Page 4 of Miss Bennet is Gone

He was not willing yet to shut the door on that version, even if he could not quite make himself trust it.

"I should like to meet her on better terms than the last," Elizabeth said. "If these are what better terms look like."

She picked the letter up, read it once more, and laid it down with a small decisive motion. "Let us go. I would rather risk being wrong about her kindness than be certain of her unkindness for the rest of my life. It is a great many years to carry a certainty like that."

He had known she would say it. He had not known, until she said it, whether he would be glad.

"You are looking at me," Elizabeth observed, "as though I have proposed something reckless."

"You have proposed kindness to a woman who has not earned it. In my experience that is the most reckless thing you do."

"It is the only reckless thing I do. I am otherwise a model of caution, as you would know if you attended."

"I attend to nothing else." He took her hand and held it. “Ten days," he said. "I find I am counting them like a schoolboy. It is not at all dignified and I have given up minding."

"Then we are matched," she said, "for I have been counting them since February, and I gave up minding a great deal sooner than you did."

She let him keep her hand. "Go and arrange your aunt's tea, Mr. Darcy. And do not look so grave about it. Whatever she is, you will be standing beside me the whole of it, and I have never yet met the woman I could not survive for one hour with you in the room."

He told her he would arrange it for the following morning. He would not, he found, be able to wait longer than that, and he rose to go.

Ten days, he thought, settling into his carriage. And then a church, and then the whole long ordinary lifetime he had stopped letting himself believe in until quite recently.

2

The de Bourgh townhouse stood in a quiet, costly street where the railings had been newly blacked and the steps newly whitened, and Elizabeth, studying it from the carriage window, thought it wore the blank, unlived look of a house got ready in a hurry.

The knocker shone. The windows gave back the gray morning without a single candle behind them. Nothing about it suggested anyone had ever been happy there.

"You are turning it over," Darcy said. "I can see you doing it."

"I am admiring the housekeeping. Your aunt keeps a very bright knocker."

"My aunt keeps everything bright. It is among the more bearable of her qualities." He was watching her and not the house. "You need not do this. We are not yet at the door. I can give the man a direction and we will be in Gracechurch Street within the half hour, and no one the worse."

"And you would spend that half hour wondering whether you had let her off too easily, and I would spend it wondering the same of myself, and we should arrive in a far worse humor than we are in now."

She drew her gloves smooth over her knuckles. "No. I would rather know."

He did not answer at once, but when he did, he said it plainly and a little to one side, in the way she had learned meant he had held a thing a long while before letting it out.

"She was cruel to you at Longbourn. I have not forgotten it, and I do not ask you to. If this morning is what it claims to be, it does not cancel that. It only comes to sit beside it."

"I know." It was, in fact, the most useful thing he had said all morning. "I am not going in to forgive her, Fitzwilliam. I am going in to look at her. Forgiveness may decide for itself afterward, once it has seen the evidence."

That earned the slight easing at the corner of his mouth that, in Darcy, did duty for a smile.

Inside, the house was warm, and silent in the way of houses kept by a great many more servants than there were people to serve. A footman took their coats and they were shown up the staircase that smelled of fresh beeswax and fresher paint.

The drawing room they were brought into had the same just-finished air as the street outside. The upholstery was uncreased, the fire too lately lit to have reached the corners of the room, and a French clock on the mantel ticking out the hour.

Elizabeth caught herself thinking that it was less a room than a stage set for one, and then put the thought away as unworthy of a woman who had come to be generous.

Lady Catherine rose when they came in.

It was the first wrong note. Lady Catherine de Bourgh did not rise for callers, unless her visitor was another peer.

Callers stood for her until released. She rose now, and came a step toward them, and there was an expression on her face that Elizabeth had never once seen there. It was uncertainty.