“For what reason?”
“For the reason she keeps anyone three further. She required an audience.”
“Yes.”
“She had a plan, Darcy. She had a plan for the spring. She had a plan for Anne. She had a plan, I take it, that you have known of in some form since we were not yet of age, but the plan had advanced very considerably since I had last had it from her. She intended Anne to be brought to Northmere by Easter for the waters. She intended Anne to be married out of the chapel here, and to be brought home in the carriage as Mrs Darcy. She had the parson chosen. She had the gown made. The gown is in two crates at Rosings now.”
Darcy walked four paces without answering, then walked three more.
“I had not heard of the crates.”
“There were no crates when I was last at Rosings in the summer. There are now. I saw them. I asked her what they contained. She told me with the air of a woman who imagined I should be congratulating her on her foresight.”
“In May?”
“In May. She had reckoned the journey at four days inside a closed carriage. She had reckoned the marriage at within ten days of the journey’s end. She had reckoned the return at three weeks, if the weather held; six, if it did not. She is a woman of estimates.”
“She is a woman of estimates who has had a wrong estimate for fourteen years.”
“There is more,” Fitzwilliam said. “I met Collins at Rosings. I had not met him before. He had come from Hertfordshire, he said, on 'business" with Lady Catherine. He came up to the house on the Sunday morning, the Tuesday morning, and the Tuesday afternoon at tea. I had no interest in him beyond the interest one takes in any man who has been spoken of one too many times at a luncheon. By Tuesday I had taken his measure. On the Tuesday afternoon I had occasion to take his confidence.”
“What confidence?”
“Lady Catherine, in my hearing, asked him for the second time at tea about his trouble with the Bennet cousins. I confess I had not, by Tuesday afternoon, made the connection.”
“And he answeredher.”
“He answered her at very considerable length. He spoke of his late cousin’s daughter, of her refusal of him, of an irregularity in the estate accounts that had come to light upon his entering on the property, of certain forged papers he had with great pain of conscience uncovered, of his Christian duty in the matter, of the unfortunate flight of the young women out of his protection, of his fear that they were now in want and possibly under improper influence. He spoke her name. He spoke the elder’s also. He spoke her uncle’s. He spoke her sister Mrs Marsden’s by her widowed name without knowing he had spoken her, because he did not, on Tuesday last, know that Mrs Marsden was at Northmere.”
“And our aunt?”
“She must know by now, Darcy. Anyone with leisure to put it together will. The road runs from Pemberley to Rosings as freely as from Rosings to Pemberley, and our aunt has servants who write to servants. Within a fortnight, perhaps within a week, she will know that the woman who shamed her clergyman is the woman you have brought into a Darcy house and propose to put on a Darcy marriage book. She will take it personally, and she will exert herself.”
“Let her exert herself.”
“You speak as if exertion on her part were an inconvenience and not a danger. It is both, Darcy. She has tenants who will believe what she tells them. She has connections in the church. She has more particularly the cousin who has been forging papers under her nose, and she has now the inducement to defend him, because to abandon him would be to admit she had appointed a fool. She will not admit it. She will instead pour resources into him, and through him into the legal pursuit of the matter we have been most particularly retaining a solicitor in Derby to forestall. She is going to be the second front of this engagement.”
“I have already had that thought.”
“Have you?”
“I have.”
“Then you know that the woman you have asked to be your wife is going to have, in addition to a clergyman, an attorney, a magistrate, and a steward of the Northmere accounts arrayed against her, a great-aunt of Pemberley who will spend the next two years making the matter the burden of every drawing room from here to Margate. And you intend to marry her anyway.”
“I intend to marry her this week if she will have me.”
“Thisweek?”
“If a special licence can be brought up from London.”
Fitzwilliam was silent for some yards. “I shall write to my father this afternoon.”
“Wainwright has not yet replied.”
“He will reply by tomorrow’s post if he is what you have said he is.”
“He is what I have said he is.”
