Page 35 of Courting Elizabeth

I immediately regretted my flippant words. They cut too close to our wound.

“I am sorry,” I said.

“Do not be.”

His voice had grown rough.

“Fitzwilliam…”

“You said before knowing. I shall hold to that.”

He took my hand and held it until the carriage reached the house.

The servants were waiting on the steps. Mrs Reynolds, the housekeeper, received me with a warmth that held neither misplaced curiosity nor coldness. She had known Fitzwilliam as a child. I could tell by the way her gaze softened when she turned toward him.

“We are happy to welcome you, madam,” she said. “The master has told us a great deal about you.”

I looked at my husband.

“A great deal?”

A slight flush crept across his face.

“The instructions necessary for your comfort.”

Mrs Reynolds smiled.

“Naturally, sir.”

Within the first hour, I learned that my apartments had been redecorated in the colors he had most often seen me wear, that the library now contained several works I had mentioned at Netherfield, that a gentle little horse had been chosen for me, and that the gardens near the house had been altered so I might walk there even after rain.

“You did all this in five weeks?” I asked when we were alone.

“I had resources.”

“And an army of terrorized servants.”

“Mrs Reynolds is terrorized by no one.”

“Not even by you?”

“Especially not by me.”

He was right. The housekeeper loved him. The servants respected him without fear. The farmers who came to greet him in the following days spoke to him frankly. He knew the names of their children, the state of a roof repaired the previous winter, the illness of an aging mother.

I discovered a man Meryton had never had the chance to see.

At Longbourn, his silence had resembled contempt. At Pemberley, it was the concentration of an attentive master. He did not speak to please, but he listened so that he might act. A widow asked for more time on her rent; he already knew of the loss of her son and granted her more than she had dared request. A young boy had injured himself in a stable; Fitzwilliam knelt in the straw to examine his ankle, heedless of his coat.

Each gesture shifted something within me.

The next day, Mrs Reynolds led me to the small estate school. About twenty children shared two long tables there. The boys occupied the front seats; four younger girls copied the alphabet near the window.

The schoolmistress explained that the girls generally left school as soon as they were old enough to help their mothers. Books were scarce, and arithmetic was rarely taught to them.

“Why?” I asked Fitzwilliam when we stepped outside.

“Because their families withdraw them earlier, and custom…”