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Gardiner rose when the business was finished. Darcy wanted to ask whether Elizabeth had slept, whether she had eaten, whether she had read his letter. He asked none of those things. She had left his house to be free of enquiries conducted through other people.

* * *

At home he called the butler and housekeeper into his study. The housekeeper brought her memorandum book, expecting instructions concerning the journey which had been cancelled. Darcy asked her to open it upon a fresh page.

“Letters addressed to Mrs. Darcy are to be forwarded to her unopened. Letters she entrusts to any servant for posting are to be sent without coming to this room. That instruction applies whenever she is here, as well as during her absence.”

The butler repeated the direction. Darcy made him repeat the second part too. He remembered Elizabeth asking whether her correspondence would continue to pass through his study, and his own answer: for the present. She would have been a fool to trust another indulgence subject to the same reservation.

“There are to be no reports to me of her visitors or movements,” he said. “No one is to seek such information from the Gardiners' servants. Colonel Fitzwilliam is not authorised to request it on my behalf, either concerning Mrs. Darcy or Mrs. Collins. The porter's instruction concerning Mrs. Darcy's walking out is withdrawn. She goes where she pleases, as she pleases.”

He watched the housekeeper write it down. She copied the directions onto a loose sheet for his desk. She asked what should be done if the Colonel called with different directions. Darcy told her to refer him to this instruction, and to himself if further explanation was required. It was his cousin's displeasure to meet, not hers.

After they had gone, he wrote to Elizabeth. The note acknowledged that she was staying where she had chosen and would decide for herself how long. Her settled provision would not be challenged or made conditional upon her return. If she wished for other property from the house, it would be sent where she directed. He described the changed correspondence instructions plainly and stated that he would not seek reports of her movements.

He did not include an account of the sacrifice this cost him. Nor did he ask for a reply. He sealed the note and gave it to the butler for delivery, keeping the unsent invitation in the drawer.

At dinner the second place had not been laid. Darcy ate at the table he had arranged, in the household which still obeyed him, and discovered that he could make no useful instruction about the only absence he wished to remedy.

CHAPTER 9

ELIZABETH

On Monday the solicitor brought Darcy's account to the Gardiners and placed it before Elizabeth without telling her what she ought to feel. Charlotte sat beside her. They had given permission for it to be received on Saturday. Elizabeth had held Darcy's note to her uncle for a long while that afternoon, astonished that the man who had read her letters should offer his own conduct to be read, and suspicious of how much she wished it to be true. Permission had proved easier than reading the result.

Elizabeth had opened both her husband's letters the day before. The first requested a few minutes with her. The second acknowledged that how long she stayed was hers to decide, described the changed household instructions and asked for no reply. She had read that one often enough to recognise the care with which he had avoided asking for anything between the lines. She had not yet trusted it.

The signed account was less carefully agreeable. Darcy began with his arrival after Collins had been struck. He distinguished the room he had seen from the violence he had not, giving neither woman a thought or intention to which he could lay no claim. Charlotte read those sentences first, then put a finger beside the description of what followed.

“That is what he directed,” she said.

The solicitor asked whether either woman wished to correct any part of his recollection. Elizabeth read on before answering. Her marriage occupied less space than she had expected. There was no account of how he had come to love her, no appeal to the intensity of a feeling he had found sufficient to justify every means of gratifying it. He had made his assistance conditional. He had intended her to understand that refusal would expose them.

She put the paper down. For so long she had been required to preserve a distinction between what Darcy had done and what the world might call it that seeing him dispense with the distinction left her almost breathless. It was there, over his own signature. She had not misunderstood him, provoked him or spoiled a happy marriage by remembering its beginning.

“Elizabeth?” Charlotte asked.

“I am quite well.” She disliked the answer as soon as she gave it. “No. I am angry that this can be said so plainly now, when I have spent so much effort trying to make him hear it.”

Charlotte waited. The solicitor looked at his notes rather than at her face, giving her a moment in which she was not an object of anyone's concern. Elizabeth took it, breathing carefully until she could read the final page.

The account went on to the letters, the withheld information and the journey prepared without her knowledge. It made no promise that those things would never happen again. His letter changed the instructions about her post and movements; it had not yet shown her what he would do when he next believed himself entitled to keep something from her. She returned the signed pages to the solicitor, who put them with the record he retained for their advice.

“I have no correction to make to what I witnessed,” she said. “I wish both accounts kept. We may need them.”

* * *

The carrier's confirmation came that afternoon: the sealed packet had been delivered to the Colonel at his lodgings. The ring was no longer waiting somewhere between Charlotte's refusal and Richard's willingness to hear it.

Charlotte put the confirmation with her own papers at the parlour table, where her father sat beside her. “Now he cannot suppose I meant to keep it.”

“Would that matter?” Sir William asked.

“To him, perhaps. To me, certainly.” Charlotte closed the small case in which she kept her letters. “I do not wish to quarrel about jewellery when I mean to refuse an arrangement.”

Her father nodded, chastened without being dismissed. He had written down the allowance he could provide and the date upon which the first payment would be made. The amount was modest, but it belonged to a plan which Charlotte could examine. Elizabeth's uncle likewise confirmed the income available for her immediate expenses and said that his enquiry concerning Ashbourne had gone to its owner. They must await the reply before engaging a carriage for the country.

The women then told the solicitor what they wished him to request from Lady Catherine. A private meeting on Thursday would allow her to state her demands and show the report upon which she based them. They would bring their own accounts and their own advisers. Charlotte wished her father present. Both agreed that Darcy should attend; the Colonel was to be invited only for the part concerning his conduct towards Charlotte.