Page 68 of The Marriage Articles

Jane laughed. “You are unkind to Mr Bingley.”

“I am kind to him. To credit him with one accomplishment is more than he deserves. He laughed very readily and seldom attended to what you said, and you spent weeks being admired by a man who never once asked you a question he wished to have answered.”

“Perhaps that is so.” Jane’s voice had gone soft. “It is a strange thing to be grateful for a disappointment, and yet I believe I am.”

“You may be grateful without being obliged to discuss it with me. I shall not tell a soul.”

“You will tell your husband.”

“I tell my husband everything. It is one of the inconveniences of being happily married.”

They had reached the bench above the river where they sometimes sat, and Jane drew her down onto it, still holding her arm. The stone was warm from the sun, and Jane paused a moment, her hands turning together in her lap, before she spoke. “Colonel Fitzwilliam and I have spoken. I told him I must have a courtship first. A proper one, with time to know each other.”

“Why?” Elizabeth asked, and kept it gentle, for she truly wished to know.

Jane looked at the water. “Because I want to be as happy as you are, and I have watched how it came about. You were given no choice in the matter, and you took time, and you were fortunate. I have the choice, and so I mean to take the time and hope for good fortune.”

Elizabeth was more surprised than the words quite accounted for. It was no small thing to learn that Jane had watched the marriage forced upon her and taken from it an example rather than a warning, and it was a thought she meant to examine at leisure when she was alone. For the present there was only Jane beside her on the bench, hands folded, the river moving below them, waiting to be answered. The irony of it struck Elizabeth with a sudden, overwhelming force. Jane had looked upon Elizabeth’s tumultuous, ill-managed union and seen only wisdom where there had been nothing more than a desperate, stumbling folly. A laugh broke from her, half-deprecating and entirely affectionate. “Then you must prepare yourself for a great deal of foolishness, Jane, for I was the greater fool of the two.”

“You are impossible.”

“Now I have done teasing, and I will say the serious thing once. It is a wise resolution, Jane. I was the fool in my own affair, and you mean to be sensible in yours.”

Jane smiled. The river ran below them, silver where the sun caught it, and for a while neither spoke, which was its own pleasure. Jane had never required filling silences, and Elizabeth, who required them of everyone else, had always excused her sister from the labour. It was one of the many small indulgences she had never thought to count.

Chapter Forty-Three

The library at Netherfield was warm against the winter afternoon. Darcy stood at its window with his person in the room and his thoughts a twelvemonth past, in this same library, where he had once sat alone and believed solitude to be the proper state of a house well kept. He had been wrong about that. He had been wrong about a number of things, and the reckoning no longer cost him anything, for the proof of his error was at this moment crossing the library carpet in her walking dress.

“You are frowning at the shelves again.”

“I was reflecting on their emptiness.”

“Mr Bingley’s failure, not yours.” She ran a finger along a bare stretch of mahogany.

“The books are the least of it.” He looked about the room with her in it. “The house is yours to order, Elizabeth, furnish it as you please.”

Darcy came away from the window and took the chair by the fire. Elizabeth seated herself on the arm of it, which was not how a lady sat, and which she knew very well. He raised no objection, having never in his life objected to an arrangement so much to his advantage. He drew her down into his lap, and she came without needing to be asked twice.

“Do not let my mother hear you say that. The curtains in the breakfast room were measured within a day of our arrival. A day. The upholsterer from Meryton has been seen entering by the side door, which my mother believes renders him invisible, and by Easter she will have rehung every room on the ground floor in colours she describes as cheerful.”

“I have no objection to cheerfulness,” Darcy said.

“You like quiet, sir, and you are not to have it.” She set a hand against his coat. “If nobody is firm with her, my mother will have the run of the whole house. She will turn us out of our own chambers and put us in the blue room at the end of the east passage. You will wake there one morning and not know how you came there.”

“Then I shall tell you how it happened.” He spoke without hurry. “Your mother will have had the measuring of it, and you will have had the directing of her, and I shall have had the good sense not to stand in the way.”

She was silent for a moment, which was rare enough to be noted. “That,” she said at last, “was very nearly a pretty speech. I shall allow it.”

“How generous of you.”

“I am always generous to a man who has just bought me a house.” She was laughing as he kissed her, and the kiss was brief because she was laughing, and he held her by the shoulders a moment after it ended. “I do not care in which room I sleep, Elizabeth, as long as you are in it.”

From somewhere far off down the passage came a shout, and then another, and then the unmistakable shriek of a small person in a state of high delight, followed by Mr Gardiner’s voice raised in protest at some offence against the laws of the game.

Elizabeth turned her head towards the sound. “We had better join our guests. If Henry and my uncle are left to referee themselves, there will be a treaty signed before tea, and I mean to be present at the negotiations.”

The drawing room, when they reached it, was in a condition which, a twelvemonth ago, Darcy would have called most irregular. At present, however, he could think of no better word for it than happy.