Page 50 of The Marriage Articles

They went down the gravel drive in silence. The habit held. They had risen at six, as they always rose, met on the steps, as they always met, and set off towards the grass and the river path beyond it. What did not hold was everything else. She walked beside him with her hands clasped before her, and her hand remained a careful six inches from his sleeve.

She was not teasing him. That was the measure of it. On any other morning she would have begun by now. Some remark about his coat, which she had once pronounced too fine for walking and had since made a small ceremony of admiring. Some nonsense about the ducks on the river having better conversation than the company in London. Today there was nothing. The ease that had grown between them over the past weeks, so gradually that he had only noticed it when it was entire, had been put away somewhere overnight, and he knew precisely when, and he knew precisely by whom.

“Fitzwilliam.”

She had stopped. They were a little short of the river path, where the grass gave way to the first of the gravel again. She turned to face him, and her face was serious in a way he had not seen on it since the early days at Longbourn. His first thought, arriving with the speed of long practice, was of his aunt.

“My aunt,” he said. “I know. I am sorry.” The words came out in a rush he had not authorised. “For yesterday, for the hour of her arrival, for her manner, which I will not pretend to defend. She is a force of nature. I have known it all my life, and I have made my peace with it, which is no reason you should be asked to make yours in a single evening. I should have warned you of what she is. I should have warned you long ago.”

He stopped. She was looking at him with an expression he could not immediately read.

“Every family has its share of embarrassments,” she said.

She said it lightly, in the tone she used for the ducks and the coat, and he heard the weight underneath it all the same.

“But that is not what I wanted to talk to you about.”

The river’s noise continued beyond the bank. Darcy waited.

“Yesterday,” she said. “In the alcove.” She paused, and her chin came up. “I wanted you to kiss me.”

He did not move.

“I do not know what it means,” she went on. “I have been awake half the night... I do not know whether I wanted you to kiss me because I am falling in love with you, or because you are kind, and handsome, or...” Her voice did not break, but it narrowed. “I do not know myself, Fitzwilliam. I have always prided myself on knowing myself, on being the one person in any room whose mind I could be sure of, and I do not know myself, and I find I am displeased with you for it, which is unfair, and I am vexed that it is unfair, which is worse.”

He wanted to say that he loved her. That he had loved her since the assembly, since he had called her tolerable within her hearing like a fool, since the mud on her petticoat at Netherfield. He said nothing.

“I need time,” she said. “I need to know what I feel. That is the truth. The articles say I must give you the truth, and that is all of it I have. I am sorry.”

“You need not be,” he said.

“You are not angry?”

“I am not,” he said. “I have had a lifetime of people telling me what they thought I wished to hear. I would have your honesty above anything.”

She looked at him then, full on. She did not look away. The same dread he had carried down the drive was in her now. Between them they had managed to fear the same conversation from opposite ends.

“I will wait,” he said.

It came out plainer than he intended, and shorter. He saw her take it, saw the small loosening in her shoulders that told him it had been the right two words and not the wrong ones. He had so rarely been certain of saying the right thing to her that the sensation was worth noting. In its small way, it felt a reprieve.

“Thank you,” she said.

They walked on. The river path took them along the bank, where the water ran quick and brown over the stones, and the morning was as fine as it had been all along, as though nothing of consequence had been said upon it. He did not know what to do with his hands, which was absurd in a man of eight and twenty, and he hooked them behind his back, which was what he did when he walked with company he was determined not to alarm.

She was not against him. That was the thing he carried, turning it over as they walked. She did not know what she felt, and she had said so.

At the bend where the path turned back towards the house, she took his arm.

She did it without ceremony, without looking at him, her hand slipping into the crook of his elbow as though it had never spent the morning six inches away.

The house came into view above the rise, pale grey stone with the morning on it, growing larger by degrees as they walked, and somewhere inside it his aunt was no doubt awake and issuing instructions to people who had not asked for them. He found he did not mind. Let Lady Catherine demand and disapprove and stay uninvited. His wife’s hand was on his arm, the truth was on the path behind them, and the time she had asked for was his to give.

Chapter Thirty

Elizabeth dipped her pen and wrote the date at the top of a sheet that was destined, she strongly suspected, to remain exactly that blank for some time. It was a curious arrangement of the world that the most important conversation of one’s day could be concluded before breakfast, and leave a person less acquainted with her own mind at the end of it than she had been at the beginning. He had said he would wait, and the worst of it, the truly intolerable part, was how instantly her spirit yielded to the comfort of it.

She set the pen down. Gratitude was a respectable feeling and she held it in the respectable part of herself. The rest of her was occupied with the alcove, the marble bust that had witnessed the whole business with more composure than she had managed, his hand rising to her jaw, and then his aunt’s voice demanding her nephew from the entrance hall. He had stepped back. She had not known whether to thank Lady Catherine or have her removed from the county.