Page 11 of Miss Bennet is Gone

Elizabeth’s hand went to the brooch. It was the other gift, the real one, and she thought how strange it was, and how lovely, to be gathered in like this by people who had once had every reason to shut her out.

"And who is it that has you looking like that?" said Mrs. Gardiner, from the hem.

"In a moment, I will share it,” Elizabeth said, and folded the card along its fold, and tucked it at her breast where the gown still stood open on its pins, meaning to bring it out when she was down off the stool and could enjoy the telling of it properly.

"And you was to take a little now, the lady said," the girl added, her eyes somewhere near the floor. "Here, where it's quiet. Before the jolting of the carriage undoes the good of it."

"Sensible woman, whoever she is." Mrs. Gardiner was already pleased with the whole business. "And you are a little pale, Lizzy, from standing about being admired. Drink it, and let us get you home before you faint into the pins."

So Elizabeth drank it. It was sweet, as a cordial ought to be, with something else running under the sweetness that she took for the medicine of it and did not think of again.

She gave the little bottle back, and stepped up onto the stool, and Madame came at her once more with the pins, and the warm ordinary talk closed over her head. Jane laughed at something, Mrs. Gardiner disputed the hem, and the gown seemed to whisper as it was turned.

It came on slowly, and from a long way off.

First the room was only very warm with the fire built high, the air thick with beeswax, and Elizabeth supposed she had been laced too tightly and stood too long.

Then the warmth was inside her as much as around her, a heaviness pouring down through her arms and settling in her hands, and the voices at the edges of the room went soft, as though someone was closing a long row of doors between her and them, gently, one after another after another.

"I think I had better sit," she said, or thought she said. Her own voice reached her late, and from the wrong direction.

Someone helped her down. Jane's face swam up close, lovely and frightened, asking her something twice. Elizabeth meant to say it was nothing, only the heat, but the words came slow and thick, like wading, and the labor of each one was enormous and strange.

They got her out of the gown before they sat her down, for she did not wish to sit with pins against her skin. Madame and the second girl lifted it away over her head with the same reverence they had used in putting it on.

And the little folded card, tucked at her breast and forgotten now by every soul in that room, its owner first among them, went up into the pale weight of the silk as it rose, and came down again somewhere in the deep folds inside the skirt of it, and was carried across the room so, and placed on the form by the window.

They settled her in the chair in the back of the room, away from the bustle, the pale forms standing around her like quiet company.

Mrs. Gardiner laid a hand to her brow and pronounced her not feverish, only overdone. They would sit a moment, and then go home, and laugh about it tomorrow. Madame went for water. Jane chafed her hands.

"Let me only have a minute," Elizabeth said. "A minute by myself. I cannot, not with the fuss. It is hard to breathe. A minute, and I shall be quite myself."

It was a reasonable thing for a bride to ask, overcome on the afternoon of her last fitting, and they were reasonable, loving women.

Mrs. Gardiner drew Jane out with her, to give Elizabeth air and quiet. The door to the workroom clicked softly to behind them. The voices she loved went to the far side of it.

Elizabeth sat with her eyes shut and the room turning slowly around her, a carousel either slowing or starting, she could not tell which.

She thought the cordial had been a good deal stronger than was kind, and that she would say so to Lady Matlock, and they would laugh.

She thought of Fitzwilliam and Georgiana at six o'clock, and the long loud table, and being married in eight days’ time. Her happiness had gone very far off now, but it was still there as a lamp left burning in another room.

Behind her, the low door in the corner, the one she had taken for a cupboard, opened without a sound.

She heard it. She could not make it mean anything. Cold air came in across the back of her neck, smelling of the lane and of horses and of outside. She rose, her legs wobbly, and moved closer to the heavenly relief of the cold.

A hand closed over hers when she reached for the open door. A large hand, gloved, not ungentle. It did not grip. It only took hold, and waited, the way one takes the hand of someone meant to be led somewhere.

She tried to turn her head, and the whole room came with it, the pale forms, the warmth from the fire, the murmur of the women she loved on the wrong side of a shut door.

Elizabeth tried to call out. There was no air in her for it. The last thing she saw, before the tilt drew her under, was her gown standing finished on its form by the window, waiting, with no one in it.

6

A minute, Elizabeth had said, and Mrs. Gardiner had given her two, and then five because a bride overcome on the afternoon of her last fitting was owed the right to collect herself without an audience.

It was the easiest thing in the world, for five whole minutes, to be nothing but an aunt of the bride at a dressmaker.