Page 14 of Miss Bennet is Gone

Sarah shut her eyes to try. “Not tall, sir. Not young, I think, but not old neither, her voice was a lady’s voice, soft, and tired under the soft, like someone who does not sleep. She never once looked straight at the card, kept her eyes off it, like.”

The girl opened her eyes. “That’s all I have, sir. I have tried and tried to make her face come and it will not, on account of the veil. I shall carry it the longest day I live that I cannot.”

“You have given me more than you know,” Darcy said, which was true, and not a comfort, and he saw it was not, and let her go all the same. There was nothing left in her, and frightening more out of her would only spoil what little there was.

Madame he kept a moment longer and put the three questions that remained, whether the veiled lady had been seen to come or go by any other soul, whether anyone had asked after the day’s appointments, whether the two o’clock fitting stood written anywhere a stranger might have read it.

To each Madame swore she knew nothing, no, no, with a vehemence that was its own kind of evidence; for a woman lying to save herself does not weep so freely over the parts that damn her own carelessness.

It was full dark when they left, Darcy carrying the bottle buttoned inside his coat and the missing card in his mind. The yard gate gave onto a lane, and the lane ran out onto three streets and a coaching mews and the whole churning anonymity of the city, and had swallowed a carriage, the way it swallowed a hundred a day. There was nothing more to be found by lantern-light, and they did not pretend there was.

They had left money with Madame, and a story to go with it, a young lady’s faint, a family’s wish for quiet, and Madame, frightened and grateful and careful to ask no question she did not want answered, had taken the one as readily as the other.

So they built it that night, over a cold and largely untouched dinner, the lie that would have to stand for as long as the silence did. Miss Bennet had been taken ill at her fitting, a sudden collapse, a low fever, the physician unwilling to answer for her if she were moved or troubled.

Absolute quiet. No callers. The wedding put off, only put off, a fortnight, a month, as long as the illness ran. There were letters that would have to be written, and faces that would have to be kept, and a hundred small daily lies to be told to servants and tradesmen and friends, each of them another brick in the wall they were raising around her absence.

Someone asked, low, about Georgiana. Darcy said he had sent her home to Darcy House before he came, with an easy story of Elizabeth being unwell and the evening spoiled and that what he would tell her once the days of being unwell began to mount, he did not yet know.

He said it flatly, as one more item on the list, and Mrs. Gardiner understood that he had set it down so plainly only because he could not yet afford to pick it up.

It was long past midnight when the last of it was settled into words, and the men's voices had worn down to the low careful pitch of people conspiring to save someone.

Darcy had gone at last, not because he believed he could sleep, but because there was a sister at Darcy House who would have to be faced, and a search to be set going that could be run only from his own desk and under his own name.

He had stopped at the door and looked back at them, and said that he would come in the morning, and every morning after, until she was found.

And then he had gone out into the cold to begin being whatever this was going to require him to be. The house emptied of talk, and did not fill with sleep.

Mrs. Gardiner went up at last and stopped in the doorway of the room they had readied for Elizabeth. The brushes laid out, the wedding clothes hung waiting under their holland, a novel face-down on the table where she had broken off reading that morning, certain she would come back to it.

She stood in the doorway a long while, an aunt who had given a frightened girl one small kindness, a minute to herself, and had it turned against them both.

Then she closed the door softly, so as not to wake a house in which no one was sleeping, and went to her bed, and lay in it open-eyed, and waited for a morning she already knew would bring nothing but the long day's work of pretending.

7

She came back to herself in pieces.

First there was a ceiling she did not know, a canopy of faded blue, water-marked in one corner, the kind of ceiling one wakes beneath in a strange inn and lies still a moment to place.

Then the headache, which was not like other headaches. It sat behind her eyes and in the roots of her teeth, and her mouth was dry as paper, and her thoughts came up slow and silted, as though she were dredging each one out of deep water.

She lay still and searched for the last thing she remembered.

The fitting room. The warm close air, and the pins. The small dark bottle, and the kind card in Lady Matlock's hand, and her aunt saying drink it, you are pale as the gown. The sweetness and the bitterness under the sweetness. A hand closing over hers, gloved, not unkind, taking hold and waiting.

Elizabeth opened her eyes the rest of the way, and sat up too quickly, and the room pitched, and she gripped the edge of the bed and was nearly sick over the side of it onto a floor that was not her own.

When it passed, she made herself look.

It was a bedroom she had never seen. A good room once, the hangings faded but fine, the furniture solid, stripped now to the bone. No glass on the wall, no candle, no fire in the grate, though the air was cold enough to want one.

One window. She rose slowly to discover she was in her chemise and nothing more. Her embarrassment at being thus in a room she did not know at least kept her from becoming sick and she pushed herself to stand. Elizabeth meant to know where she was and who had brought her here.

She crossed to the door on legs that were shaky to find it locked. Elizabeth grasped the cold knob, and tried to turn it but it did not give. The hinges were on the far side. The door had been hung to keep a person inside.

Elizabeth stood with her hand flat against it and made herself breathe and think. Someone had removed her from the back room of the modiste. Fitzwilliam must be mad with worry, her aunt and uncle and Jane and Lady Matlock as well.