Page 51 of The Marriage Articles

A laugh, quiet and rather too fond, escaped her before she could prevent it. She took up the pen again. Her mother expected a letter, and her mother would expect it to contain intelligence of Derbyshire society. Elizabeth could hardly write that the principal event of the week had occurred in a recess beside the stairs and been interrupted by an aunt.

Georgiana was in the music room with Jane, perfectly content. Mrs Annesley had gone to her widowed sister in Staffordshire, and the house had adjusted to her absence, though not without some quiet difficulty.

Then she heard it. Even through two closed doors and a corridor, the voice in the drawing room was unmistakable, pitched at the volume of a woman who had never once in her life been asked to repeat herself. A servant’s murmur answered it, apologetic and doomed.

Elizabeth laid the pen upon the inkstand and rose. The servants of Pemberley had not taken employment in Derbyshire to be berated by visiting aunts, and it was her house to answer for now.

Lady Catherine was installed in the middle of the drawing room with her back to the window, surveying the furnishings.

“Lady Catherine.” Elizabeth closed the door behind her. “How do you do. I hope you were not left long without attendance.”

“I was left precisely long enough to form my opinion of the drawing room,” Lady Catherine said. “It is a small room for so large a house. Rosings has six of twice the proportions. But I did not come to speak of rooms. I came to speak of guests.”

“Then I am glad I came quickly.”

“I am told the Bingleys are expected at Pemberley.” Lady Catherine pronounced the name Bingley as one might pronounce a bad smell. “The people from Netherfield. The family whose fortune was made in trade, in some town in the north, I am given to understand. I assume they are connexions of yours. You will write and put them off.”

“They are expected at the end of the week,” Elizabeth said.

“Then there is time. You will write today. A civil note, some excuse of illness, the thing is easily done. I will not have the shades of Pemberley polluted by persons whose grandfathers sold goods by the yard. My nephew has not been himself since his marriage, but he will come to thank me for taking the matter in hand.”

Elizabeth felt the smile arrive and permitted it, since civility required something of the kind. “I am afraid the invitations have been sent and accepted, ma’am. It would be most discourteous to recall them now. I could not answer for the appearance of it.”

“The appearance of it!” Lady Catherine drew herself up, which in her case meant becoming fractionally taller than seemed reasonable. “You speak to me of appearances?”

“I speak of courtesy, which I believe your Ladyship values above everything.”

There was a pause of the sort that follows a door slammed in another part of the house. Lady Catherine had no answer, possessing none of the habits required for a rebuff, and looked about for some piece of furniture to hold responsible for the deficiency.

“Very well,” she said at last. “You have made your choice. I observe you have made a great many choices since you came to this house, and I shall observe the consequences of them.”

“I hope you will be comfortable doing so, ma’am. Shall I ring for refreshment?”

The door opened before Lady Catherine could refuse, which was perhaps fortunate, and Jane came in with Anne de Bourgh at her shoulder. The two of them had fallen into the habit of each other’s company over these past days, with Georgiana usually close behind, so that the little company of four had come to move about the house with a quiet familiarity that Elizabeth had begun to rely upon without quite deciding to.

“Anne, you are pale again. It is the air of this place. I have said so to your cousin and I say so to you. Derbyshire does not agree with delicate constitutions.”

“I am very well, Mama.” Anne seated herself in the chair nearest the window, and the light found her face and did its best for her. “The walk yesterday did me good. Mrs Darcy was kind enough to show me the path by the river.”

“Mrs Darcy is prodigiously instructive,” Lady Catherine said. “I am come here and what do I find? The house full of strangers, the servants at sixes and sevens, a companion dismissed, and now persons in trade invited to sit at my nephew’s table. In my day the mistress of a great house understood that her first duty was to keep the wrong sort of people out of it.”

“Mrs Annesley was not dismissed, ma’am. She asked leave to attend her sister, who is recently widowed, and I was happy to grant it.”

“A convenient answer.”

“A true one, which I find more convenient still.”

Miss de Bourgh made a sound that she converted, with commendable speed, into a cough.

Lady Catherine looked at her daughter, and then at Elizabeth, and something in the exchange between the two younger women plainly escaped her, which seemed to displease her more than the remark itself. “You are very free with your opinions, Mrs Darcy. It is a quality that a little experience of the world generally cures.”

“Then I must hope my cure is slow in coming, ma’am. I should be sorry to lose it all at once.”

Jane lowered herself into a chair and folded her hands, and her eyes moved between the two of them with the wary attention of a person watching a game whose rules she had not been taught.

Lady Catherine rose. “Come, Anne. We will walk. The room is become very crowded, and I find the conversation of this house exhausts me.” She paused at the door and surveyed Elizabeth one last time. “You may tell my nephew that I am displeased.”

Miss de Bourgh’s footsteps followed her mother’s down the passage, light and unhurried. The room was quiet. From beyond the window the garden lay in its late morning light, and somewhere below, a servant was already righting whatever Lady Catherine had set wrong. Elizabeth discovered that she had been holding her shoulders somewhere near her ears and lowered them.