Page 10 of Miss Bennet is Gone

Anne stayed kneeling at the cooling grate a while longer, and then she rose, and washed the ash from her hands at the basin, and went down to sit with her mother and wait for the afternoon to come.

5

The house had not been so full, or so loud, since Elizabeth first came to it. With Jane and Bingley up from Netherfield only since that morning, Gracechurch Street had rearranged itself around them. Cases half-unpacked on the landing, Bingley somewhere below making a friend of the cook, and Jane restored to the chair at Elizabeth's elbow as though she had never once been gone from it.

The rest of the Bennets were not looked for until the week's end which everyone agreed was the ideal arrangement, leaving a stretch of days to be happy in before there was a wedding to be anxious about.

Darcy came in the early afternoon and brought Georgiana, who at seventeen still could not enter a room she was glad to be in without lighting the whole of it by accident.

She kissed Elizabeth on both cheeks, a new boldness, lately and carefully practiced, and tucked herself onto the arm of Elizabeth's chair as though she had been doing it for years.

And almost in the same breath she asked, under her breath, whether it was too soon to begin practicing sister in company, or whether she must wait until the thing was made legal.

Elizabeth told her she might practice as much as she pleased, that she had in point of fact been promoted to sister some weeks since, and the church was a mere formality got up to satisfy the lawyers.

Georgiana went pink with the unguarded gladness of a shy creature let all the way in. Of all the gifts of marrying Fitzwilliam Darcy, Elizabeth thought, the sister might be the one she had never known to want and could now least imagine going without.

Elizabeth was dressed already for the appointment with the modiste, and at her throat upon a velvet ribbon sat the brooch, Lady Anne's, the gift Lady Matlock had given and which she had worn every day since, until it began to feel like hers.

Darcy's glance found it when he came back to her, the way it always did, and rested a moment longer than usual. He had never once spoken of her wearing it. His hand came up and just touched the gold of it where it lay against her, and then touched her, and she understood the whole of what he did not say.

"You are not coming," she told him.

"I had not asked to."

"You have the face of a man working himself up to asking. A last fitting is no place for a bridegroom. You would stand in the corner watching and Madame would put a guinea on the bill for the wear and tear on her nerves."

"I had thought," he said, "to take Georgiana to Hatchard's and be of use to no one whatever, and to call for you at six, so that the whole of this excellent uproar might dine together." He looked, saying it, very nearly undone by his own happiness which, on Darcy, was a quiet and slightly astonished thing, as though he kept waiting to be told there had been some clerical error and it would all have to be given back. "Will six do?"

"Six will do very well."

Darcy handed Elizabeth up and kept her gloved hand a half-second past any need, and she leaned from the window as the carriage pulled away and watched him stand in the cold and grow smaller, Georgiana's arm through his, the full warm house at his back.

And so they went, Elizabeth, Mrs. Gardiner, and Jane, gone into the Gardiner carriage with the giddiness of three women turned loose on an errand that is really only an excuse to be together.

Soon, Elizabeth thought, I shall be Mrs Darcy.

Madame's stood proudly in a spacious shop on Bond. She received Elizabeth herself, which Mrs. Gardiner murmured was a great compliment and a greater rarity.

The fitting room at the back was warm and close and hung about with half-made things on their forms, pale and patient as a roomful of polite ghosts.

The gown was brought out under a sheet, and unveiled to a small reverent hush. Jane covered her mouth, and Mrs. Gardiner said Well in the tone of a woman who has resolved not to weep in a shop if it should kill her.

They got it onto her with the reverent fuss such things require, Madame and a second girl easing it over Elizabeth's shoulders while Jane held her hair up out of the way. And when it was hooked and settled, Mrs. Gardiner turned her to face the long glass. Elizabeth looked at herself a moment and said nothing.

She was not, in the ordinary way, a woman undone by her own reflection, but there was the gown, and the brooch at the throat of it, and there in the glass beyond her own shoulder were the two faces she would have chosen out of all the world to have at her back on such an afternoon.

Elizabeth found she had to drop her eyes to the hem, and clear her throat, and submit herself to the pins, before she disgraced herself entirely.

It was while she stood up on the low stool, being turned and pinned and turned again, that Sarah, the young assistant, came in with a little tray.

"Begging your pardon, miss," she said with a careful voice. "This came for you, miss. The lady said the card would explain the rest, and no fuss was to be made of it."

On the tray sat a dark bottle and a small folded card. Elizabeth stepped down and opened the card, and there was Lady Matlock's hand wishing her every joy, and bidding her take a little for her nerves, the way Lady Matlock's own mother had once made her do before her wedding; and signed, your Aunt Margaret.

Elizabeth did not read it out for she wanted a moment of it to herself before it became a thing the room discussed.

Her eyes pricked. She had not thought the woman would spare her a thought twice in one week, let alone a thought like this, with the small, unimportant tenderness that costs the giver nothing and lands on the receiver like a whole inheritance.