Page 21 of Miss Bennet is Gone

He set the glass down untouched. “That is the whole of it. A doctor chasing his money. I have seen the mother. I have seen the rooms. There is nothing in it.”

The thread, pulled, had come away in his hand, attached to nothing. Darcy watched the hope go out of the room the way it had gone out of him that morning over Sable’s note, feature by feature, each face setting back into the grey patience that was the only sustainable expression any of them had left.

What none of them could see, what no one in that room could possibly have seen, was how near the thread had run to the thing itself before it frayed. The doctor was real and innocent and a dead end. But the coin that had paid the doctor was not innocent; it had come folded in a handkerchief from a veiled woman who knew a poor girl’s name and her mother’s illness, and the same girl who had sent for Mr. Adair had taken a sealed bottle from that same gloved hand and put it into Elizabeth’s.

“It was right of you to run it down,” Darcy said. “It was right of you not to tell us until you had. You will go on being right about both of those things, Richard, and I will go on hating you for it, and we will neither of us stop.”

“I know it.” The Colonel looked into the fire. “I keep thinking I have known terrible sieges. I have not. There is no siege like this one.” He was quiet a moment. “We will have her,” he said, not as comfort, he was not a man who offered comfort he had not verified, but as a thing he had decided to hold, the way Darcy held the narrowing field and Mrs. Gardiner held her guilt and Mr. Bingley held his chair by the fire. Because the holding was the work, and the work was all any of them had.

The trail was cold by midnight. They sat with it cold a while longer, none of them willing to be the first to go up, until Bingley, who had appointed himself to this office and would not be relieved of it, saw them off one by one to what sleep they could manage, and banked the fire, and put out the candles, and was, as he had been every night that week, the last of them awake in the dark house.

11

After that first visit Anne came again, and then she came as a matter of course, and within three days her coming had acquired the settled, unremarked regularity of a thing that has always happened.

Which was, Elizabeth thought, precisely how habits installed themselves in people who would have denied to the death that they had formed one.

She came in the dead middle of the afternoon, the slack hour when the house had finished its morning and not yet begun to think of its evening, and she brought her embroidery. This was new. She had come empty-handed the first time, with nothing to do but look.

Now she came armed with a hoop and a basket of silks, and set herself in the chair her mother used, and bent over her work, and stitched, badly, Elizabeth noted, with the joyless competence of a woman who had been made to learn a thing she had no love for, and between the stitches she watched.

The embroidery was a pretext, and they both knew it, and neither of them said so. It gave Anne a reason to be in the room that was not I cannot keep away, and it gave her somewhere to put her eyes when the watching became too naked even for her, and it filled the silences, of which there were many, with the small respectable sound of a needle going through linen.

Elizabeth understood the use of it. She had her own version. She kept her hands busy with the hem of her sleeve, which she had unpicked and was slowly, pointlessly re-sewing, because a woman with something to do with her hands is a woman who need not fill every silence with talk. Elizabeth had decided that in this strange daily siege the one who talked least gave away least.

For it was a siege, whatever the embroidery pretended. Elizabeth never once forgot it, not for a stitch, not for a sentence. She sat in a barred room and was visited each afternoon by one of the two people in England responsible for her being in it, and she received these visits the way a besieged garrison receives a parley; civilly, watchfully, giving up no ground, certain that whatever the other party wanted, it was not her good.

That Anne was interesting did not make Anne safe. That the hours were less unbearable for the company did not make the company a kindness.

Elizabeth held both of these facts steady in her mind while she talked, the way she had learned to hold the count of her own breathing, because the day she let the pleasantness of an afternoon persuade her she was among friends was the day the house would have begun, quietly, to win.

It was the books that undid the careful distance, a little, against the will of both of them.

It began with nothing. Elizabeth, to fill a silence she had for once grown tired of guarding, said that she would give a great deal for something to read, that the worst of the room was not the cold nor the bar at the window but the absolute famine of print, that she had not gone four days without a book since she was old enough to hold one and had not known until now how much of her own company she kept by means of other people’s sentences.

Anne’s needle stopped.

“You read a great deal,” she said. It was not a question. There was something careful in the way she said it.

“I read whatever I can reach. My father’s library was not large, but it was unguarded, which is better. He never once told me a book was beyond me. I read a great many things I did not understand, and it did me no harm I have ever been able to find.”

“Unguarded,” Anne repeated, and there was the careful word again, held at arm’s length. “I was permitted books. A great many books. Sermons. Conduct. A history, if it taught the right lesson. Poetry, if it was the improving kind, which is to say the kind no one would read who was not made to.”

She drew the needle through and did not seem to see it. “There was a locked case in the library at Rosings. I asked once, when I was twelve, what was in it. My mother said it held the books that were not suitable, and that when I was old enough to be trusted with them, I would not want them, and that this was the whole purpose of growing up.” A pause. “I am eight-and-twenty. The case is still locked. I have drawn the obvious conclusion as to what she thinks of my growing up.”

It was said dryly, almost as a joke, and it was the saddest thing Elizabeth had heard in that house, and the danger of it was that her whole heart moved toward the woman who had said it before her judgment could catch the heart by the collar and haul it back.

She is your gaoler, she told herself. Her unhappiness is real, and it is also not your charge, and a clever captor need not even intend a thing for it to serve her.

And all of that was true and even so Elizabeth heard herself say, more gently than she had said anything since the door first locked, “What would you read? If the case were open and your mother in another county and no one in the world to tell you a word of it was beyond you. What would you take down first?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and it seemed to frighten her. “I should not know where to begin. That is — ” she stopped. “That is what she took. Not the books. The knowing what I would reach for. I could not tell you my own taste if my life hung on it, because I was never let to have one, and you cannot acquire at eight-and-twenty the thing that is only got by being left alone with a shelf at twelve.”

The silence after that was a different silence than the guarded ones. Elizabeth let it be. She had sense enough not to fill it, not to press the advantage, for it was an advantage, and she hated that part of her mind went on coldly noting it as one even while the rest of her ached, and after a while Anne bent back to the hated embroidery, and stitched, and said nothing more, and the afternoon wore down to the hour of her going.

Anne went up to her own room afterward dissatisfied and could not have said with what.

She had got nothing she came for. She never did and was no longer sure there was a thing to get, or that there ever had been.