Page 7 of The Marriage Articles

The gardener was a man of middle age, weathered by exposure, with earth upon his hands and the countenance of a servant who had blundered into a private conference. His eyes passed from Mr Darcy to Elizabeth in silent astonishment, and he almost dropped the handles of his barrow.

“I beg your pardon, sir. I had no idea anyone was here. I was ordered to the far border.” He lowered the barrow and retreated, his gaze fixed upon them as though retreating from a spectre. “I beg your pardon.”

He turned and hurried back along the walk, the wheels scraping heavily upon the stone until he was lost to view.

Elizabeth and Mr Darcy remained facing one another across the narrow path. The silence between them had altered. It was no longer the suspension of an argument cut short, but the stillness that follows a decisive blow.

Elizabeth assumed her full height and commanded her voice to steadiness, a task more difficult than she wished, yet less impossible than she had feared. “I beg you will excuse me, Mr Darcy.”

Without waiting for his answer, she turned and made her way towards the house at a rapid pace, and if her agitation betrayed itself in the trembling of her hands, she had at least the consolation that no observer walked before her to mark her distress.

❧ ❧ ❧

Elizabeth shut the door of Jane’s chamber and stood with her back against it, as though the people in the house might come through it after her. Her hands were still cold from the garden. Jane was sitting up against the pillows. The fire had been built up since the morning, and the curtains were half drawn against a sky already going grey at the edges, though it wanted a quarter of an hour yet to four.

“Lizzy.” Jane’s smile began and then stopped. “What has happened?”

“Oh, Jane,” Elizabeth said. She came and sat on the edge of the bed, took Jane’s hand, which was warm, and held it rather harder than she intended. “It was after Mama and our sisters had taken their leave that I went into the garden to be alone, and I was not long permitted to be so. Miss Bingley and Mrs Hurst came down the walk on the other side of the hedge, and they were speaking of us. Of Mama, and Lydia, and the impropriety of our family entire. They did it very exactly. Miss Bingley has our mother’s voice quite at her command, which is an accomplishment I had not suspected in her.”

Jane’s hand moved in hers. “You overheard them?”

“Every word. And then Mr Darcy was consulted, and he gave his opinion.” She said it steadily. “He was not being cruel, Jane. That is the worst of it.”

“Oh, Lizzy.” Jane’s eyes had filled, which was more than Elizabeth’s had done. “I am so sorry you were obliged to hear it.”

“I was not obliged. I stayed behind the hedge and listened, which was my own choice, and I would do it again, because now I know.” Elizabeth rose and went to the window, pulling back the curtain an inch. The light was fast fading from the walk below.

“There is more. When they had gone in, Mr Darcy returned and found me there, and we quarrelled. I told him what I had heard, and he expressed regret that I had heard it, which is by no means the same thing as being sorry for the truth of it, and I told him as much. I think... I think neither of us perceived how close to each other we were standing, and while we were in the very height of our dispute, a gardener came round the hedge and saw us.”

“Saw you quarrelling?”

“Saw us standing together.” Elizabeth let the curtain fall. “Standing so near as to breach every rule of decorum, which in Hertfordshire is a compromise of propriety.” She paused, her hand gripping the back of a chair until her knuckles turned white. “And the tale will make its rounds. But that is nothing to me compared to the insult we have received. To stay here as Miss Bingley’s guest, to receive smiles and polite enquiries from women who revile our family behind our backs, it is a humiliation to which I will not submit. I am resolved not to sleep another night under this roof.”

Jane was quiet for a moment, and when she spoke it was without any reproach at all, which Elizabeth had half expected and knew she did not deserve. “Then we must go home,” Jane said. “I am well enough to travel, truly I am. I have been up half the day.”

“Today,” Elizabeth said. “Not tomorrow.”

“Today,” Jane agreed, and began to put back the covers. Elizabeth rang for the maid.

The girl came, the same one who had been tending Jane’s fire all week. Elizabeth sent her down with a message for Mr Bingley. Miss Bennet felt herself well enough to travel, the ladies were obliged to be at Longbourn before dark, and she begged the favour of the carriage. The maid bobbed and went. Elizabeth set about the room, gathering Jane’s things from the chest of drawers with a dispatch she did not feel, folding what the maid had left half folded and finding Jane’s slippers under the chair where they had been kicked.

The answer came back up within ten minutes, and it was not an answer but a request. Mr Bingley begged to be allowed to see Miss Bennet before she left, if she felt equal to receiving him.

“I will see him,” Jane said, before Elizabeth could frame a refusal. “He has been nothing but kind, Lizzy. I will not slip out of his house without a word.”

Elizabeth could find no argument against this that she was willing to say aloud. She gave Jane the hairbrush, then her own assistance with the fastenings of a day dress. After that she took herself into the adjoining dressing room, where the maid helped her to pack. She folded and strapped with great concentration. If she attended to the murmur of voices through the wall it was only to be certain that Jane was not tiring herself, and not at all to catch whether any name besides her own was mentioned.

When she came back, Jane was sitting in the chair by the fire, a little pale but composed.

“He was surprised,” Jane said. “And disappointed, I think, though he was too good-natured to make a difficulty of it. He said only that he was sorry to lose us so soon. That the carriage should be brought round the moment we were ready.”

“That was kind of him.”

Elizabeth sat down on the arm of the chair and put her arm around her sister’s shoulders. “I have cut your visit short, and I have to ask whether it has cost you anything. With Mr Bingley.”

“No lasting harm has been done, Lizzy, truly.” Jane said it with that earnest, gentle gravity which always marked her deepest convictions. “He is not a man to think ill of anyone for another person’s rudeness, and I do not believe Miss Bingley will tell him anything, because there is nothing to tell that would not make her own part of it the more remarkable part of the story.”

Elizabeth considered this, and found it sound. The maid came to say the carriage was at the door. Jane rose and took Elizabeth’s arm. They went down the stairs together, slowly.