Page 74 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

The weather in Derbyshire has repented of its sins. It has been blue and gold and sparkling since Sunday, with little white clouds running over the tops of the hills like sheep let out of a fold, and the whole park smells of cut grass and bluebells. I tell you this only to be cruel, since you tell me London is full of lilac and you resent it.

Anne has climbed the hill.

I know you forbade it. So did Mrs Reynolds, and the apothecary from Lambton, and James, and Hannah, and Georgiana. Anne listened to all of us very politely, and then on Tuesday morning at nine o'clock she put on her stoutest boots and only two of her shawls and set off up the path behind the house with a stick, and a flask of Mrs Reynolds's barley water, and Georgiana and me running after her.

It took an hour and three quarters. We stopped eleven times. At the fourth stop I was quite sure she would die, and at the seventh I was quite sure I would. But she got to the top, Fitzwilliam. She stood on the very top of the ridge, with the wind blowing her shawls out behind her like flags and the whole of the Peak laid out in front of her, blue and green and gold for twenty miles, and she did not cough once. She laughed. She laughed and laughed until she had to sit down on a rock. Then she said, very quietly, "I have been in a carriage for four-and-twenty years." And then she cried a little. Georgiana and I pretended to be looking at a hawk.

She has not coughed since Leicester. Mrs Reynolds says it is the air. Anne says it is being allowed to walk. I think it is both. I am writing to her mother by the same post, and I should very much like to see her face when she reads it.

Georgiana plays every day, in the saloon, on your mother's great pianoforte, with all the windows open over the water. The gardeners stop work to listen. She is not afraid when she plays here. She told me so. She said, "Nobody here has read the papers, Elizabeth. They only know me as the little girl who used to fall in the lake." She fell in the lake, I gather, at the age of six, fishing for a trout with a bent pin. The whole household remembers it. They bring it up at every opportunity. She blushes scarlet and does not mind in the least.

I have been learning the house, and the people. Mrs Reynolds has taken me through every room, one each morning, and told me its whole history. I have visited eleven tenant families with her. At the Hollins farm there was a little boy of four with a fever, and I sat with him an hour while his mother went to milk, and told him the story of Jack and the Beanstalk three times, and when I went back yesterday he was sitting up eating porridge, and he called me "Mrs Master" and asked for the giant again.

And Mrs Reynolds has decided where to put me.

I know it, because yesterday evening she came up to my room with the linen, which she never does herself, and stood by the window seat looking at your mother's Cowper, which I still have not moved. And she said, not looking at me, "She used to sit there too, madam. Every evening. She would have liked you. I have been thinking so since the first day." And then she said, very gruffly, "The master has done well. Better than I had any hope of," and went out with the linen before I could answer.

I sat in the window seat afterwards and cried into your mother's Cowper. I am afraid the violet is a little the worse for it.

Now I am going to tell you something, because you told me in your letter that you would tell me what my "there" did to you when you saw me, and that is not fair, and I shall not wait.

I know now why you wanted me to see this place. It is not the house, though the house is beautiful. It is not the park, or the water, or the beeches that are the colour of my green room. It is that every single person here loves you. Mrs Reynolds, and the old gardener who taught you to fish, and the Hollins family, and the blacksmith's wife in Lambton, who told me you paid for her husband's leg to be set when you were nineteen and never let him repay a penny. I did not know. You never told me. You would never tell me. You would think it was boasting.

I married you because I loved you. I love you more every day I am here, because I am meeting you for the first time: the whole of you, the boy and the young man and the master, all the parts of you that London never sees. Every room in this house tells me something about you that you would never say yourself. I am falling in love with you all over again, a hundred and fifty miles away. It is the strangest feeling in the world.

Come home soon. The door is still open.

Your Elizabeth

P.S. Mrs Reynolds tells me that a gentleman from London took a room at the Green Man in Lambton on Tuesday, and asked a great many questions in the tap room about the family at the house, and whether the ladies walked out, and where. She did not like the sound of him. The landlord said he was fair, and very pleasant, and paid in gold. I dare say it is nothing. Only I thought you would want to know. No secrets.

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Darcy House. Friday, 24th April. Two o'clock in the morning.

My Elizabeth,

I cannot sleep, so I will tell you the weather: it is dark. There is a watchman going round the square calling two o'clock and a fine night. He is wrong. It is not a fine night. You are not in it.

You asked me once, on the hill at Oakham Mount, why I had told you about Ramsgate. I said I did not know. That was the only lie I have ever told you. I knew. I have known since the moment you took off your glove.

I will tell you now, because it is two o'clock in the morning and I am a hundred and fifty miles away and I find I am not brave enough to say it to your face, only to paper.

All my life, I have been alone in a room full of people. I do not mean that I had no friends. I had Richard. I had Bingley, in his way. I had my sister, when she was small. But nobody ever saw me. They saw Pemberley, and ten thousand a year, and my uncle the earl, and a man who did not dance. They looked at me across a ballroom and added me up, like a column of figures, and I let them, because it was easier than being known. I thought that was what it was to be a Darcy. My father was like that. He had a wife who loved him and he kept her forty yards away down a passage, and he died without ever letting her close. I was going to be like that too. I had made up my mind to it.

And then you looked round a pillar at the Meryton assembly and saw me.

Not Pemberley. Not the ten thousand. Me. A tired man who did not like crowds, who was worried about somebody at home. You had never met me and you saw it at once, and you said it aloud to a room full of people who were laughing at me, and you made a joke of it so that nobody could call you kind.

That is why I told you about Ramsgate. Because you had already seen me. I could not bear to have you see only part of it.

You say in your letter that every room at Pemberley is telling you something about me that I would never say myself. I am glad. I want you to know all of it, even the parts I am ashamed of. I want there to be no room in any house of mine that you cannot walk into. That is what the doors are for. I did not understand it when I had them made. I thought it was only that I did not want to be like my father. I understand it now. I had them made because I have been alone all my life, and I did not know how to stop, and I wanted a door into you that could never be locked from either side.

I have been told, every day for a month, in every newspaper in London, that I married beneath me. It is the only thing they have printed that is not a lie, and it is exactly backwards. I married so far above myself that I shall spend the rest of my life reaching up.

The watchman is calling half past two. I am going to leave this on the desk and not read it over, because if I read it over I shall burn it.

Your husband, who loves you more than it is quite dignified to say,