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She took a second spoonful with deliberate enjoyment. He laughed and passed her the toast.

He wanted mornings like this. The wish was almost painful in its ordinariness. He had possessed houses enough to accommodate a dozen such lives, and failed to understand that a person could make one possible only by choosing it.

They spoke of the road he would take back to London and the weather expected later. Elizabeth asked whether he could discover the title of a useful book on pruning, adding that she meant the title, not a new library. Darcy promised the title. He would have enjoyed buying her every relevant volume in London. The smaller request gave him something he could actually do for her.

Before ten she went upstairs to fetch a letter for Jane, which she intended to put with the outgoing post. Darcy waited in the hall, his gloves on. The coachman reported that all was ready. He could have found another question about the garden, another small excuse to occupy five minutes. He had agreed to leave at ten.

Elizabeth came down with the sealed letter in her hand and gave it to the housekeeper. Then she walked outside with him. The air was already warm, and the shadow of the house fell across the drive where his carriage stood.

“I am glad you stayed,” she said.

“So am I.” He took her hand, kissed it and let it go. There was no invitation for another day, and he asked for none. When he was seated, she stepped back to the housekeeper, already beginning to speak of the kitchen garden.

Darcy watched them turn towards the path as the carriage moved. Elizabeth had a morning to continue after his departure. He had been allowed into it for a time, and left it without requiring her to abandon the rest. The pleasure he took from that discovery was smaller than triumph and much more difficult to lose.

CHAPTER 13

ELIZABETH

In the third month after Elizabeth left Grosvenor Square, Darcy arrived at Ashbourne expecting a drive and found her dressed for a walk. She had proposed the drive herself in her last letter. Since then she had spent two days upon the road to visit Charlotte and found that her enthusiasm for carriage cushions had been exhausted for the week.

“I am sorry,” she said. “You may call me inconsistent, provided we discuss it upon our feet.”

Darcy looked towards the carriage, which had been kept ready at his direction. There was enough disappointment in his expression to make her anxious, followed by a calculation she recognised. He had arranged an agreeable prospect and hoped to show it to her. She had altered the prospect before he could begin.

“May I put off the entertainment until another day?” she asked.

“Yes.” He turned to give the coachman the changed instruction, then returned to her. “Though I shall be obliged to discover something nearer at hand worth your attention.”

“You might begin with yourself.”

His answering smile made the remark worth its immodesty. They took the path beside the wall and went out through the gate she had found on her first solitary walk. Elizabeth carried no work, no letter requiring discussion and nothing with which to defend herself from an idle hour. She told him about a neighbour's dog which had mistaken her basket for an invitation, and he asked what had been in it.

“Nothing worth the indignity of having to negotiate for it.”

“Then the animal was unreasonable.”

She almost spared him the comparison, remembering how often a joke between them had become an argument. But she wanted to laugh with him without first deciding what he could bear. “Entirely. I thought you would sympathise with my position.”

Darcy glanced at her, recognised the invitation to take offence and declined it with a dry observation about the costs of an inadequate negotiator. She laughed. When he asked later what Charlotte had said in Hertfordshire to make her smile at the memory of it, she said it was a private joke between them. He accepted that answer and began pointing out the repairs to a field gate.

It was not that he had become incurious. She could see that he wished to know. The difference was what he did with the wish. Elizabeth listened to his explanation of why the gate sagged and discovered she was thinking of ordinary years: walks in which she would be inattentive, arguments she would not win, letters whose contents would interest him without belonging to him. The thought frightened her less than it pleased her.

At the house he left when he had said he would. She watched him go, then went upstairs to write to her uncle. There were practical questions she wished answered before she made the less practical decision which had begun to occupy nearly every unguarded moment.

* * *

Gardiner and his wife came to Ashbourne later that week, staying a night on a journey they had already intended to make. Her uncle brought the papers she had asked him to review, but her aunt brought a description of the children which took precedence over them until after dinner. Elizabeth welcomed the delay. She did not wish the whole visit to become an enquiry into whether she had learnt enough to manage her own happiness.

The following morning she and her uncle sat at the small table near the window. The copy of the existing provision lay between them. He answered the question she had asked in her letter before beginning upon any figure.

“Living with your husband does not, of itself, extinguish the arrangement made in your settlement. I shall continue to administer the income under its terms.”

Elizabeth read the provision again while he waited. Nothing upon the page required the surrender she had feared might be expected of a wife returning willingly. She looked up and told him that Darcy had asked for no alteration.

“I wished to be certain that I was not making the choice smaller by misunderstanding what followed it. I need not give it up to show that I mean to remain with him.”

“That would be a very expensive way of illustrating an intention,” Gardiner said. He turned to the account of her income, ready to show her what the practical answer would amount to.