Page 49 of The Marriage Articles

“Darcy.” She did not sit. “I did not think, when I set out from Kent, that I should arrive at my own nephew’s house and be sent for like a tenant with a grievance about his fences. And at such an hour. I have but this moment come off the road, I have had a journey of five days and a dinner I have not yet seen, and I am summoned to a study as though I were a petitioner at a levee.”

“You are very welcome at Pemberley, Aunt.” He offered her the chair before the desk, and she took it after a pause calculated to show that she did so at her own pleasure. “I will not pretend I am sorry for the message. I wished to speak with you before dinner, and there was no other way of arranging it that you would not have arranged otherwise.”

She narrowed her eyes, her chin lifting with sharp offence. “You presume entirely too much on your position, Fitzwilliam, if you think to corner me in your study.”

“Then allow me to ask,” Darcy said, “to what I owe the pleasure of so sudden a visit.”

She looked at him as only a woman could look when expected to account for her actions to a nephew who should have known better. “It is no sudden visit. It wants no occasion. I am your aunt, this is your house, and I have a right to come to it when I choose and to stay while I choose. I was coming to Pemberley before you were born, and I shall come to it, I daresay, when the present arrangement has been long forgot.”

“I hope you will come to it for many years,” he said. “I did not ask whether you had the right. I asked the occasion.”

She was quiet for the space of one breath, which he counted as the nearest thing to a concession the interview was likely to produce. Then she arranged the charges in her own order, as he had known she would, for she had never in his memory begun with her strongest card.

“You have married disgracefully.” She said it as a fact of weather. “I do not scruple to say it to your face, for I have said it to everyone else, and I should be ashamed to say behind a man’s back what I would not say before it. You have married without connexion, without fortune, without so much as a family that can be named in company, and you have done it in a manner that has set the whole country talking.”

“My choice of wife is my own,” Darcy said, “though I grant the manner of it was not what I would have chosen.”

“So I have heard. I have heard the account of the circumstances, and a more scandalous account I have never been obliged to hear in my life.” She folded her hands. “You have injured Anne by marrying another. That is the second thing, and I will have an answer to it. And thirdly, I am come to see that my sister’s memory is not to be sullied by an upstart miss from Hertfordshire set up as mistress of her son’s house, giving orders to her son’s servants, and sitting, I suppose, in her son’s chair.”

Darcy went very still. He had learned long ago that anger in him did not come out as heat. It came out as formality, and he let it. When he answered, his voice was lower and more correct than it had been at the beginning of the interview.

“I will take the second charge first, Aunt, because it is the only one with any substance in it, and it has none. A marriage between Anne and myself was an idea in your head, and it has had no existence anywhere else. Neither Anne nor I ever had the least inclination for the other. I told you so at Rosings on every one of my visits, year after year, and you did not choose to hear me, and so we have had the conversation annually, like the Easter service. Anne will tell you the same, and with less patience than I have shown, for she has had to bear the idea longer.”

“Anne is too dutiful to know her own interest,” Lady Catherine said. “That has always been her failing. I have known it for her.”

“She has known it for herself since she was twelve.”

“You did not come this year.” She said it as the fact that outranked all the others he had offered, and he understood at once that it did, in her economy of injuries, outweigh the marriage itself. “Your Easter visit to Rosings. You have kept it every year of your life since you were a boy. Your cousin waited, and I waited, and the house was prepared, and you did not come. You did not so much as write.”

“I was in London at Easter,” Darcy said. “I was newly married at that time.”

He said nothing further to defend it, and the silence did the work that a defence would have spoiled. She looked at him for a long moment, and for the first time in the interview he could not have said precisely what the look contained.

“A newly married man,” she said at last, “has a wife to attend to. I am not ignorant of the world.” She made the concession sound like an accusation, which was perhaps the only way she could make one. “It does not answer for the marriage. It does not answer for this woman you have put into my sister’s place, with her impertinent eyes and her Hertfordshire family and her manner of walking into a room as though she had been expected.”

“Mrs Darcy has been expected,” he said. “By me.”

That stopped her, but only for a moment, and he used the moment to give her the terms, for he had come into the room to give them and he would not leave it with them unsaid.

“You are my family, Aunt, and you are welcome here. You may stay at Pemberley as long as you find it necessary, and you and Anne will be made comfortable in every particular the house can supply.” He kept his hands behind his back and his voice where it was. “You will not be uncivil to my wife. Not in my house, and not at her table. If you find that Mrs Darcy is beneath your notice, you may take your notice elsewhere, and I will tell you that Lambton has a very good inn, and its dinners are thought excellent, and it is no more than five miles from this door.”

Neither of them relented. He did not raise his voice and she did not lower hers, and the fire settled in the grate with a small, civil sound, as though the room were determined to behave better than its occupants.

“I am not to be dictated to,” Lady Catherine began, her voice faltering only to harden instantly against the breach. “I am not to be dictated to in this house, where my sister lived, where so little of her remains that a nephew of mine can sit behind his desk and tell me the way to the inn at Lambton.” She caught herself, her jaw tightening as she forced back whatever had nearly broken through, and when she spoke again the imperium was back, fresher for having been briefly misplaced. “I shall stay as long as is necessary. I am not to be driven from my own nephew’s house by any person living, and you may tell your wife so, though I daresay she knows it already, for she has the look of a woman who has never been driven from anything in her life.”

Darcy heard it and said nothing. He saw the genuine anxiety beneath her wrath, though he knew better than to name it. She was more deeply offended by his failure to visit Rosings at Easter than by the marriage itself, yet she would have denied it with her last breath. The marriage touched her pride and his neglect touched her heart, and she would never acknowledge the second. To speak of it would only force a denial, and a denial from Lady Catherine was a structure too solid ever to be pulled down.

So he said none of it. He stood, and came around the desk, and offered her his arm.

“Dinner will be on the table within the half hour, Aunt. The country hour here runs early, and Mrs Darcy keeps to it. Will you allow me to take you in?”

She took his arm as tribute rather than courtesy, which was the only way she had ever taken anything, and rose with the air of a sovereign condescending to inspect the kitchens.

He walked her from the study to the dining room, the length of the house between them and the table, her hand on his arm and her opinions at full sail. He hoped for the best and expected the worst. An evening in which nobody required anything further of him was what he wanted. He was not going to get it, and this was, in a sense he did not care to examine, entirely his own doing.

❧ ❧ ❧

Darcy had walked this path every morning, and he had learned to tell the hour by the light on the river. He had also learned, with considerably more interest, to tell his wife’s temper by the angle of her bonnet. This morning the bonnet was lowered, and the light was fine, and neither fact was of the smallest use to him.