Page 133 of Hard Home

There was, in the end, nowhere in that country to walk that was not the subject; and after a mile and a half they came out on the rise above the church, where the whole of the low ground is in view — the church, and the water, and the hundred and ninety acres beyond it, lying in the September sun exactly as green as everything round it.

They stopped without either of them proposing to.

"I have been three weeks getting to this," said Darcy, "and I would rather do it here than in a room, and I am going to do it badly.

"Your aunt Lady Catherine said a thing to you in that grove that you told me on the road just now, and passed over rather quickly, and I do not think you passed over it in your own mind."

"No."

"Say it back to me."

"That nobody knows what a line does when it comes off a broken keeping," said Elizabeth, "because it has not happened in England since before the rolls. That braiding mine into yours might strengthen us, or take you down with me, or do nothing whatever. That she would not do it with a horse."

"She is right," said Mr. Darcy.

"I know she is right. I have known since Thursday and I have not slept much."

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"Then hear the whole of it," he said, "because I have spent three weeks on it and I have had Tarrant's answer and I have had my cousin Fitzwilliam's, and neither of them will say anythinguseful, and I have arrived at four possibilities and I can eliminate none of them.

"The first is that it does nothing at all; that a keeping and an Accord are different animals and do not mix, and your family's part in this is a matter of your father's blood standing on that ground and not of anything that could be braided anywhere.

"The second is that it strengthens you. There is a doctrine — it is in Colwood, your sister has it marked — that a failing thing may be carried by a sound one, as a keeping in its last life may be carried on if there is enough put in. That is what my aunt intends for her daughter and it is why she has wanted me for Anne since we were four years old, and I have never until this month understood one word of it.

"The third is that it takes me. Not quickly and not all at once; but if what is under this county is coming off its hold, and I am braided into the blood that has been holding it, then I am inside it, and I do not know what that is like and neither does anybody else."

"And the fourth?"

"The fourth," said Darcy, "is that it does all three, in some order, over forty years, and that we should not know which until it was much too late to do anything about it."

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Elizabeth stood on the rise and looked down at the water.

"You have brought me up here to offer me something," she said. "You do not walk a person a mile and a half to a view in order to give them four possibilities. What is it?"

"There is a church in London," said Mr. Darcy.

She turned round.

"St. Clement's in the Fields," he said. "No incumbent since 1794, served from Aldgate, and the ward has been dead thirty years and there is nobody alive who could put it back. I have seen it. I have stood in it.

"A man and a woman may be married in that room as legally and as bindingly as anywhere in this kingdom. There is a register and a curate and a license and two witnesses and God, and every promise made in it is kept in the sight of everybody who matters.

"And there is nothing in it to take."

He said it quite steadily.

"You would be my wife. There would be no braiding — nothing merged, nothing spent, nothing put at risk in either direction. Whatever happens under this county happens to your father's blood and not to mine, and whatever happens to Pemberley happens to Pemberley. It is not a trick and it is not a half-measure in any way that the law or the church or your mother would recognize. It is the safest thing available to us and I have been sitting up at night for three weeks arranging it and I have the license written out in my pocket-book.

"I am offering it because I would rather have you and be safe than have you and find out in eleven years that I have taken you down, or that you have taken me, or that Georgiana has a brother at four-and-forty who cannot lift the ward on his own front door — which is what my aunt said would happen, and she may be right about that too."

Elizabeth did not say anything for some time.

"That is what you did for Lydia," she said at last.

"Yes."