Page 31 of Shadows Of Rosings Park: Part 2

"The evidence of our situation won't be written on your face," he continued, folding his own letter with precise creases. "You look well. You look — if you will permit the observation — as though marriage agrees with you."

"Does it?"

He met her eyes. In the enclosed carriage, his unhurried attention was inescapable. He had memorised her face during sleepless nights and seemed to compare memory with the original.

"You have colour in your cheeks that was absent a week ago. The shadows beneath your eyes have diminished. Your posture is less rigid." A pause. "Whether these improvements reflect genuine contentment or merely the natural consequence of a warm bed and regular meals, I leave to your own assessment."

"You have observed a great deal."

"I observe everything about you, Elizabeth. I thought you had noticed."

She had. She turned back to the window.

Longbourn appeared. Mrs. Bennet was on the gravel drive. The welcome was a force of nature, hands seized, cheeks kissed, exclamations deployed at a volume that scattered the birds from the elm tree and made Darcy's shoulders draw back by a fraction of an inch.

"Oh, my dear Mrs. Darcy! How well you look! Does she not look well, Mr. Bennet?"

Mr. Bennet stood in the entrance hall, his pipe unlit, his eyes finding Elizabeth with an assessment that cut through the chaos like a blade through gauze. He looked older. Since her return, worry had deepened the lines around his mouth and altered the set of his shoulders. He had given his daughter to a man he mistrusted, and the cost of it was written in his face.

"Well, Lizzy," he said. "You've achieved what few daughters manage — surprising your father not once but twice in a single year. First with an engagement to a man you despised, now with a transformation into a matron of consequence." The irony remained, but resignation had cooled the warmth beneath it. He knew the situation lay beyond his power and had lowered his expectations accordingly.

"Transformation occurs where necessity demands it, Papa."

"Indeed." He took her hand. Held it. His fingers were dry and warm and familiar. The pressure of his grip, the way his thumb rested across her knuckles as it had done since she was a child, produced in Elizabeth's chest a contraction so sudden and so complete that she had to look away.

"Adaptability must be contagious," he continued, releasing her hand. "It seems to have afflicted the wealthy even more severely than the poor."

Darcy received this with the equanimity of a man who had absorbed Mr. Bennet's pointed remarks since the engagement and had developed, if not immunity, then at least a method for enduring the exposure. He bowed. He offered no reply. The silence was, in its way, as eloquent as any reply.

Jane was waiting in the parlour. She embraced Elizabeth with gentle firmness, saying through touch what words could not carry. Lavender. Warmth. Elizabeth's throat ached with love she could not afford to voice.

"I'm here," Jane whispered against her hair. "I'm always here."

Bingley was there too, radiating the transparent happiness of a man whose joy had no ceiling and no design.

"Mrs. Darcy!" He clasped her hand with genuine warmth. "How wonderful. You must tell me — how do you find married life? I confess I have been contemplating the institution with considerable interest of late."

He glanced at Jane as he said this. Bingley possessed neither talent nor appetite for concealment. Jane coloured, and Elizabeth envied the uncoerced happiness warming her sister's face.

"I find it instructive, Mr. Bingley. One learns a great deal about a person by living with them."

"I should imagine so! Though I confess I have always thought the learning should begin before the wedding, not after. Would you not agree, Darcy?"

Darcy, who had been observing the exchange like every conversation yielded intelligence, inclined his head. "Marriage accelerates understanding considerably."

"There! You see? Even Darcy agrees. And when Darcy agrees with anything, one may be certain it is either profoundly true or profoundly convenient."

Elizabeth nearly laughed. Bingley's cheerful obliviousness, his total inability to perceive the dangerous currents beneath the social surface, was both infuriating and oddly comforting. He moved through the Darcy world like a swimmer who does not know the water is cold because he has never stopped generating warmth.

The morning passed in the usual Longbourn confusion. From the sofa, Mrs. Bennet moved between raptures about the match, lamentations over Jane's missed opportunities, and inquiries about the size of Pemberley's drawing rooms. Lydia demanded to visit Pemberley. Kitty demanded London. Mary quoted a passage about marital duty from Fordyce's Sermons that was so ill-chosen it might have been satire.

Elizabeth watched Bingley watching Jane and felt the familiar ache that came from observing what love looked like when it was not a prison. She turned away. There would be time enough to envy them when her own work was done.

After luncheon, she found Jane alone.

The anteroom off the entrance hall. Their childhood hiding place. The wall they had pressed their ears against during dinner parties, the darkness in which they had whispered secrets and invented languages and been, for a few stolen minutes, accountable to no one.

"Jane." Elizabeth gripped her sister's hands. The anteroom was small and dark and smelled of beeswax and old plaster. "Charlotte will soon be taken to London. Colonel Fitzwilliam has arranged it, and she has no safe means of refusing him."