Not the questions Darcy most feared—Fitzwilliam had no reason yet to connect an unnamed patient in Derbyshire with a young gentlewoman named in a filing in London. He had only marked the omission of a name in Georgiana’s letters and put the inquiry to Darcy with his usual directness. But it was not nothing that the man Darcy was about to send hunting, on his behalf and without explanation, had already begun collecting unanswered questions about the same household.
Fitzwilliam had heard her. So had the other guests at the two dinners. So, certainly, had Lady Catherine’s physician at Harley Street, because Lady Catherine never said anything to her physician that she did not also say four times over in company. The Merebank name had been broadcast, by a voice designed for broadcast, throughout an acquaintance that reached from every drawing-room in Kent into the chambers of several attorneys of the better sort. Mr Rowland Tilney, counsel to Lady Catherine, was within the natural compass of that voice.
The circular’s specificity was accounted for.
So was its velocity.
He went to the window.
The yard offered no counsel. The lower field beyond the south wall showed a colder green today, still uneven where the water had drawn wrong after her attempt to leave. Ashby was at the carrier with two boys and a length of timber. Hadley, farther off, moved along the meadow with the patient stoop of a man who distrusted every surface while pretending only to inspect one. Beyond them, under the noon-white sky, the mere lay dark in the middle where, after so much rain, it ought to have carried more light.
He had believed her.
He had wanted to believe her, which was worse. He had been, for some time he could no longer date, arranging his afternoons around the parlour she was in and his sentences around the hope of making her laugh.
He had acceptedI cannotin the lane because the woman who said it had looked at him from within his own coat, white to the mouth, and he had wished to spare her further question. A gentleman sparing a lady. The gentleman, he saw now, had been sparing himself.
A man who had once been cut in half by the discovery that his father’s favourite protégé had been working upon his sister for a month, and who had in the years since been lied to by the father he had revered upon points he had not expected a father to lie about, by agents of his own estate whose ledgers would not survive a second glance, by cousins upon entries of credit, by Lady Catherine upon her own age and her daughter’s constitution, by half the society that wished anything from him, did not, lightly, extend credit to uncorroborated accounts.
And yet he had, each time. Faith once given he had found it costly to withdraw. He had been taken in at twelve, at fifteen, at twenty-two—by nurses and tutors and friends and lovers of his father and stewards of his own—had trusted and been trampled, and trusted again, as if the fault lay in his own scepticism rather than in the world’s unfailing calibration of its dishonesty against his own patience.
He had extended it here because he had wished to. He had wished to, and he had been a fool for a second time in his life upon the same ground, and this time the woman was in his house and he was losing his heart to her.
He would not ask her. To ask her now would warn her, and a woman in fear of her history would not answer in the interests of the truth. He would know what she was from another source.
He sat down and drew Fitzwilliam’s letter toward him.
He took down a fresh sheet.
He sat with it blank for the best part of ten minutes. He had intended to set down the particulars as he had them—the filing, the name, the attorney, the matter—and ask Fitzwilliam to act on them before the Rosings Easter. He did not. He was a man who had been trained from boyhood to believe that the mail was a safe place to set serious things, and he had come, this month, to believe nothing of the kind. A sheet written in his hand, travelling south by the same stages as every other packet between Derby and London, bearing the name Bennet and the name Collins and the name Merebank in black ink on a single page—no. A fool’s confidence. If Tilney had put clerks on the northern post, Tilney had put clerks on the southern.
He wrote four lines.
He wrote that a matter had reached him which he would not commit to paper, that it required Fitzwilliam’s particular mind and the particular trust he had held from boyhood, and that Fitzwilliam would oblige him by coming to Merebank at his earliest convenience and by saying to his aunt, if the question were put to him, that he was discharginga commission for the War Office in Manchester. He begged him not to announce his coming by letter to the house.
He signed it. He sanded it. He sealed it. He rang for Norton.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
MrsHadleypronouncedonthe bath a little before noon. She had determined the matter in her own kitchen the night before, Elizabeth understood at once, and had come up to the parlour only for the formality of announcing it.
“A soaking,” she said, standing at the foot of the bed with her sleeves pushed back. “Hips and below. Warm as the skin will bear, mere water fetched while the kettles still hold it, twenty minutes by the glass. The wound is closed enough at last. If you are ever to put a leg to the ground in this valley, Miss Bennet, it will not be on a knee that has seen nothing but cloth for five weeks.”
Elizabeth, who had been reading and not reading the same page of Georgiana’s lent novel for an hour, laid the book down.
“Now?”
“Within the hour. Mrs Reeves has the kettles on. Martha is bringing the tin bath up from the scullery where it has done nothing but harbour Mr Darcy’s opinion of excess furniture for a decade. Your sister is warming towels at the drawing-room hearth because the parlour hearth smokes when the wind sits south.”
So it was already arranged. Elizabeth had not been consulted and did not mind.
“Shall I send for anything?”
“You shall sit where you are and let competent women do their work.”
The next half-hour passed around her as though she were a landmark the household had agreed upon and was now rearranging the furniture to face. Mrs Reeves came in twice, first with a folded screen from the drawing room which she set between the bed and the window, second with a bucket of steaming mere water so full that Martha behind her was being admonished to keep the step-pace without jolting. The tin bath arrived next, carried by Martha and Hadley’s boy between them, set down by the hearth with a thump that made the lamb in its basket in the kitchen complain audibly through two doors.
Jane came in with her arms full of linen.
