, the bed was wrong, even her name sounded wrong. Mrs Darcy. The day lay behind her, yet she could not find, however she turned it, the thing she had expected to find. She was not at home. She was not afraid either, and the second of these facts surprised her more than the first.

It had not been a bad day. She turned her cheek into the unfamiliar pillow. Somewhere through the wall, the great house made its small settling noises.

She would speak to Mrs Fenwick about the gravies.

Chapter Fourteen

A man may hold his sleeping habits for eight and twenty years and surrender them in a single night, and Fitzwilliam Darcy lay awake in his own bed, in his own house, thinking of a woman two rooms away. His pocket watch on the night table said half past six. Beyond the connecting door lay the private sitting room, and beyond that the mistress’s chamber, and in it, unless she had taken to sleepwalking, his wife. He could hear nothing. The sitting room between them saw to that, and he was briefly grateful to whatever long-dead Darcy had thought a buffer between a husband’s rest and a wife’s dressing table an act of foresight rather than an admission of defeat.

She would be awake. Rising early was her habit. He pictured her ringing for Smith, sitting for her hair, choosing the plainest of her walking dresses with the indifference of a lady who owned finer and did not care. The picture was agreeable. He permitted himself to lie with it a moment longer than was strictly necessary, then rang for his own man before the agreeable became the absurd.

The breakfast room was empty. Georgiana, as ever, would sleep until the morning had given up on her. Darcy took his coffee and made a ceremony of it, as he did every morning, finding a quiet comfort in the solitude.

The door opened. She came in from the cold with her cheeks rosy, her bonnet in her hand, her hair the worse for the wind. She looked so well that he very nearly forgot to rise, and only recollected himself in time.

“You have been out already?” he said.

She went to the sideboard and helped herself to tea and toast. “It was a beautiful morning. Cold, but beautiful. I walked to the park and back, and I was glared at by one nursemaid and entirely ignored by a great many fashionable people, which I count a success.”

She sat across from him and poured her tea.

“Tell me of your aunt and uncle. I know your uncle is in trade, and that he lives in Cheapside, and beyond that I know nothing at all.”

“My uncle Gardiner is my mother’s brother.” She said it evenly, watching him. “He is in trade, yes. He imports and exports. Tea and spices and silk and muslin from the East Indies, timber and wine from the Americas. He has done very well at it. He has a warehouse, and clerks, and opinions about the harbour duties which he will share with you if you give him the smallest encouragement.”

“He sounds a prosperous man.”

“He is a prosperous man.” The smallest pause. “I am aware, Mr Darcy, of what the ton thinks of men in trade.”

“The ton thinks what it is told to think. A man who has made his own fortune commands my respect a good deal more readily than one who has merely inherited his, and I say this as one who has merely inherited his.” He took up his coffee. “A successful man in trade is tolerated everywhere and honoured by anyone with sense. I flatter myself I have some.”

She looked at him a moment, and something in her face eased. “My aunt will like you for that speech alone. She is from Lambton, you know. In Derbyshire.”

“So you said.” He set the cup down. “Lambton, you know, is not five miles from Pemberley.”

“So I am given to understand. She grew up in Lambton, and she speaks of the place still, though she has not been back in years. She is the kindest woman of my acquaintance. When Jane and I were girls, it was her house we ran to when Longbourn grew too loud, which was often.” Her voice had warmed past teasing into something plainer, and she did not trouble to disguise it. “You will like her. Everyone likes her. It is quite her most tiresome quality.”

“Have they any children?”

“Three.” She counted them off on her fingers. “Henry, who is eleven, and very grave, and will want to know whether you have been to the docks and seen the East Indiamen. John, who is eight, and will simply show you his soldiers without asking leave. And Lizzy.”

“Lizzy.”

“Elizabeth.” Her arch smile was unrepentant. “Named for her cousin, who was flattered then and is flattered still. She is four years old and she rules the house. My aunt pretends otherwise.”

“She sounds a most frightful creature to behold.”

She laughed. “You will find out this afternoon, and then you may tell me.”

He found he was looking forward to the afternoon, which surprised him. A warehouse keeper in Cheapside, a Derbyshire wife, three children. These were not the connexions he would once have called eligible.

She finished her toast and rose. “I have letters to write. My mother must be told we are safely arrived in London, or she will conclude we have been murdered on the road and tell all of Meryton so.”

She was gone.

The letters from Pemberley were waiting in his study. His steward wrote in his usual thorough hand. Rents outstanding on three farms, to be collected or excused, and he must decide which. A tenant named Hargrave whose cottage roof had come off in the winter storms, the family housed meanwhile in the barn, which would not answer past another month. Flooding in the lower meadows, worse than the ditching had been built for, and something would have to be done before the spring planting or the acreage was lost for the year.