Chapter Text
TO ADMIRE A GAINSBOROUGH PART 6
The next page in the sketchbook contained several quick little scribbles. One was of another scale. In one cup, Mr. Darcy had drawn a tiny madman playing a broken fiddle. The other cup contained two stick figures wearing triangles for a skirt and poking at another stick figure whose only identifying feature was a top hat.
“What is this?” Elizabeth asked.
“I was trying to decide if I should go to the Meryton assembly with Bingley. Miss Bingley and Mrs. Hurst would have stayed at Netherfield with me, no doubt requiring constant attention,” Mr. Darcy said. “Neither alternative was particularly pleasing.”
“Your life is a constant trial,” she said.
“I am not good with crowds,” he said.
“I might have been able to figure that out,” she said, looking at the next pages. On the left side of the spread, he had drawn a very chaotic scene at the assembly hall, viewed from the entrance. The dancers were going in every direction at once, in danger of collisions. Several people looked very drunk. One character was more like a shaky blur than a person, and there was an apparent loud argument going on in the background. All that was missing was the noise and the headache.
On the right side, the chaos had paused for a moment, and everyone had turned to stare piercingly at the newcomers.
“It reminds me of that menacing scene you showed me earlier,” she said. “The mob that killed Julius Caesar.”
“Oh yes, I find that a little backstabbing always enlivens a dull party,” he said.
There was Bingley, smiling at a stiff backed female whose face was indistinct. Charlotte, perhaps?
Mr. Darcy had sketched Mrs. Hurst in the middle of his dance with her. “How to dance a perfect reel: an accomplished woman can hop, step, shake and twirl, and be utterly bored throughout it all,” the caption said.
“Politeness requires me to ask her to dance,” he said. “And it is so relaxing when it is all over.”
There were a couple of sketches of Miss Bingley. In one, she was talking with some locals and looked like a fashion plate who had swallowed a lemon. In another, she was facing Mr. Darcy, with a smile of delight that looked somehow contorted. It was not captioned as much as headlined: “Enchanted, Mr. Darcy.”
“It took me a while to catch on to the difference but she fakes many of her smiles,” he said. “And none of her flattery is sincere.”
“I have noticed,” Elizabeth said.
Mrs. Bennet was pictured in the middle of an open-mouthed soliloquy, gawking at somebody, probably Bingley. “He just got a house, he must be in want of a wife,” the caption said. “He can have any of my daughters, no questions asked.”
Elizabeth recognised Kitty in a group of girls. She was pointing at somebody mockingly and they were all laughing. Elizabeth did not know why, until she read the caption. “Mary would rather read than dance - what a joke! Good thing she actually can read!”
“Poor Mary!” Elizabeth said.
Another sketch was of Mrs. Bennet sitting with Mrs. Philips, vulgarly ogling at somebody. “Oh sister! Look at how he fills his breeches!”
“I thought they were speaking of me, but I could not be sure,” he said.
“You drew so many sketches from the assembly.”
“I had a lot of time the next morning,” he said. “None of the Bingley siblings emerged early from their rooms, after a late night.”
“You have a really good eye for faces, and details.”
“When one does not like to dance there is a lot of time to observe.”
“You seem to have paid special attention to us,” she said. “The Bennets, I mean.”
“That is because Bingley was so smitten with your sister, and his sisters had so many opinions about your family. In the carriage back to Netherfield, they all pressed upon me to agree with them. But Bingley has been known to wear rose-coloured glasses when he is infatuated with somebody, and his sisters already hated everyone in Hertfordshire before ever meeting a single soul, so I wanted to make up my own mind.”
"And what did you decide?”
He did not respond to the question directly, just waved vaguely at the sketchbooks. “Most of it is there in those books.”
“A picture is worth a thousand words, is it? I suppose that by that metric you have been ever so talkative and open with me today.”
“I want to be all that but words are a tricky thing,” he said. “They often trip me up. People so frequently say things they do not mean and mean things they do not say.”
“So how do you deal with that?”
“I pay attention to their faces,” he said. “Sometimes their real thoughts leak through in their expressions, even if they are pretending to smile and nod. But it is so fleeting I cannot always tell until I have sketched it.”
“What am I thinking now?” she asked.
“I wish I knew.”
There was a sketch of Mary, isolated, and lonely.
“You have drawn her with such compassion,” she said. “She looks miserable but so beautiful.”
“I found her to be a kindred spirit,” he said. “She was the only one in attendance who looked as uncomfortable and awkward to be there as I felt.”
Lydia had been sketched in a dark corner, nearly spilling out of her dress and standing far too close to a young man who had his hands upon her person. The caption said, “Lydia is the most lively of my daughters, and such a favourite with all the young gentlemen!”
