Page 42

“And if you find you cannot be happy there, I shall not hold you to it. Once we have been seen together long enough, and people believe the marriage is a real one, you may spend most of the year in town if you would rather. We need not trouble each other more than the world expects.”

She stopped on the pavement, and he had to stop with her.

“You would allow that?”

“I would.”

He meant it, too, and he would have kept his word. But he hoped very much that she would never take him up on it. He did not expect her to love him. He had given up that hope in the parsonage parlour at Hunsford. He only wished that one day she might think of Jane and Bingley without that small hard line appearing at the corner of her mouth. It was there now.

“That is more than most wives are offered.”

“It is no more than you are owed.”

She looked at him as if she were searching the offer for a catch. Whatever she saw, she kept it to herself. After a moment she took his arm again, and they walked on.

***

The bookseller's was warm after the street, and it smelled of new paper and leather and lamp oil. Elizabeth let go of him at the door and went straight to the shelves. She pulled off one glove to turn the pages, and for the first time that morning she forgot to be on her guard. He could tell by the way she read. She frowned at the page as if it had said something clever and she meant to argue with it.

He went to find the book he had come for. On his way back he stopped in front of a row of small calf-bound volumes.

“You cannot mean to buy that.”

She had come up beside him without his hearing her. He held up the first volume so that she could read the spine.

“Why not? Sir Charles Grandison is a very good book.”

“It is seven very good books, and the hero is never in the wrong from the first page to the last. I lost patience with him in the third volume.”

“Would you rather he were a rake?”

“I would rather he were a man. A man who is never mistaken has nothing to learn, and a man with nothing to learn is very dull company, however fine his speeches.”

“And a man who is often mistaken?”

“Is at least interesting.” She took the book from him and turned it over. “I grant you Sir Charles is handsome and rich, and very good to his tenants. Miss Byron is quite right to admire him. I only wonder that she can bear to sit through a whole afternoon with him.”

“Miss Byron thought him worth waiting for. All seven volumes of him.”

“Miss Byron was invented by a gentleman, Mr Darcy. I would not trust her opinion on anything.”

He laughed. He had not meant to, and it came out loud enough that a gentleman at the next table looked up from his book with a frown. Elizabeth's mouth twitched. For a moment she looked at him exactly as she used to in the drawing room at Netherfield, when she was about to pick one of his opinions to pieces and meant to enjoy every minute of it.

“Then Sir Charles shall stay where he is,” he said. “I would not shut you up at Pemberley all winter with a hero you cannot abide. Do you know, I believe that is the first time you have laughed at anything I have said?”

Her smile went. He watched it go and knew he had sent it away himself.

“Not the first, sir. You managed it once at Jane’s wedding breakfast. But this time it was Mr Richardson, not you.” She put the book back on the shelf. “It is getting cold. Shall we go home?”

She did not take his arm on the way back until they came to a crossing, and then only because the stones were slippery. The walk home seemed twice as long as the walk out.

***

The post had come while they were gone. The letters lay on the salver in the hall, and he knew the top one before he had taken off his hat. His aunt wrote a large, upright hand, and she pressed so hard that in two places the pen had nearly gone through the paper.

He broke the seal where he stood. Lady Catherine had heard of his marriage. She did not say who had told her, but she had heard it with the greatest astonishment, and she spent a whole page describing her astonishment before she came to the point. She would not be answered by letter. She and Anne would set out for town as soon as the horses could be put to, and she expected to find him at home.

“Not bad news, I hope?”