Page 18 of Miss Bennet is Gone

He paid it again now, and kept his face shut, and said only, “I am asking you to trust me and ask me nothing, and to help me by being as dull and sorry and ordinary as any girl whose new sister has taken ill before a wedding. I cannot do this thing and shield you from it both. Will you give me that?”

She did not cry. She rose, and came round the desk, and kissed his temple, the way their mother was said to have done, though she could not have remembered it, and said, “Yes.”

Then at the door, not turning, “Brother, whatever has been done, and whoever has done it, take everything from them. Leave them nothing.”

And she went out, and he sat with the door shut and understood that she had grown up when he had not been looking, and had chosen this morning to let him see it.

Across the city the same lie was being built in a plainer house. Jane spoiled three sheets before she had a letter to Longbourn her hand would not betray.

Lizzy unwell, the wedding a little put back, no cause for alarm. Mr. Hewitt was told half of it, enough to lend the illness a doctor’s weight and not enough to make him dangerous.

The Gracechurch servants were given the same words as the servants in the great house across town, so the lie should match at every turn, and by nightfall two households were keeping one secret, and the secret had begun to keep them.

That night, when the house was dark, Darcy went out again on foot to the lane behind the shop. He could not have said what he hoped to find that three men had failed to find by daylight.

He went because the alternative was the dark and the bed and his own mind, and a man can refuse those only so many hours together.

The lane was empty and smelled of refuse and, under it, the river. He stood at its mouth where it opened past the yard gate. There, in his mind’s eye, the carriage drawn close, the horse’s head to the street for a quick start.

The gate, and a man coming through it with her , walked or carried, in the four or five seconds the yard stood empty. He paced it off. He stood on the spot. A minute, it would have wanted. Less.

He walked the lane to its end and back and found nothing, because the city had swept itself a hundred times since the afternoon, and he stood in the cold a while longer because home was no better.

There was one thought he had kept off all day. He let it come now, here, where no one could see what it did to his face. She was alive, she had to be, because whoever had done this wanted a thing only a living woman could give, a surrender.

And that for as long as they wanted it they would keep her, and for as long as they kept her, he could reach her. It was the thinnest comfort in the world.

He took it in both hands and held it and walked home through the first carts of the waking streets, and was washed and shaved and in command of himself at his desk before Georgiana came down to a breakfast neither of them would eat.

9

On the first full day she learned the room with her hands, because it was the only ground she had and she would not lose it for want of knowing it.

She began at the window. The bar was iron and new; she set her thumb to each of the four screws and pushed until the nail bent white, and not one of them gave. She wrapped both hands round the bars and pulled, a foot braced on the wall, and it did not so much as creak.

Elizabeth let go and looked down past it into the back court three storeys below. Trodden earth, a water-butt, a dead bed where something had grown once, a wall too high to see beyond.

While she watched, a cat came along the top of the wall, picked its way the length of it, and dropped down the far side and was gone. Nothing else crossed the court the whole of the morning.

She paced the floor next, heel to toe, counting under her breath. Eleven of her feet one way, fourteen the other. She did it twice to be sure, and once more for the plain comfort of the count and made herself stop.

Her bed was stripped to the ticking, with one grey blanket, a washstand, a table and a chair. On the table lay the paper, and the stoppered ink, and a good pen set down beside them.

Laid fresh that morning, she was certain, for she had left the pen a half-inch off the square the night before, and here it was set true again by a hand that had come and gone without her hearing it.

Elizabeth did not touch it. She drew the chair round to the far side of the table instead, so that she sat with her back to the paper and her face to the door.

The locks turned at midday, the lower first, deep and slow, the upper after, quick and light, a new lock on an old door, and Lady Catherine came in.

“You have not begun,” she said, with a glance at the dry pen.

“I do not mean to begin.”

“You will find the want of occupation wearing, in time. The letter would give you something to do.” Lady Catherine sat, unhurried, and arranged her skirts. “I have written out the substance of it for you, that you need not labour over the wording, only the hand need be your own. You have reconsidered. You were never equal to what the match would ask. You have gone away of your own will and beg not to be sought. He knows your hand.”

“He will know it for a lie in the reading of it.”

“He will know your hand. That is enough to begin the doubt, and doubt is a patient worker. It does not need to win the first day.” She rose. “I shall leave it with you. You have a great deal of time, Miss Bennet.”