Page 44 of You Willfully Misunderstand Me

The morning of their departure came grey and mild, the kind of soft Isle weather that seemed, to Elizabeth, almost deliberately unwilling to make the leaving easy by contrast. Mrs.Kewley wept without shame at the cottage gate and pressed upon Elizabeth a small parcel of dried lavender from the linen press, "for the ship, and for after, so you'll not forget us entirely." Mr. Kewley shook Darcy's hand a long moment, and said only, "You'll have a care of her," in a tone that made it not quite a request.

The harbor at Castletown was busier than Elizabeth had yet seen it with carts and crates and the shouting of men glad to be at work again after weeks of enforced idleness, gulls wheeling overhead in the freshening wind, the Liverpool Pack riding at anchor with her sails still furled but her rigging alive with purposeful movement. It ought to have felt like triumph, this return of the ordinary world's machinery. Elizabeth found it felt instead like the closing of a door.

Darcy stood beside her at the rail some while after they had gone aboard, watching the island recede into grey distance behind them, and said nothing for a long time. She did not press him to it.

"I find," he said at last, "that I do not know how to thank a place for very nearly killing me and then giving me back the whole of my life in exchange."

"I do not think it requires thanks," Elizabeth said. "I think it only requires that we not waste what God gave us."

He turned from the rail to look at her, and whatever he had meant to say next seemed to leave him entirely, replaced by something simpler, "No," he agreed. "We shall not waste it my love."

Behind them, the Isle of Man dwindled to a grey smudge upon a greyer sea, and before them lay Liverpool, andHertfordshire, and Pemberley, and Lady Catherine, and Mrs. Bennet, and every small, familiar machinery of a world.

But the ship carried them forward regardless, as ships do, indifferent to the courage of their passengers, and there was nothing left to do now but discover, together, whether what they had found on that narrow, wind-scoured island could survive the crossing.

CHAPTER 23

The Packet arrived at Liverpool on a grey, blustering afternoon, and Darcy's first act upon setting foot again on English soil was not to arrange for horses, nor to send word ahead, but to secure, with a briskness that rather startled Elizabeth, a respectable woman by the name of Mrs. Pryce to travel with them as far as Longbourn.

Elizabeth teased Mr. Darcy, as they prepared to ascend their carriage, bound for Longbourn, "I might have managed the journey with no worse chaperone than propriety itself has already survived on the island.” She had spoken to him in a light whisper, as the woman's small trunk was loaded alongside their own.

"You might have, but I do not intend that you should have to, not for one mile more than necessity requires." Darcy's tone was even, but she caught the particular firmness beneath it. "We return to England with questions enough already attached to our names, Elizabeth. I will not add to them by any carelessness that can be so easily avoided. Whatever is said of us in the coming weeks, it will not be said with any foundation of truth to stand upon."

She did not argue further. She had come, these past weeks, to recognize when his correctness sprang from vanity and when it sprang from care, and this, plainly, was the latter.

***

Mr. Bennet received them, with a mixture of alarm and surprise, in his library, and looked at Darcy for a long moment over the rim of his spectacles before speaking, "So," he said. "You have brought my daughter home rather more entangled than she departed, Mr. Darcy, and I confess myself curious to hear the particulars.”

Darcy told it plainly, the harbor, the storm, the cottage, the men who had come asking after Wickham's business, and all that had followed, omitting nothing of substance, and claiming for himself no more credit than the facts allowed. Elizabeth, seated beside him, found she loved him a little more for the plainness of it; he did not soften the danger to make himself appear the braver, nor did he dwell upon it to make himself appear the more deserving.

Mr. Bennet heard him out in silence, and when it was done, sat a while longer with his fingers steepled before him, "You have asked my daughter to marry you."

"I have, sir, and she has done me the very great honor of accepting."

