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Darcy looked out of the window. He made no further enquiry, though there remained the length of Brook Street in which he might have made several. Elizabeth kept her gloves folded. Tomorrow she would visit her uncle, and this time she would have to ask for something more difficult than an afternoon alone with a friend.

CHAPTER 3

ELIZABETH

At her aunt's house on Saturday, Elizabeth was offered a chair with a cushion which had lost an unequal battle against the children, a plate of biscuits and a description of a cold which had travelled through the family with more determination than severity. She had not known how much she missed being received somewhere that had been occupied before she entered it.

Mrs. Gardiner kissed her, held her away for a moment's inspection, then refrained from saying whatever she had intended. Instead she moved the plate nearer. “Your uncle will be with us directly. He insisted on putting away his papers himself, though I told him you had married into sufficient wealth to be above stealing his accounts.”

“I should have preferred an opportunity to prove my honesty.”

“You may begin with the biscuits. There were six when I left the room.”

Elizabeth took one. It broke badly, and she laughed at the crumbs in her lap with a freedom out of proportion to the accident. Her aunt fetched a napkin without making anything of the laugh. This, too, was a kindness she had forgotten: to be observed without being required to account for what was seen.

When Mr. Gardiner came in, he asked after the journey and Darcy, then sat beside the table rather than behind it. Elizabeth gave the answers expected of a recently married niece. They sounded tolerable until her uncle asked whether she had found everything at the London house to her liking.

She looked down at the crumbs. “I have a room of my own.”

“That is good,” her aunt said carefully.

“Yes. It is.” Elizabeth put the napkin aside. “My letters are taken to his study before they are sent. He reads them.”

Neither of them spoke at once. From somewhere above came a child's protest against an injustice which appeared to concern a wooden horse. Mrs. Gardiner glanced towards the ceiling, waited until the noise subsided and looked back at her niece.

“All of them?”

“All that pass through his servants. I tried to write to Jane in a manner he would not understand. He understood it perfectly.” The humiliation returned in the familiar room, where she had hoped to be spared it. “Will you show me what my father arranged for me? What is actually mine to use.”

Gardiner's expression had lost its mildness, but he made no declaration about what Darcy must be made to do. He asked instead whether she could obtain money when she needed it.

“I can ask my husband.”

“That was not quite my question.”

“No.” She rubbed a crumb between her finger and thumb until it became dust. “I know.”

* * *

Her uncle brought the settlement papers from his locked cabinet. He did not present their existence as a revelation, for Elizabeth knew of her father's provision; what she had lacked was the certainty of how a promise made before her marriage might become a bed, a journey or the payment of a tradesman after it.

Gardiner laid the papers where she could read them and indicated the provisions he meant to discuss. The income was held under the settlement, with himself appointed to administer it for her benefit. The arrangement did not make her mistress of an estate. It gave her a means of meeting ordinary expenses without asking Darcy to approve each one.

“There is enough for respectable lodgings, if you were to live quietly,” he said. “Not for the establishment at Grosvenor Square. I should rather tell you that now than encourage an expectation the account cannot fulfil.”

“I have never been particularly attached to having my own footman.”

“Then we begin with an economy upon which we agree.”

She bent over the paper. Her father's name was there, familiar in its careless-looking confidence. He had made her laugh at people who took themselves too seriously, then left her to discover that laughter could not always protect her from them. Yet he had also done this. She touched the edge of the sheet, surprised by the sharp desire to sit beside him in his library and say nothing for a while.

Ashbourne was separately provided for: the use of a house belonging to an acquaintance of Darcy's, abroad for the year, which her father had insisted be reserved to her in the articles for an agreed term. Gardiner showed her where the arrangement ended, well beyond the coming three months but not indefinitely. Availability would need confirming before she travelled, and the household could not be expected to receive her upon the mere production of a key.

“The key I have,” she said.

“I am glad of it. We shall still write.”

Her aunt smiled, and Elizabeth found that she could smile too. The limit was almost reassuring. Something which had an end and required ordinary arrangements seemed more likely to exist than a refuge which would answer every need merely because she had been told of it.