Page 36 of The Marriage Articles

He turned then, and his face was dry. “I cannot imagine where you got that idea.”

Elizabeth said nothing. In her mind was the Netherfield drawing room, all the things Miss Bingley had claimed about his regard for her judgement, how they were of one mind on every subject, how well he liked her conversation. Some of it she had believed. She understood now that she had been wrong about him, and that Miss Bingley had been wrong about him too, and there was a satisfaction in the second error that nearly made up for the first.

Later, she went up to the library, and sat at the little desk by the window. She took a sheet of the new paper with the Darcy crest, which still startled her every time she saw it at the head of her own letter. Then she wrote.

My dearest Jane,

You will be glad to hear that I have survived my first at-home, which concluded an hour ago, and that I am told the salver in the hall is very creditably loaded. I had not fully understood what the occasion required of me. They came in a steady stream, Jane, all of them very civil, all of them asking questions with great politeness. I flatter myself I gave them very little to carry away. It is a strange exercise, to be perfectly agreeable for three hours to people one suspects of ill will, and I was relieved to discover I have a talent for it. You would have been proud of me, and Papa would have laughed.

The Bingley party arrived in a body, Mr Bingley, his sisters and Mr Hurst. Miss Bingley was all that she knows how to be, smiling and attentive and very sure of her own good breeding. You would be proud of me, Jane. I was as civil as she could wish, and took care that neither warmth nor coldness could be proved against me.

Now I come to the part of this letter I have been dreading, and you will know why when you read it. Mr Bingley was as warm as ever. He asked after everyone at Longbourn, and his smile was exactly the smile we remember. He did not ask after you by name, which I found odd. I asked him whether he meant to return to Netherfield, and his answer told me what I needed to know. He spoke of London as if Hertfordshire had ceased to exist, and he did so with such ease that I do not believe the thought of returning has ever occurred to him. I am sorry, Jane. I think he will not go back.

Jane, forgive me for saying this, but I fear I must. His affection for you in Hertfordshire was real. I will not have you think it was ever feigned. But his attention goes wherever the company is thickest, and I do not believe his sisters have laboured in vain. I only tell you this so that you will know it from me, and not from the Meryton gossips.

The rest of my news is happier, and much duller. I walk in the square garden every morning at six, when there is nobody about but the gardeners and one very old gentleman with a spaniel, who raises his hat to me as though we had been acquainted these twenty years. I sit with Mrs Fenwick over the household books on Tuesdays, and I have learned what a leg of mutton costs in Mayfair, which I will not repeat, for you would not believe me. My new gowns hang in a wardrobe larger than our old dressing room, and I still open the doors sometimes to look at them, like a child at a shop window. Georgiana’s shyness is beginning to crack, a little more every day. She asked me yesterday to play a duet with her, and at dinner she talks now, and once she teased her brother, and he bore it so meekly that I was obliged to laugh.

Write to me soon, and tell me everything, and give my love to Papa and Mama and the girls. Tell Mary I am reading a great deal and Fordyce not at all.

Your affectionate sister,

Elizabeth Darcy

Chapter Twenty-One

Darcy set his knife across his plate and gave the evening up to gratitude, which was a sentiment he distrusted on principle and could not, at present, be persuaded to relinquish. The candles had been lit an hour since, and the soup had come and gone. The dish of fried sole now stood between his wife and his sister in the middle of a table that had been, six weeks ago, the stillest place in the house, and was now, by some miracle, full of life. He had wanted his sister restored to him. He had got his wish, and the instrument of it sat at his left hand telling a story, and some part of him still did not quite believe it would last.

The lighter dinner had become the custom without any decision of his. Elizabeth had ordered it once, in her first week. Now a lighter dinner came up every evening as though it had done so for twenty years, the dishes varying but the measure unchanged. Tonight there was clear soup, then sole, then cold chicken, and a lemon cream which Georgiana had asked for.

Darcy watched his sister across the candles and was careful not to be caught watching. Three weeks ago she had answered his wife in monosyllables and kept her eyes on her plate. This evening she had asked Elizabeth, without prompting and before the fish was removed, whether she thought the music at the opera the night before had been truly fine. The opera had been a very successful outing, with Mr and Mrs Gardiner in their party, and Georgiana, quite at her ease, had then offered an opinion of her own on the soprano, which she defended for a full minute against Elizabeth’s laughing contradiction before yielding the point with a smile.

The conversation ran on a little longer into the general question of operas and whether the season’s fare was equal to the last, and then, as talk will, it came round to home.

“I had a letter from my mother today,” Elizabeth said.

“Is all well?”

“All is excessively well. That is rather the difficulty.” Elizabeth laid her spoon down and turned a little in her chair, and her voice took on the tone she kept for a good story. “The militia has come to Meryton at last. My mother has been expecting them since the winter. The whole town is in an uproar. Officers marching through the high street every morning, ladies leaning out of every window, and my mother conveying Lydia and Kitty to every possible point of encounter with a perseverance that would do credit to a general.”

There was a glint of mirth in Georgiana’s eyes now, and the astonishment in them had quite given way to amusement.

“Mrs Long’s niece fainted dead away at the sight of her first red coat, and had to be revived with lavender in the street. The butcher’s boy has appointed himself guide to the officers’ quarters and is, my mother writes, making a fortune of it, though she does not say what currency a butcher’s boy considers a fortune. And there is a catalogue. Every officer, Miss Darcy. Height, complexion, regiment, fortune where it can be discovered, and prospects where it cannot. My mother has opinions on the cut of each man’s uniform.”

Mrs Annesley smiled into her plate. Georgiana had stopped eating altogether. Even Darcy, behind his napkin, was obliged to own himself entertained, and permitted it to show, since the room expected it of him and since it cost him nothing to give his wife the tribute she had earned.

“There is one officer in particular,” Elizabeth said, and she said it idly, the way a storyteller saves the last figure of a procession, “who appears to be the favourite of every lady in the county. All easy manners and pleasing address, and my mother has already decided that he is to marry my sister Lydia. A Mr Wickham.”

Georgiana’s glass stopped halfway to her lips. The colour left her face. She did not look up. Nor at him. The lemon cream in front of her held her eyes as though she had never seen it before, and her hand, when it came away from the stem, went into her lap and stayed there.

Mrs Annesley, beside her, turned her head a quarter of an inch. It was a glance that took in the glass, the hand, the face, a glance practised at noticing and sworn to silence. Elizabeth saw it.

“I find I am not so hungry as I thought.” Georgiana rose. “Forgive me. I have a headache. I should like to lie down.”

He watched the door open and close again behind her. The faint sound of its settling into the frame reached him. He set aside his anger where it could not be seen and laid his napkin beside his plate.

“I will see if Miss Darcy is well,” Mrs Annesley said, and quitted the room.

Elizabeth was looking at him now. He dismissed the servants. The room emptied in the orderly way of his house, with doors opening and shutting. Soon it was the two of them, the candles, and the untouched lemon cream at Georgiana’s place.