“Quite right. And the form of it?”
“Marriage within the Diocese of Lichfield, at any church or chapel of the diocese, at any canonical hour, by any clergyman with licensed faculty. The vicar at Northmere village has undertaken to be ready at whatever hour you should fix. He has put down tomorrow morning at eleven, or the morning after at the same hour, to give you the choice.”
Darcy picked up the paper. He did not break the seal. He went to the window with it. The mere held the late February light off the bottom of the western reeds where, in November, it had held nothing at all.
“Tomorrow at eleven.”
“Sir.”
“And the rest of the bag?”
Ellison undid the tape and laid the three letters on the long table beside the licence. “From Mr Wainwright, sir, with materials behind it.” He passed the first across. “Mr Collins has retained a London attorney. Mr Wainwright has copies of the preliminary writ, which is for the present being held back from filing. The opposing attorney has served notice that he means to file within seven days unless a private settlement is reached. The terms proposed are the removal of Miss Bennet from Northmere and her placement either at the Magdalen Hospital in London, or at another house of correction acceptable to Lady Catherine.”
“And the second?”
“From a Mr Stanley at the office of the Faculty in Doctors’ Commons, whom Mr Wainwright has put on to make particular enquiries. Within the last week Lady Catherine has put in an application of her own—not a marriage faculty this time, but the conveyance of the patronage at Hunsford to a person other than herself, in trust, inter vivos. Mr Wainwright has marked the bottom in his own hand.”
Darcy read Wainwright’s hand without taking the letter from the table.She is making her papers transferable.
He understood the note at once. If Lady Catherine were taken ill, or if she chose to remove to Bath for the season, her instruments against the family would not be lost. Collins would have a second authority over him.
“And the third?”
“From Mr Gardiner, sir. He is up at his wife’s cousin’s house in Lambton; Mrs Gardiner came up to him two days ago. He is at your disposal whenever a carriage is sent. He writes that he could be at Northmere by tea-time of the following day.”
Darcy did not answer at once.
“Then we shall have them up to-morrow. He shall give her. The Colonel shall stand for me. Mrs Reeves shall lay the breakfast at the house. We shall not, in this season, contemplate the long table at the church. Mr Hadley and his wife shall stand at the church; Mrs Reeves shall ask Mrs Hadley this evening. And, Mr Ellison, I shall see to it that you are well settled at the inn in Bakewell until the morning following. I would have preferred to offer you a room here, but with the south wing as it is, I am afraid we have no extra rooms. I shall see to a carriage for you to Bakewell.”
Ellison’s eyes widened. “That is very kind, sir. I had not looked for any special consideration.”
“You deserve it, Ellison. You have done very well for me.”
“I have done, sir, what I was set to do.”
Darcy did not contradict him. He took the licence to his own writing-table behind the long one, picked up his pen, and dipped it.
“Half an hour, Mr Ellison. I will go to Miss Bennet now to talk of the arrangements for tomorrow.”
Herhandwentthroughhis arm at the top of the church step before she had given any direction to it. The cane was at the house in Mrs Reeves’s keeping, against some return to need she did not, this morning, intend.
“Mrs Darcy.”
He had been saying it under his breath through the vicar’s homily, and once, very softly, at the rail when the vicar had paused for the responses, and was by now in the matter of saying it not so much with words as with his arm under her hand. He had said it now properly because they were on the church step and the company was coming out behind them, and he might say a thing aloud to his wife on a church step that he might not on the inside of a church.
them there. The family she had to run from to keep them safe, and Mr Darcy’s protection and love and care has made it possible to try to restore them to her. She doesn’t know how it’s all going to work. But this valley heals, and here is the proof.
She did not at first answer.
Of the things she had supposed in November to have been taken finally out of her hand—the use of her own foot upon a gravel path, the use of her own name in plain hearing, the use of any arm but a paid attendant’s anywhere—there had been none she had given more nights to than the second; and the second was the thing he had given her in two words on the church step in the cold of February.
She turned her head.
Her aunt and uncle Gardiner were three persons behind her at the door of the church, her aunt’s hand in her uncle’s arm where it had been these twenty-eight years. They had been at the breakfast table of Lambton at six o’clock. They had come down to Northmere in time for the vicar’s first words. They were here.
She had been at a distance from her uncle since the autumn, as she had been at a distance from every other party of her family. He would not have been a danger to her. She would have been a danger to him; and she had laid the distance between them deliberately, by no post, no acknowledgment, no word sent her aunt that her aunt could have answered without bringing the lender’s clerk to her own door. She had not known then that there should be such a man as Mr Darcy in the world, by whose care alone the restoration of her uncle to her should have been made possible—possible at the price of a chaise from Lambton in the cold of a March morning, and the giving of her, in his Cheapside voice and on the strict form, to a man who should not by any conduct of his own dishonour her in a course of years. She had not known there should be such a valley either, that should heal a leg and a name and an aunt and an uncle and give them all back to her on a church step in the same hour.
She did not yet know how the rest of it should work. The valley healed, however; and her aunt and her uncle on the church step in the late March sun were the proof of it.
