“Shall we walk the lane?”
Elizabeth turned back to the man beside her. “I shall walk the lane, sir, on the arm of my husband. There is no part of that arrangement, sir, that three months ago I should have had any business supposing. I shall require some considerable practice before I have made myself a mistress of it.”
“I shall bear with you, madam, for some considerable period.”
“I had hoped you might.”
The leg held her down off the church onto the gravel of the path in one step. She had set her foot on the gravel as easily as she might have set it upon the carpet at the top of the south passage. Darcy’s arm was under her hand, and it was his name that was now hers. There were so many small and not-so-small miracles in the matter of that one step, and she had no breath this morning to give to more than one of them at a time, and the third she set aside, for now, for the lane.
Behind them by some paces Mrs Gardiner’s voice came up, in the carrying London tone she used when she had been brought to a country prospect she was determined to admire.
“It is the most extraordinary water, Mrs Hadley. I had thought from my niece—Mrs Darcy, I must learn to say—that the mere was a darkish sort of pond. It is not. It is the colour of weak tea on the surface, and where the sun is on it, of new-cut silver below. I do not think I have ever seen a body of water of just that character in any county I have travelled in.”
“It is not a pond, ma’am.”
“No, I see it is not. I had got the impression from the descriptions, but the descriptions had not—”
“It is not a lake either, ma’am, by your leave. It is the mere.”
Elizabeth had heard, atMrs Darcy, her aunt’s voice catch in a manner her aunt herself had not heard; and her aunt was already speaking of the colour of the water again.
“Forgive me, Mrs Hadley. The smell, however, I shall confess to. It is something between a sulphur spring and a—well. I shall not draw a comparison the gentlemen would think me genteel for drawing. I shall say only that it is something my husband does not appear to mind, but which I am not, this fortnight, in any disposition to bottle.”
“It is the iron, ma’am. And a little of the lime. It is good for the lambs.”
“For the lambs?”
“Mr Hadley has had eleven this lambing, ma’am, and not one weak. He had three out of twenty-three the year before. And there is Mrs Pemberton in the village, who could not open her hand in November without crying, and who has baked three batches a week these last three weeks. The Reverend’s gout has gone down, of which the Reverend will not speak in his own person. The smell, ma’am, is the smell of the waters. The waters have been particular this year.”
“I see.”
“They have been particular, ma’am, for Mr Darcy and his lady too in their own time. I should not, by your leave, discuss it in the lane, but I should say—”
“You shall, Mrs Hadley, say whatever you please.”
“The waters are not, ma’am, the sort of waters one bottles.”
Elizabeth walked on her husband’s arm up the lane. The lane in February had the dry hedge on either hand and the sun coming clean down between the bare branches and a smell of cold ground and old smoke from a kitchen chimney somewhere off behind the wood. The leg held her at every step. The leg, if anyone should have asked her, had not been a part of her at all in November. The leg this morning, if anyone should have asked her, was a part of her she had not consented to surrender at any hour of the last six months and would not consent to surrender at any further hour for the rest of her life.
The Colonel’s voice came up next, somewhere behind Mrs Gardiner’s, in the dry quick tone she had come to know on him. Mrs Marsden was on his left arm. Miss Darcy was on his right. Georgiana was laughing at something Jane had said. Jane was, perhaps, laughing at something Georgiana had said back. Behind them, Mr Hadley and her uncle Gardiner had got onto the question of the eastern gate, and Mr Ellison brought up the rear with the bag strapped to his arm.
The word came up under her hand on her husband’s coat before she had words for it being the word that came up. The word wassafe. She had not, in the last six months, had the word in her possession. She had been carrying its absence under everything she did, and under everything she said, and under everything she had not said to her sister or her aunt or her uncle or to the man who walked her up the lane this morning; and the carrying had been so habitual that she had not, until this morning, had occasion to put the carrying down. She put it down. She walked on her husband’s arm with her sister and her sister-by-marriage and her aunt and her uncle and the Hadleys and Mr Ellison behind her, and there was no one in the world this hour who had reach upon her that the company behind her could not put between her and the reach.
The lane bent.
Merebank came up at the bend, with its gables of yellow stone in the late February sun and the south windows giving back the brightness of the mere across the lawn. Mrs Reeves had set the door open. There was a wreath of winter green on it, of Mrs Reeves’s making.
There was also a carriage drawn up on the gravel under the south gable.
It was not a carriage Elizabeth knew. It was a hired post-chaise. The boy of the chaise was at the head of his off horse. The door of the chaise was open. On the step of the chaisestood a man in a black coat. He had risen at the sound of the wedding-party in the lane. He had spent the morning on the road north. He had no intention of taking the afternoon to recover from the road.
Mr Collins had arrived.
Chapter Forty-Three
MrCollinscamedownoff the step of the chaise toward them with his hat in his hand.
“Mr Darcy, sir—Mr Darcy—I had not thought to find you abroad, but it is the better that I have. I had been preparing myself to wait in the house, but I have been kept at this step these forty minutes for the want of your housekeeper’s leave to enter—I beg you would not blame the housekeeper, sir; she had no instruction in the matter. I have come up on the night mail with intelligence of the most pressing nature, and I shall beg of you, sir, the favour of a private word at the earliest—by your leave, before any further part of the morning’s business is taken up, for I should rather speak to you, sir, in such terms as do not bear telling before—”