"Then I shall ask you what I did not think to ask when Mr. Collins made his own request of me, chiefly because I did not then care what answer I received." Mr. Bennet's eyes, sharp beneath their customary irony, fixed upon Darcy directly. "Will you make her happy, or only comfortable? I have observed a great many marriages accomplish the latter with no attentionwhatsoever paid to the former, and I find, now that it comes to it, I would rather bury my daughter unmarried than see her settled into that particular species of misery."

"I do not know that I can promise happiness entirely, sir, no man being equal to guaranteeing so large a thing." Darcy did not look away. "But, I can promise that I have found, in your daughter's company, the only version of myself I have ever much cared to be, and I do not intend to spend the remainder of my life failing to deserve the good opinion it has cost her so much trouble to give me."

Mr. Bennet regarded him a moment longer, and something that might, in a less guarded man, have been called satisfaction moved briefly over his face.

"Well," he said. "That is a rather better answer than I expected from a man with ten thousand a year. You have my consent, Mr. Darcy, for whatever a country gentleman's consent is worth against a will so evidently already settled between the two of you. Lizzy, you may go on being cleverer than the rest of us. I have long since given up hoping otherwise."

It was only once the matter of the engagement stood settled between them that Darcy raised the second matter he had carried home from the island, one he had spoken of to Elizabeth alone, in low tones, aboard the packet, and had not yet laid before her father.

"There is a further business I must see to, sir, and I would not have you hear of it first from Lady Catherine, nor from any other quarter that might give it an uglier shape than it deserves." He drew from his coat the letter, creased now from handling, and from the many times Elizabeth had seen him take it out to read again, as though it might yield some new senseon the twentieth reading that it had withheld on the first. "The men who came to that cottage came at Wickham's instruction, by their own admission, and by every appearance of. And, I have reason to believe, reason I will not trouble you with until I have proof, that my cousin Anne is somehow bound up in the arranging of it, whether by her own design or another's working through her. I do not yet know which, and I do not intend to speculate further until I do."

"You mean to go to Kent?"

"Yes, I mean to go to Kent, though not before I have done the one thing I consider more urgent than anything else." He turned to Elizabeth, and something in his face eased even amid the gravity of the rest. "I intend to have the engagement announced properly first, in the papers, and to whatever acquaintance requires the formal courtesy of hearing it from me directly, so that whatever Lady Catherine or Anne or anyone else at Rosings may say of this business, they say it knowing you are already spoken for, and beyond the reach of any scheme that supposed otherwise. I will not go chasing after the truth of that letter and leave the truth ofusstill vulnerable to invention in my absence."

Elizabeth felt something steady in her chest at that, relief, certainly, but relief with an unbecoming amount of impatience mixed into it, for she had never in her life felt a greater desire to resolve this mystery. She wanted the truth of Anne and that letter laid bare, and sooner rather than later, whatever form it took. But she had lived two-and-twenty years under her mother's roof, and she knew better than most the wisdom of moving quickly where Mrs. Bennet's imagination was concerned. "Then you had better write to the papers quickly, sir," she said, "for I begin to suspect my mother and Mrs.Philips has already done half your work for you, and rather less accurately."

Mr. Bennet was yet again surprised at Mr. Darcy’s speech, and gave him leave to do as he must, owning Elizabeth was right. “Aye, sir, you had better make use of my desk, if you mean to have it done quickly. I make no promises as to the pen, which has not been properly mended since Michaelmas, but I daresay a man capable of managing four armed intruders and a Manx fever besides can contrive to manage a poor nib."

"You are very good, sir," Darcy said with a slight bow.

At that, Mr. Bennet rose, gathering his spectacles and the book he had abandoned some quarter hour before. "I shall leave you to your correspondence, and go and inform Mrs. Bennet that her second daughter is to be married after all, and to ten thousand a year besides, which I expect will occupy her nerves rather more pleasantly than the scandal has done. I give you perhaps three minutes of peace before she descends upon this room in transports. I should write quickly."