The clear circle began to refill, but slowly—more slowly than water had any business moving back over a place it had just left—and he watched the darkness flow back into the clearing with the reluctance of a thing being reminded of an older obligation.
Elizabeth did not look at him. She did not look at the water. She looked at the frosted grass of the bank and said, in a voice she had trained to levelness in the half-second since her breath had given her away, “It is colder than I thought.”
“Yes.”
He did not say more. She did not ask him to.
She pulled her glove back on with hands that were not quite working as she meant them to, and he took her weight and brought her up off the bank onto her good foot again, and handed her the crutch, and she fixed the crutch under her arm without meeting his eyes.
“My leg has had enough,” she said. “We ought to go in.”
“Yes.”
He turned with her. They began the walk back.
Shewastired.
He could see it in the set of her shoulders against the shawl and in the small extra care she gave the crutch on the flat places. She was not yet in distress. She was at the near edge of what she could do. They would make it, and she would arrive spent, and Mrs Hadley would put her to bed for the afternoon.
He had perhaps six minutes.
She had told him nothing in speech. But she had knelt at the bank and put her fingers into the water and the water had answered her. He had seen it. She had seen that he had seen it. Neither of them had said one word about it. She was walking beside him now in a silence whose thickness was the shape of the thing that had happened on the bank and the shape of her refusal to let him name it.
He had ruled out every direct question and every indirect one. What he had not ruled out was the ordinary conversation of a gentleman with a lady on a walk—the kind he might make in a drawing-room with any number of acquaintances—and which he could be accused of using for advantage only if the listener knew how much hung on it.
He began with his uncle.
“My uncle Fitzwilliam has been writing to me with some tedium on the subject of the northern property. He holds the view that a second son of his—Colonel Fitzwilliam, whom I hope to present to your acquaintance if he ever consents to visit a county that produces neither society nor good hunting—should be the one inspecting my northern concerns on his behalf. My uncle distrusts anything north of Warwickshire and has extended the distrust to my own judgement now that I have spent longer at Merebank than a gentleman’s business strictly requires.”
“Your uncle Fitzwilliam.”
“The Earl of Matlock. I believe you have not had the pleasure.”
He watched.
There was nothing. A polite attention, no more. She had not recognised the name.
“My aunt, his wife, is kinder than he deserves and writes to Georgiana every fortnight. I owe her a letter I have not yet composed.”
“A common failing.”
“Georgiana has also a cousin at Cambridge who writes her poetry of an increasingly alarming character. We are in some suspense as to whether he means to be sincere or merely fashionable. Both outcomes would require management.”
Another small laugh.
“I may have to go to London in the spring. My affairs there have gone unattended longer than is prudent. There is the question of Georgiana’s town doctor, who has not been consulted since we came north and will be aggrieved. There is the question of my agents, who are also aggrieved but less expensively.”
“You have a habit of aggrieving people, Mr Darcy.”
“It is a family gift.”
“Shared by all your relations, or only you?”
“A general endowment, variously applied. Lord Matlock aggrieves his agents. His wife aggrieves her dressmaker. Fitzwilliam aggrieves the officers under his command. I have merely inherited the constitution.”
“And your aunt in the south? Has she been spared the family gift?”
He let the smallest measure of a breath through before he answered. This was the approach he had planned. He was not prepared for the sheer difficulty of keeping his own tone at the level hers had set.
