Accompanying the filing is a circular of enquiry directed to attorneys throughout the northern districts. The circular concerns not Miss Bennet alone but her elder sister, one Mrs Marsden, whose husband, Mr Marsden, was understood to have removed northward with his wife in the year preceding last for the benefit of mineral waters upon a chest complaint. The pair are supposed by Mr Tilney’s client to be presently resident in that country, and the circular enquires after the lady’s direction on the assumption of their continuing establishment there.
It is supposed by Mr Tilney’s client, upon intelligence I cannot judge the source of, that Miss Bennet may have fled to her sister for shelter, and that the sister’s present place of residence may therefore be the object of direct enquiry.
The circular further specifies, in terms of greater particularity than I was at first prepared for, that the said Mrs Marsden is thought most likely to be found in the neighbourhood of Merebank in Derbyshire, that estate being described as an obscure property possessed of waters of the class in question, and the only such known to Mr Tilney’s client in the northern counties.
I need hardly represent to you, sir, that it is this final particular that has obliged me to write at once rather than await our next quarterly correspondence. The circular has named your estate by name. It is addressed to every attorney of my profession in this county. I should suppose that by the end of the present week a dozen of my colleagues in Derby and Bakewell will have read it over their morning coffee and considered at their leisure whether their own clients have any connection to the property so identified.
I have not communicated any reply to Mr Tilney’s enquiry, and shall not without your instruction. I have, however, thought it my duty to bring the filing and the circular to your attention at the earliest opportunity, and to enclose a fair copy of the principal passages for your perusal.
If I may be of any further service in the business, I am, of course, entirely at your direction.
I remain, sir, &c.,
J. Wainwright
Darcy read it twice.
Longbourn. Hertfordshire. The Reverend Mr William Collins. A young gentlewoman named Elizabeth Bennet, believed to have travelled north under a false direction, holding documents material to an entail. A married elder sister supposed to be living with her husband near mineral waters in the north. Merebank named as the likely place.
He did not sit.
He set the page flat on the desk because his hand, after the third reading, had begun to produce a small unsteadiness in the paper he could not permit to persist. He stood with both hands braced on the desk’s edge and read Wainwright’s third paragraph once more, slowly, as if he were parsing an indictment whose charges turned on single words.
Each word held.
Merebank was his own property, and too obscure for its name to have reached the outside world through any channel but one. His aunt, instructed by Mr Collins uponthe afflictions of the Bennet family, would have pronounced with her customary confidence that she happened to know of a suitable property in Derbyshire, and would have surrendered the name before Collins had finished thanking her for her attention.
That the pronouncement had been made in ignorance—that Lady Catherine did not know, any more than her former rector did, that Miss Bennet was at present in his own parlour—was a mercy Darcy could not permit himself to rely upon for longer than the week. The circular was out to every attorney in the county. Wainwright had written first. Others would write to Tilney.
He had known since nearly her first week at Merebank that Miss Bennet was hiding from something material enough to make her white at the mention of her own county. Three days ago in the lane he had received her plainest confession yet—I cannot—and had accepted it without question.
What he had not known was that she was the subject of process.
Not gossip. Not private pursuit. A filing in Chancery. An instrument of law, drawn up by an attorney in Gray’s Inn, naming her by name, describing her flight in the forensic language of a claim. And a circular by that same hand, hunting her through enquiries after her sister, that had printed the name of his own house in black ink.
He had been sheltering, in his own house, under the same roof as his sister, a woman against whom a cause had been filed in a court of law, without knowing she stood so charged.
His eye went, almost of its own accord, to the other letter upon the desk.
He picked up Fitzwilliam’s pages and read them again.
This time he read them differently.
Pronounced upon Merebank four times. At the second, six.
Five upon the comparative merits of southern and northern waters (the latter suddenly risen in her estimation).
Seven upon Georgiana’s rapid improvement under the influence of your springs, of which she has persuaded herself in the cheerful absence of any correspondence to contradict her.
A young lady come to stay at Merebank who broke her leg upon the ice in January and has been mending under your roof since. She describes the recovery as remarkable.
She does not, in either letter, supply the lady’s name.
If you are at liberty to supply any particulars, I should be glad of them.
The Merebankcampaign was no longer a family joke. Lady Catherine had pronounced upon Merebank at Rosings with the frequency of a woman determined the entire dinner-table should know of it by the close of the meal, and she had been doing so for months.
And Fitzwilliam was already asking questions.
