Page 28 of The Marriage Articles

Henry grinned, sudden and young. “Master Harwick says the third declension is where boys are sorted from men.”

“Then I am glad to be sorted out early. It saves a great deal of trouble.” She put a hand into John’s hair as he passed her chair, and the boy leaned into it with the shamelessness of a cat.

“Mrs Gardiner,” Darcy said. “My wife tells me you hail from Lambton.”

“Indeed, I grew up in it. My father was vicar of Lambton for thirty years.”

Darcy set down his cup. “You are Mr Rowley’s daughter!”

“You knew him?” Something quickened in her face. “Oh, but of course you would. Everyone in the parish knew everyone.”

“He christened my sister. He used to give me peppermints in the vestry after service and instruct me not to tell my father, who disapproved of sweets on a Sunday.” Elizabeth was watching him over the head of the child on her lap. “He was a good man. I was sorry to hear of his death.”

“Five years ago, this autumn.” Mrs Gardiner’s voice was even, but her hands had gone still on the teapot.

“Your father was a kind man.”

“He was.” She smiled at the memory.

Mr Gardiner rescued him from his own eloquence by asking whether he fished.

“When I can. There is good fish at Pemberley.”

“There is good fish everywhere, if a man is humble about it.” Mr Gardiner had the satisfied air of a person delivering a position he had defended before. “I take a rod with me whenever business calls me north, and I sit by a stream and catch very little. My wife says I keep the trips as an excuse to sit still, and she is right. The trout are old and they know me.”

The conversation ran on through flies and water and the quiet business of men. Darcy could not recall when he had last talked so easily.

A maid cleared the tea things. The little girl had migrated from his wife’s lap to his wife’s side and had a fistful of her skirts. On the mantel stood a good clock, in a good case, keeping good time, and it said they had been an hour.

“We must not keep you longer,” Elizabeth said, and began the business of detaching her namesake, which required negotiation.

“Before we go.” He spoke before he had entirely decided to speak. “Mrs Darcy and I will be at the opera one evening next month. Our box will take six comfortably, and we are two, and my sister makes three. If you and Mrs Gardiner care for the music, we should be very glad of your company.”

There was a small silence. Mr Gardiner looked at his wife, and Mrs Gardiner looked at her niece, and it was Mrs Gardiner who answered, with the same plainness as her husband’s handshake. “We should like it above anything, Mr Darcy. Thank you.”

He bowed. The children were shepherded to the door to shout their farewells, and little Lizzy had to be prized off his wife a second time, and then they were in the carriage with the noise of Cheapside beginning outside the window.

His wife turned to him. She did not speak for a moment, and then she asked, “The opera, Mr Darcy?”

“I hope it was not presumptuous.”

“It was not presumptuous.” She was smiling in a way he had not seen her smile at him before. And he found that he liked making her smile.

Chapter Fifteen

Darcy set his spoon on the cloth and considered the company at his table. There were four people present, and none of them was speaking. He discovered that he did not mind. It was a general truth he had arrived at slowly over a great many silent dinners that a quiet table was a reproach to the man at the head of it. Tonight the reproach had not come. Georgiana turned her fork in her fingers, watching his wife as if she meant to ask a question and feared the interruption. Mrs Annesley buttered her bread with a steady, unshakeable method that suggested no domestic crisis had ever penetrated her sphere. His wife was eating very little, which he took for a want of appetite.

The fish had given way to a remove of veal in some fashion of the chef’s own devising, all cream and complication. Darcy ate what was placed before him. The man had come at Lady Matlock’s recommendation, because a French cook was what a house in Grosvenor Square was understood to require, and Darcy had signed the engagement without tasting so much as a spoonful. At Pemberley the cook sent up mutton and was thanked for it. Here the mutton, and everything else, arrived smothered in French sauces. He had said nothing about it in three years and saw no reason to begin.

Elizabeth took another mouthful of the veal, and set down her knife, and took up her glass instead.

“Your aunt,” Georgiana said, and stopped. She set her fork down and looked across the table at Elizabeth as if testing the footing under her words. “Your aunt in Cheapside. Is she very like my aunt Matlock, do you think? I mean, is she very like an aunt generally is?”

Darcy, watching her, was aware of the considerable resolution required for the enquiry, knowing well how much courage it had cost a girl of sixteen to venture so far.

“I hardly know how to answer that, for I have never met your aunt, and you have not met mine. But I can tell you that Mrs Gardiner laughs a great deal, and asks questions she already knows the answer to, because she likes to hear how one will answer them.”

“Then I should be very much afraid of her,” Georgiana said, and looked so alarmed at her own boldness that Elizabeth laughed outright.