Page 115 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

"Come," she said, and tugged his hand. "Mrs Reynolds will be standing on the steps. She has been standing on them since four o'clock, I expect. We must not keep her waiting."

He laughed, and handed her back up into the coach, and swung onto his horse. And they went down the long curve of the drive together, over the bridge and past the water and up to the house, where Mrs Reynolds was indeed standing on the steps, very small and very upright in her best black, and had been since four o'clock, and was pretending she had only just come out.

#

The summer went by at Pemberley like a long slow river, and Darcy, who had spent every summer of his adult life counting the days until he must go back to London, found that he had lost count of them altogether.

He did not go to London once. He did not go to Derby, except on Tuesdays, for the market. He rode out every morning with his steward over the farms, and came home at noon with his boots muddy and his face brown, and found his wife in the garden, or the stillroom, or the Hollins farm kitchen telling the story of the beanstalk for the fortieth time, and forgot what he had meant to say to her.

The house filled up with letters, and with people.

Samuel Hobb was a second footman now, in the Pemberley livery, six foot three and very solemn, and so anxious to give satisfaction that he had to be forbidden by Mrs Reynolds to polish the same spoon more than twice. His mother had a cottage at the end of the village with a slate roof and a garden full of hollyhocks, and every Sunday after church she stood at her gate in a black bonnet and curtseyed to Mr Darcy as he rode by, and every Sunday, very gravely, he took off his hat to her.

Tom Hollins's little brother had his pony. It was a fat grey Welsh pony called Beanstalk, which was Elizabeth's doing, and the boy rode it round and round the Hollins yard every evening with his mother running beside him, shrieking with laughter, and once, memorably, up the front steps of Pemberley and into the hall, where Mrs Reynolds met him and he was not seen again for some time.

The ice house was full again. Darcy had had it cleared and scoured and whitewashed, and new straw laid, and in the long hot days of July the cooks went down to it every morning with their baskets for ice for the syllabubs, as they had for a hundred years. He had not been able to look at it for a month. Then one evening in early July he had walked down there with Elizabeth, and stood in front of the heavy oak door, and she had put her hand on his arm and said, Mrs Reynolds says the cream has never kept so well, and he had laughed until he had to sit down on the stone bench. After that it was only the ice house again.

Anne de Bourgh climbed the ridge behind the house nine times in June and July, and the last time she did it in an hour and ten minutes, without stopping once, and came down with her face burnt pink by the sun and a sprig of heather in her bonnet, and wrote to her mother. Lady Catherine came north in the last week of July, in the barouche with the four horses and the enormous footman, to take her daughter to the sea. She stayed three days. On the third evening, at dinner, she looked at her daughter across the table for a long time, pink-cheeked and laughing with Georgiana over a pudding, and then she put down her fork and said, to nobody in particular, "I have been a fool for twenty years," and went on eating. Nobody said anything. Anne got up from her chair and went round the table and kissed her mother's cheek, in front of everybody, and Lady Catherine went scarlet, and ordered more claret, very loudly.

They left for Ramsgate the next morning. Anne waved out of the window all the way down the drive.

The letters came every day. Richard wrote from Spain, briefly, with a great deal of mud in it, and something about the storming of a town whose name he would not write, that made Darcy go quiet for an evening. Jane wrote from Netherfield, in a round happy hand, to say that the baby was expected in December, and that Charles had bought a rocking horse already, and a cradle, and three dozen pairs of very small stockings. Lady Matlock wrote every fortnight, long, careful, affectionate letters that she signed, for the first time in her life, your aunt Audrey. And the Morning Post of the fourteenth of July announced, in a very small paragraph that Elizabeth read aloud at breakfast three times, the engagement of Lord Edward Aldridge, younger son of his Grace the Duke of Harrington, to Miss Caroline Bingley.

"She will be a duke's daughter-in-law," said Elizabeth. "She will never let any of us forget it."

"She will lead him the most dreadful dance," said Darcy.

"And he will enjoy every step of it."

There was a young man, too, who came to stay for a fortnight in July: Mr Robert Kerr, Lady Harriet's younger son, the shy young man with the very nice face who had waltzed with Georgiana at the ball, and who had been asked to Pemberley by Elizabeth without, Darcy suspected, any reference to anybody else at all. He was two-and-twenty, and a clergyman in expectation, and read Cowper, and turned Georgiana's pages at the pianoforte, and blushed whenever she spoke to him, and made her laugh. Darcy watched him very carefully for the whole of the fortnight, with the expression of a man watching a horse he is thinking of buying. At the end of it, he took the young man into his study for half an hour with the door shut. When they came out, Mr Kerr was white and trembling and radiant, and Darcy said to his wife that evening that he believed the boy would do, in a year or two, if he did not die of fright first.

And all through that long gold summer, his wife was tired.

He noticed it in July. She, who had walked three miles in the mud to Netherfield and never stopped walking since, began to sleep in the afternoons. She could not bear the smell of coffee at breakfast, and had it sent away. She was sick one morning in the garden behind the yew hedge, and would not let him fetch the apothecary, and laughed at him when he tried. She was sometimes, for no reason he could see, on the edge of tears, and then laughing again the next minute.

He began to be afraid.

He went to Mrs Reynolds, in the end, on the last evening of July, in her room, with the door shut, and told her. He had not gone to Mrs Reynolds with a trouble since he was twelve years old.

Mrs Reynolds listened to him, with her hands folded at her waist and her face perfectly grave. When he had finished, she looked at him for a long moment without saying anything.

Then, very slightly, at one corner, her mouth moved.

"I should not trouble yourself, Master Fitzwilliam," she said. "I think you will find that the mistress means to speak to you herself. Very soon."

"Mrs Reynolds—"

"Very soon, sir. I should go and find her, if I were you. I believe she went down to the lake."

#

The evening was very still.

Elizabeth sat on the flat grey stone at the edge of the lake, where the path from the house came down through the beeches to the water, and watched the light go. The sun had gone behind the western hills half an hour ago, but the sky above them was still full of it: pale gold at the edge, and then primrose, and then, higher up, a clear deep green-blue like the inside of a wave. The lake had caught all of it and was holding it very still, so that there were two skies, one above and one below, and the swans on the water seemed to float between them. On the far side the house stood against the hill with its long front gone soft and grey and violet, and three windows lit, one after another, as she watched.

She had her hand on her waist. She kept finding that it was there. She did not think she had put it there on purpose.

She had known for a fortnight. She had suspected for longer than that, since the beginning of July, when she found she could not bear the smell of coffee. She had told nobody. Not Hannah, who had certainly guessed, nor Mrs Reynolds, who had certainly guessed first, nor Jane, in any of her letters, though it had been very hard not to, when Jane's letters were so full of rocking horses. She had carried it about with her all through the long gold weeks of July like a candle in a dark house, cupping her hand round it so that nobody should see the light before she was ready.