Page 45 of The Marriage Articles

A little farther on the path curved in towards the house, and Darcy showed her the terrace. It was a long platform of stone below the study and music room windows, its parapet taking the full weight of the morning. A stone bench stood at the turn where the wall gave way to the river.

“My father often sat there to read,” he said, gesturing to the stone.

Elizabeth looked at the quiet bench, picturing him there with his books, taking a brief, peaceful reprieve from the endless weight of his duties.

They came up the rise above the park and the view opened all at once. The valley below them, the river running through it, the parkland spread out on either side, and beyond everything the Peaks, their slopes blue-green in the distance. She stopped. He stopped beside her. For a moment neither of them said anything at all.

“It is beautiful,” she said at last, conscious that the term fell entirely short of the truth, and caring very little for the defect.

“My father used to bring me here.” His hands had gone behind his back, the way they did when he walked with company, but his voice had gone somewhere quieter. “He said a man should know the best view of his own land, and stand in it often enough that he never mistook the land for his own achievement.”

“Tell me about him.”

He was quiet for a moment, and she let him be quiet.

“He was kind,” he said. “And fair. He knew every tenant by name, and their children, and which of them had a roof that wanted mending before the man himself had thought to mention it. He kept his word. I never once knew him to break it, to anyone, in any matter.” He paused. “I learned a great deal from him. More than I understood at the time.”

“And your mother?”

He did not answer at once. “She played,” he said. “The pianoforte every evening, whether there was company or not. Georgiana sits at the instrument just as she did, with the same lift of the chin, and I stop whatever I am doing to listen, though I have never told her why.” He let a moment pass. “She was livelier than my father and quicker to laugh, and she had a way of making whichever room she sat in the centre of the house. Georgiana has her face entirely, the same grave gentleness, the same way of hearing a whole sentence out before she answers it. My father saw my mother’s face in Georgiana every day, and I do not think it ever grew easier for him. Her death broke something in him. He grieved quietly, because that was his way, but it changed him. He was never again quite the man he had been before, and I think he knew it.”

“I am glad you brought me here.”

He turned and looked at her then, and whatever he saw in her face he did not comment on, for which she was grateful. There were limits to what a woman could have observed in her countenance before breakfast.

She had never seen him so little on his guard. In London he had carried the air of a man standing for inspection, at dinner, in his own drawing room, on the steps of his own house. Here he was freer than she had ever known him, his shoulders eased of their usual stiffness, his face open to the morning.

She weighed two explanations for the change. The first was the house. It was his home, the house he had been born in and the land he had come into as a young man, and a man might be expected to stand at his ease upon it. The second was the fever. She had sat that night in the chair beside his bed. He had held her hand when the fever was at its worst, and she had heard him say her name in the small hours without any of the distance he kept in company. Something had been settled between them in that room which she did not think had unsettled since.

She found she preferred the second explanation, and not entirely for his sake.

They started back. Ahead of them the house grew larger, the stone and the windows and the terrace above the river. At the edge of the drive, where the grass gave way to the gravel, she took his arm.

By some fraction too small to measure his pace adjusted to hers, and they went on towards the house, arm in arm, while the windows caught the light and the river ran on below the terrace.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Elizabeth knocked on her sister’s door. Jane sat at the window with her embroidery frame beside her, the park spread out below in dull gold afternoon light. She turned, and the smile came before the greeting.

“Lizzy.” She set down her needle. “You look different.”

“Do I? I have just spent an hour with Mrs Reynolds discussing the management of a linen inventory that appears to stretch back to the Tudors. I must look terrified that I shall be found entirely unequal to it.”

“You look happy,” Jane said.

Elizabeth crossed to the window seat and sat, gathering her skirts out of the path of the light. “Then I am greatly relieved. I feared I looked merely pleased with myself.”

Jane laughed softly and reached for her hand. “Your fears, then. Were they unfounded?”

“They were.” Elizabeth met her eyes and did not pretend to misunderstand. “Mr Darcy is a good man, Jane. I have come to admire him very much.”

“Only admire?” Jane’s needle paused above the canvas.

“For now.”

Jane looked at her with a small, quiet smile that said she did not quite believe her, and said nothing.

“He is different here,” Elizabeth said. “He smiles more.”