Page 66 of The Marriage Articles

“It is done, or near enough.” Darcy rose and went to the window, where the river showed itself between the trees. “But you have put me in mind of the remedy. Jane is due home. We shall all accompany her. The whole party, to Hertfordshire, and we shall stay at Netherfield, which will hold us all, and you will be in the same neighbourhood as her for as long as you wish it. There is your ground, Richard. Court her there.”

Richard stared at him. “I say, Darcy. You should have set up as a matchmaker. You would put half the mamas in London to shame.”

The night came, and the house settled, and Darcy sat with his wife in the sitting room between their chambers, in use for the first time since they had come back to Pemberley together. The fire was low. Her door stood ajar behind her, and his behind him. Elizabeth sat at the other end of the sofa with her feet tucked under her. When he took her hand she let him, and when he kissed her she returned it with an interest that put the topic of Netherfield quite out of his head.

“What would you think, my love, of accompanying Jane to Hertfordshire?” he said presently. “Of taking our whole party to Hertfordshire for a time?”

Elizabeth considered it, her head against the cushion. “I should like to see my family very much. But where would we all stay? Longbourn will not hold us. Unless Mr Bingley were to open Netherfield for us, there is no place for us all.”

“There you may be easy.” He had looked forward to this. “Netherfield is ours, Elizabeth. Or as good as ours. I have written to Bingley, and my man of business has the matter in hand. The lease is taken over, with intent to purchase. It is a good, prosperous property, and a sound investment besides.”

She looked up. “What?”

“Netherfield,” he said, well pleased, and began to explain, but his eagerness flagged as he observed her, for her features betrayed none of the satisfaction he had anticipated. “I spoke to Bingley when he was at Pemberley, when the arrangement first occurred to me. The instructions went to my man of business last week. There is nothing uncertain in it. I wished to tell you when it was done.” He paused. “I thought you would be glad.”

Elizabeth drew her feet down and sat up. “You promised.” Her voice was level, and the levelness was worse than any height it might have risen to. “Why did you not ask me?”

He looked at her and did not understand. “Ask you? It is a house, Elizabeth. A good house, near your family, bought in part so that your mother should never want a roof. I cannot see the injury in it.”

“Then I must show it to you, for it is plain to me.” She rose from the sofa. “You have decided a matter that concerns both our futures, where we shall stay and when, what shall be done for my mother, and you decided it alone. This is my life as well, Fitzwilliam. My mother, my sisters.”

“I meant it to please you, Elizabeth.” His voice had gone very even. “A house near your family, a roof for your mother should she ever want one. You receive it as an injury. I do not understand how kindness has become presumption.”

“That is the quarrel,” Elizabeth said. “That you do not understand it. You cannot go about deciding things for people without asking them, however kind your intentions. Not for my mother, not for my sisters, not for me.”

“For you least of all, I am to understand.” He stood, because sitting had become impossible.

He drew a long breath and let it slowly out. Anger was there, and beneath it something worse, something like bewilderment. The day had been spent as the happiest man in Derbyshire, and now anything more said tonight would surely be regretted. He knew himself that far, at least. “I will say no more,” he said, “because I should regret anything I say. Goodnight, Elizabeth.”

He went through his own door and shut it. Behind him he heard hers shut, quiet and final. The sitting room was left to the low fire, the sofa, the two closed doors that stood unlocked, as they had stood unlocked since last night, and now might as well have been locked after all.

Chapter Forty-Two

There was a particular species of folly, as she had discovered in the last half hour, that consisted in writing down rules for other people and then being caught by them oneself, and the sheet of paper in her hand was the proof of it. She stood at the drawer of her dressing table with her robe drawn over her night gown against a chill that was not in the room. Half an hour had passed since she had left him. Half an hour was, she had found, precisely long enough for anger to cool.

Seventh. No variance or misunderstanding between us shall be carried past the setting of the sun, but settled before we sleep.

She had written that. She had written it thinking to arm herself for a future quarrel. The quarrel came tonight. She had stormed from her husband’s room over an act of generosity. There was an irony in it so complete that she could not even be angry at it. She could only be tired, and sorry, and resolved.

She exhaled, folded the sheet along its old creases, and placed it back in the drawer.

She crossed the cold floor in her bare feet and knocked softly at his chamber door.

There was a pause long enough for her to imagine him deciding whether to answer at all. Then his voice, level and without welcome. “Come.”

He was sitting in the chair by the window with his coat off and his shirt open at the throat, a glass of port in his hand, and the moment he saw her he set the glass down on the table beside him. It stayed there. The stillness she had learned to read was on him at once, his jaw tight, his whole body arranged against whatever she had come to say, and she understood that he expected the fight to continue.

“Elizabeth.” He did not rise. His voice stayed low and even, without contempt, without heat.

“I did not come to quarrel,” she said.

She watched the words reach him. His shoulders came down a fraction. The hands that had been gripping the arms of the chair loosened.

“I came to apologize.” She folded her hands before her. “Netherfield was kindly meant, and it was well done, for me and for my family, and I am thankful for it. I am thankful for you. I said none of that this evening, and I should have said it first.”

He was very still. “You owe me no thanks for what I wished to do.”

“Perhaps not. But I do owe you an apology.” She had meant it. “You acted from kindness, and I answered you as though you had acted from tyranny. I was wrong, Fitzwilliam. Entirely wrong, in the truest sense, and I will not dress it up.”