Elizabeth groaned in dismay. “Who is that man? I cannot discern his face.”
“I only saw him that one time,” Mr. Darcy said. “I do not know his name but I heard him say he would go back to Oxford the next week.”
“Oh, then it must be Arthur Goulding,” Elizabeth said. “I did not know Lydia had had anything to do with him.”
“It certainly did not seem like a serious relationship,” Mr. Darcy said.
“Perhaps later when they are both a bit older and wiser,” Elizabeth said, full of misgivings.
“Perhaps later when they are both more sober,” he said.
“Unfortunately it seems you did not catch our family at our best that night.”
“I certainly hope so,” he said.
“But you do not look entirely convinced,” she said.
“Their behaviour is not always entirely proper,” he said. “Can we agree on that?”
“Yes but for better and for worse, they are the family I come with, and I love them.”
He was silent for a long while, thinking it through.
Eventually he nodded and said, “I realize that, and I need you to know that if you agreed to share your life with me they would become my family too.”
“What does it mean?”
“I might not always be comfortable with them but I would love them for giving me you to love.”
He fixed an intense gaze on her, and there was another long silence. She could think of nothing to say either, so she turned to the sketchbook again.
“Oh, there’s Jane!” Elizabeth said. Jane was dancing with a hastily sketched male who might or might not have been the eldest Lucas son. The sketch made Jane look mild-mannered and polite, but her smile was slightly vacant. The caption said, “My daughter’s beauty is her only identifying characteristic.”
“I lost count how many times your mother mentioned that her eldest daughter was very pretty.”
There was a caricature of lady Lucas speaking with Caroline Bingley, both gesturing in a vaguely catlike manner. “Jane Bennet is such a sweet girl! So sad about her lack of dowry!”
“Oh dear!” Elizabeth exclaimed. “So that is how Caroline Bingley knew all about our sad, straitened circumstances?”
There was an entire page of tiny Janes, speaking and dancing with various people, always serene and kind, even when she was dancing with Arthur Goulding, who had been far too drunk for polite company at that time of the evening. The caption asked, “Does she always wear the same smile?”
“Believe me, when Jane loses her serenity you do not want to be there,” Elizabeth said.
“Well, luckily that will be for Bingley to deal with,” he said. “What are you like when you lose your serenity?”
“Oh, absolutely scathing,” she said. “Sarcastic and apt to exaggerate everyone’s faults.”
“I cannot wait,” he said.
“For what?”
“For our first fight,” he said. “And for the reconciliation.”
“Are you not being a bit presumptive?” she asked, tilting her head, as if the changed viewing angle would give her a different opinion about this man.
“The way I see it,” he said, “as long as you have not given me your answer you are both at the same time. You are both my future wife and the woman who broke my heart.”
“Oh.”
“As long as we do not know how things will turn out, can we not assume they will turn out well?”
“Oh. Is that your general philosophy in life?”
“No,” he said. “I am a worrier by nature. But here you are, against all odds, in my home, looking through all these books with me, and probably learning all my deep dark secrets.”
“I have certainly learned a great deal.”
“Yet you are still here, determined to see these pages through with me,” he said. “You have not rejected me yet. So I am hopeful.”
“I could not stop looking now if I wanted to,” she said. “It would be like reading the first three volumes of a novel and never finding out how it ends because the author died before writing the last part.”
“Anything that puts off my rejection for longer,” he said. “While you are making up your mind, I would rather cherish you as the love of my life than react to you like you were the heartbreaker.”
“A good call,” she said. “I am sure to enjoy it better than being egged and thrown out of the house. Or whatever you do with the women you break your heart.”
“I am still hoping to never find out,” he said. “I have never had anyone break my heart before.”
At that moment Elizabeth had no wish to be the first one. Her feelings were more tender and more protective of him than ever before. But she still did not understand.
“Here is the thing,” she said. “So far I have come across many reasons for you to avoid the Bennet family, and nothing that would make you wish to marry into it.”
“I do not have the words to explain,” he said. “Maybe you will see if you go on looking.”
“All right, bring it on,” she said. “Let us see what you have got.”
She turned the page to the last drawing in this sketchbook.
“Good heavens!”
On the earlier pages he had sketched everything from the assembly in black and white.
But this was a watercolour and he had used beautiful pastel shades.
Or rather, he had used shades of grey to paint the crowd of faceless, nameless revellers. The crowd parted like the Red Sea, for the eye to focus on an ethereal, luminous figure of a woman who looked a lot like Elizabeth, only more beautiful, more colourful, more beloved than she had ever felt.
The caption said, “She is tolerable…”
This time it was she who could not find the words. She stared at the painting. Then she stared at him. Then at the painting again.
“When I saw how that picture came out,” he said, “that was when I knew.“