“My aunt in Kent has the family gift in its most unmitigated form and bestows it with the freest hand of any of us. I shall have to disappoint her this year by not attending at Rosings for April, which she will take as an act of unfilial neglect requiring a letter of eight pages to correct. I expect two.”
“Eight pages—or two letters?”
“Two letters, each of eight pages. I have received them before.”
She laughed.
He laughed with her.
He had not intended to. He had intended to offer her the sentence in the exact dry tone he had planned upstairs at five o’clock this morning and let her laugh against it without joining her, and the plan had held until her laugh reached him and met something in him for which no plan had been adequate. The laugh was louder than he wanted it to be and warmer than he could afford, and he could not retrieve it once it was in the air between them.
“Poor Mr Darcy. Besieged by aunts.”
“One aunt. Who is the equal of several.”
“And her name, so I may pity you properly?”
He had not expected her to ask outright. It disordered his plan by half a second, but he recovered. “Lady Catherine de Bourgh.”
He did not look at her.
He looked at the path, at the crutch, at the distance to the next bend. He held his pace at what it had been. He held his arm at the angle it had been. He did not turn his face, because if he turned his face he would not be able to keep it, and she would see him, andthe whole thing would be over.
Her hand on his arm did not move. That was the thing he caught first—that her hand, which had been adjusting and lifting and resuming along the walk back, went still. It did not tighten. It did not lift. It simply stopped making the small movements it had been making.
Her next step was a half-count late.
She did not stumble. She compensated at once, with the crutch, and with a hand at his arm that found the grip it needed. But the half-count was there. He felt it under his sleeve.
He waited for her to produce the next line of the exchange. It was her turn, if she were truly innocent of Lady Catherine's name. He had offered it. The small social ledger required her to offer something back. Aformidable woman, I take it.Awhat a name.Any sentence at all. She had produced three such sentences for the other aunts in the last quarter of an hour, each sharper than the last, each delivered in the dry tone she had been entertaining him with since January.
The sentence did not come.
She drew a breath and did not speak on it. And another.
He did not look at her. He could not. He kept walking. He kept his arm at the angle her hand required. The bend in the path went past. The next bend came up. Still no sentence. The gap where her wit had been was more conclusive than any answer she could have produced.
He did not fill the gap. The name had done what he had needed it to do. He owed her—he owed himself—the silence that followed.
They walked the last stretch of the path in that silence. He had his confirmation.
He had nothing he could do with it.
He had to sit at supper with her this evening.
He had to walk past the parlour door tomorrow, and the day after, and however many days followed, and know what he knew, and say nothing.
Chapter Thirty-One
Byteno’clockonthe day after the walk Elizabeth had been at the writing-table in the parlour for nearly an hour and had produced two opening sentences, each worse than the last, and had burnt them both.
She had started with her aunt and uncle Gardiner in Cheapside, which was the only letter she had any business writing at all. She had setMy dear aunt and uncleat the top of the sheet and got as far asI am obliged to beg of youbefore she had set the pen down.
The trouble was not the words. The trouble was the sheet itself, with her hand upon it, being set into a mail-bag at the north end of a post-road and drawn south by stages through Derby, Leicester, Northampton, St Albans, and into a London office where a letter from Derbyshire addressed to an address in Cheapside known to be that of her only uncle in trade was exactly the letter Mr Collins’s attorney, if he was any good, would be instructing some clerk to watch for. She did not know whether Mr Tilney of Gray’s Inn had instructed any clerk to watch for anything. She had to assume he had. She had spent long enough on the flight north understanding what she was running from to know that any attorney retained to recover property of the value Collins meant to recover would have placed a hand on the post at both ends, and that a sheet of her writing travelling from Derby to Cheapside was, by itself, a summons.
She drew the pen throughI am obliged to beg of youand fed the sheet to the fire.
The second had been to an old cousin of her mother’s in Bristol whom Elizabeth had last seen when she was eleven and whom she could not now be sure was still alive. She had writtenMy dear Mrs Fentonand then she had stopped, because Bristol was further than her uncle’s courage had been able to stretch in January, and because Mrs Fenton, if she was still alive, would answer any enquiry from an unknown Miss Bennet of Hertfordshire by writing first to Longbourn to confirm that such a niece existed. A letter from Bristol to Longbourn asking after Elizabeth would reach Collins within four days. She fed Mrs Fenton to the fire as well.
