The air in the yard was cold enough to hurt, and he was grateful for it. He walked along the south wall and down toward the lower field without a coat. Mrs Reeves would scold him for that later, and Mrs Reeves could keep her scolding. The ground was the frozen-and-thawed ground of early March, and each step wanted to turn his ankle, and he kept walking.
At the turn of the wall he stopped because his legs stopped, and he put his hand against the stone, which had the cold of stone and did nothing else of any use to a man putting his hand on it.
I would rather have gone into service, she had said.
Collins had written to her. Collins had written to a woman whose father was unburied and offered comfort and propriety in exchange for a more humble mind.A more humble mind.Someone had written that sentence in a letter to Elizabeth Bennet and expected an agreeable reply.
He bent over with his hand still on the stone. What came up was not sickness, but something that wanted to be sickness and had been denied the means of becoming so. He stayed bent until it went back down.
When he straightened, the lower field was in front of him and the mere below it and the mere was as dark as Hadley had said, with the middle gone a colour he had no precedent for. Along the southern bank the reeds that ought to have been standing out of water were standing out of mud. The line of winter wrack marked where the water had been a fortnight ago.
He did not go down. He turned and walked back to the house by the long way, past the yew, past the stables, along the avenue and in at the front because the front door wasthe door he used when he meant to be seen. Norton was in the hall, and Norton took the expression on his face and did not offer to relieve him of a coat he was not wearing.
“Bring me tea. In the study. And tell Hadley I shall not be wanting him this afternoon.”
“Sir.”
He went up to the study, closed the door, and sat. When the tea came he did not drink it.
Forgery.A capital crime.
He had half-reasoned most of it in the days since the letter, but reasoning and hearing were not the same thing—he had reasoned a case, had known she was running from something, and tried to credit her with honourable motives. Forgery, to defend a widow and her daughters from such a man… No matter how justifiable, it was still a felony.
But she had, in the end, told him. And from the shape of her face when he had entered, he suspected that if he had not confronted her, she had been on the cusp of approaching him.
Hargrove had not come, in his time, to any desk and told. Edmund had not, in any year of his stewardship, given an account. And Wickham! Wickham would have delighted in keeping Darcy ignorant and deceived long after any danger of discovery could have robbed him of his advantages. Each of them had let him reason what they would not say.
But Elizabeth had told him. Had placed her safety—her life, even—in his hands, and trusted him not to destroy her.
He rose and went to the window. He put his forehead against the glass, which was as cold as the wall stone had been an hour before and offered no more comfort than the wall stone had offered.
Whether he would help her was not the question. That had answered itself at some hour he could not now name, weeks ago, and he had been about the business of acting on the answered question without permitting himself to phrase it. The question, at this hour, was what help required, and which persons of his acquaintance he was prepared to stand against in order to give it.
His aunt would learn, at some hour not of his choosing, that he had harboured Elizabeth Bennet. She would not be gentle in the learning. His uncle the Earl would take it with the laconic displeasure of twenty years’ correctness spent on a foolish cause. Georgiana—Georgiana’s reputation rested in part upon the certain rectitude of her brother.
Fitzwilliam he could count on, having counted on him since boyhood. The others he could not count on, and was not in a position to expect any cooperation. He would losestanding in each of them by varying degrees, and he would provide Collins, in the process, with a further and possibly more damaging instrument against her—the discovery that the gentleman of Merebank had known and concealed.
None of this was reason to hesitate, and he did not hesitate.
He returned to the desk and took up a fresh sheet. He wrote to Wainwright—the third letter that week—asking three questions by their proper legal formulations and instructing him by return post what steps Wainwright was to take regarding Mr Tilney of Gray’s Inn and regarding a particular debt paper originating in Hertfordshire and regarding the form of application by which the filing could be challenged before its hearing. He did not set her name. He wrotethe party concernedandthe lady lately residentand such other forms as a careful attorney would understand without requiring the specifics to travel in ink across five counties. He sanded the letter and sealed it, then called for Norton to take it from his hand.
He had just exposed himself. No matter how careful his language, Wainwright would read it knowing his client was now acting on particulars and not apprehension.
“Youareup,”Janesaid.
Elizabeth stiffened, roused a little from her reverie. “I have not been to bed at all. I did not intend to be up at this hour, Jane, but the matter has not permitted me to lie down.”
Jane closed the door. She came into the room and stood at the foot of the bed. She did not sit.
“I went to the parlour this evening to ask whether you would come to supper. Mrs Reeves headed me off in the passage. She told me that you and Mr Darcy had been occupied with a matter in the afternoon, that you had asked not to be disturbed, that a tray had been sent and refused, and that she thought I should leave the thing alone tonight and ask my sister in the morning. I went back to my room and sat with Georgiana for an hour and did not ask my sister in the morning. I am asking her now. What matter, Lizzy?”
Elizabeth looked at her. She could not undertake, at this hour, the graded way of telling a thing that her sister’s composure required, because she had spent whatever could do that yesterday.
“A man came to the village yesterday morning asking after you. And Mr Darcy had a letter more than a week past.”
Jane gasped. “So… he knew?”
“He came to me in the parlour and laid out what he had and asked what I had. I asked for the afternoon. I gave him the afternoon. I told him everything.”
