Page 13 of Miss Bennet is Gone

"What cordial?"

She told him of the small dark bottle, and of the folded card that had come with it, and how Elizabeth had opened it and read it and been so plainly moved that she, Mrs. Gardiner, had asked in the way of aunts who it was from; and how Elizabeth had said presently, and put it away at her breast, and had been going to tell them when she came down off the stool.

That she had drunk it there in the room, and within the quarter hour had gone pale and strange and begged to be left by herself.

"Then no one in that room knows who sent it," he said slowly, "except the one person who cannot be asked." He wrote a single line, and underlined it once, and sat looking at it.

Then he stood. "I want to see the room," he said, "and the yard, and the lane, and whatever the girl who carried that bottle can tell me while there is still a little light to see any of it by. And I want that card. Whoever did this took away a living woman without a sound, and I do not expect them to have been careless; but a card is paper, and paper goes where it is dropped and stays there, and if it is anywhere in that shop I mean to have it in my hand tonight. Mr. Gardiner, come with me."

Mrs. Gardiner and Jane were given over to the long wait for news. Darcy and Mr. Gardiner took the carriage to the shop while there was still a little daylight to see it by.

Madame met them at the workroom door wringing a length of muslin between her hands as though to strangle it, and the moment she saw Darcy’s face she began to weep. “Monsieur, messieurs, I have gone over it and over it. Forty years I keep this house, forty years, and never has a lady gone from it but by the front door on her own two feet⁠—”

“The room first,” Darcy said. “Then you may tell me everything. Not before.”

She took them through. The little back room stood as Mrs. Gardiner had ordered it left; the gown finished on its form by the window, Elizabeth's dress, her shoes, the chair, the stand, the cup of water.

Darcy stood in the doorway and did not go in at once. He looked at the low door in the corner, and crossed to it, and opened it on the yard, and stood a moment in the cold draught measuring with his eye the distance to the gate. Then he came back and took up the water cup and set it down, and looked at the gown a long time, and touched nothing else.

“Who carried the lady her cordial?” he said.

“The girl. Sarah.” Madame twisted the muslin. “A good girl, monsieur, a steady hand, three years with me. Her mother is ill and she does not miss a day, I would have sworn to her before the King.”

“Send for her.”

Sarah came in wiping her hands on her apron from habit, though they were clean, and stopped when she saw the tall stranger and went white.

She had the sleepless look of a girl nursing somebody at home, and her eyes went from Darcy to Madame and back, and her hands would not be still.

“No one blames you,” Darcy said, and made himself gentle, because a frightened girl forgets, and he could not afford her to forget. “You will not be turned away for any answer you give me, you have my word on it. I want only what you saw. The cordial you gave Miss Bennet today, when did it first come into your hands?”

“Yesterday, sir.” Her voice was small. “In the afternoon. A lady brought it.”

Mr. Gardiner's coat rustled where he stood by the door. Darcy did not move at all. “A lady. Tell me of her.”

“She come to the counter, no carriage at the door, sir, and no maid with her, which I did think on after, a lady so fine and no maid, and she had a veil down, a thick one, so I never saw her face, not once, the whole time. She knew my name.” The girl swallowed. “She knew Mother was poorly. She asked for me by name, sir, Sarah, the girl whose mother is poorly, and I could not have told you then nor now how a veiled lady come to know it.”

“What did she give you?”

“A little case, velvet, and in it the bottle, dark glass, stoppered and sealed with a red seal, and the card folded by it. And she told me what I was to say, that it come from a lady who wished her every joy, and the card would explain the rest, and no fuss to be made, and Miss Bennet was to drink it down there in the quiet of the room before the jolting of the carriage undid the good of it. She had me say it back to her twice over till I had it right.”

Sarah’s face crumpled. “And she gave me money, sir. A great deal of it. More than ever the errand was worth, for my trouble, she said, and a proper doctor for Mother, a real one and not the parish man. And I, God forgive me, sir, I thought her the kindest creature in London. A sad, quiet, kind sort of lady. I never thought a wrong thing of it. Why would I? It was a wedding gift.”

It was the worst of it, and Darcy heard it for what it was. The girl had stood at her own counter and taken the whole thing into her hands.

The veil, the missing maid, the sender who had left no name to be repeated, the over-payment, the careful drilled words, and felt nothing but gratitude, because she had been chosen precisely for a heart too burdened to suspect a kindness. He did not say so. There would have been a cruelty in it past bearing, and no use in the cruelty.

“The card,” he said. “She held it in her own hands not a quarter of an hour before she was taken out of this room. Where is it?”

And there began the second search of that evening, which came to nothing at all. Madame had not seen it; she had been out of the room for the water.

Sarah had not seen it after she set the tray down and went back to her pins. They took the little room apart between them, and at the last Darcy went over the floor of it himself on his knees with Mr. Gardiner holding the candle low, under the chair and the stand and the skirting and along the black gap beneath the press; and there was the cup of water, and the chair, and the gown standing finished on its form by the window, and there was no card in that room anywhere.

He got up off his knees and stood a while looking at the place. A thing had come into this room in a girl’s two hands and gone out of it again, and every other object the afternoon had touched was sitting exactly where the afternoon had left it.

Either they had thought that card worth the four seconds it would have cost a man to stoop for it, which meant there was something written in it that could be read against them; or it was lying within twenty feet of him at that moment and he could not find it, which he liked no better and could do no more about.

“This lady,” Darcy said, still at the window, his voice level. “Her height. Her age. Anything the veil did not cover. Her hands, her voice, the way she stood.”