Page 65 of The Secret Diary of Anne de Bourgh

Richard sighed. “Sit down, Annie, please, and let us talk about this. Have I distressed you?”

“No. I only wished to understand.” I took the chair, arranging my skirt rather more carefully than was necessary.

“I think very well of Byerly,” Richard said when I was settled. “Darcy has had considerably more opportunity to know him than I have, and his opinion is equally favourable.”

“I know Darcy likes him,” I acknowledged.

“He is sensible, well educated, and has good manners without appearing to think them sufficient in place of everything else. He listens when you speak, and takes an interest in what you have to say. Those are not qualities to be despised.”

“I do not despise them,” I said. “I do not despise him.”

“No, of course you do not.” He spoke kindly. I wished he would be a little less kind.

“Then you think I ought to marry him?” I asked, in a small voice.

“I think you ought to allow yourself to consider it.”

I had known that Mr Byerly must mean marriage. There could be no other reasonable explanation for what he had been doing. Nevertheless, hearing Richard say it aloud felt like a blow to the face.

Richard leaned towards me. “Has he done anything to make you uncomfortable?”

I thought of the dinner at Thurston Hall, and the pudding I had wished to eat, and had decided not to. But I could not tell Richard that Mr Byerly’s greatest offence was that he occupied a chair in which I wanted Richard to sit.

“No,” I said. “He has been very agreeable.”

“Then give yourself time to know him. He plainly admires you, and I believe he would be very desirous of making you happy.”

“You cannot know that,” I objected.

“Not with certainty,” Richard conceded. “But I have seen nothing which gives me reason to doubt it. Quite the opposite, given his efforts to make himself pleasing to you.”

He went on to speak of Mr Byerly’s circumstances. There would be no anxiety about money, no necessity for me to be hurried into arrangements I disliked.

“Indeed, there is another consideration,” he continued. “You told me that you did not wish to make your home at Rosings.”

I looked up. I had not expected him to mention that conversation.

“Byerly has no country estate of his own,” Richard said. “But he intends to purchase one. He has not yet chosen it, and a wife might have a considerable voice in that choice.”

I considered this.

“You mean that I might live somewhere else?”

“I see no necessity for you to live at Rosings. He has the means to buy ten houses its equal in consequence. You might choose a house together.”

A house we chose together. I had thought of such a thing so often, but never with Mr Byerly beside me.

“And Rosings?” I asked. “Might I sell it?”

“That would still require Darcy’s agreement, as well as mine,” Richard reminded me. “But if you intended to settle elsewhere, we should have a definite arrangement to put before him. You would not merely be saying that you wished to sell Rosings; you would have a home of your own with your husband to live in instead.”

I looked down at my hands.

This was something I had not thought of. I had been so occupied in wondering whether I could ever feel for Mr Byerly what I felt for Richard that I had scarcely considered what marrying him might mean in any other respect.

He was looking for a home. I wished for one.

Perhaps there need be no return to Rosings, no attempt to make myself content in those great rooms where I had spent so many unhappy years. I might have a garden I liked, and rooms I had chosen, and something useful to do with my days.