Page 24 of Miss Bennet is Gone

They might outlast the date. They could not outlast it forever; a house kept thin and a secret kept by few would, in time, show through, and she had only to be there, whole and watching, on the day it did.

And there was Darcy, who was turning the city over, she knew it the way she knew her own name, and who would not stop, not for the date, not for a month of dates, not while there was a single stone in London he had not lifted.

Lady Catherine was counting on the calendar. She had left out of her arithmetic the one figure that did not appear in any almanac, that the man Elizabeth was to have married did not know how to give a thing up.

She drew the chair round, and uncapped the ink, and did not write Lady Catherine’s letter. She added a line to her own, the hidden one, the one under the desk, telling Darcy what she had worked out about the calendar.

That she had decided not to be afraid of it, and that he was to hurry, please, not because she was breaking, but because she would so much rather be found than wait to be released.

And she had never in her life been good at the waiting kind of courage and saw no reason to become good at it now.

Then she hid it again and set the pen its half-inch off the square, and sat down to wait in the only way she had ever been able to, as though waiting were a thing she was doing to them, and not a thing being done to her.

13

The last thing the search turned up before the trail went cold for good arrived, as such things have a habit of doing, on the morning it could do the least good.

It came in a note from Sable, brought round before eight. The letting-agents had given nothing, but one of his men, working the mews and stable-yards in the streets behind the modiste’s, had at last found a hostler who remembered something of the afternoon in question.

A carriage had stood waiting that day in a yard off the lane. A closed carriage, a plain one, standing the better part of an hour where no carriage had any trade to stand, the horses kept harnessed and a man at their heads the whole time.

The hostler had marked it because the idle waiting was odd and because the vehicle itself was odd. A good carriage, well kept, well horsed, a gentleman’s carriage by every mark of it, and yet bearing no crest, no arms, no device of any kind on the door, only the faint ghost where such a thing had lately been and was not.

Darcy read it standing at the cold window of his own house in his wedding clothes, which he had put on that morning the way a man’s hands will finish a habit his mind has not given them leave to start.

A plain carriage, stripped of its crest. He turned it over and over and could make it yield nothing. It told him the abduction had been prepared by people of means, people with a good carriage to spare and the foresight to render it anonymous, which he knew already.

But a carriage with no crest was a carriage that could not be traced; that was the entire purpose of stripping it, and the purpose had been served. There was no maker’s arms to inquire after, no device to match to a family, nothing to carry to a herald or a coachbuilder and say, whose is this?

The one fact that would have unlocked it, whose carriage, from what house, was the precise fact that had been filed away to nothing by whoever had thought to take the crest off in advance.

He stood holding the note and felt the old helpless fury rise. He had been left, once again, a true thing he could not use, a fact looking like a key and cut to fit no lock he could find.

He did not know, he could not have known, and it would have broken something in him to know, that the carriage in the hostler’s memory was a carriage he himself had ridden in, years ago, at Rosings; that the ghost where the crest had been was the de Bourgh arms, ordered taken off in the autumn by a pale woman who feared a housemaid’s memory.

And that the single thread the whole vast search had finally caught hold of ran straight back to his aunt’s door and could not be followed there by any living soul. The one woman who could have named the carriage was sitting at that hour behind a barred window a mile away, and the one who had stripped it was breaking her fast in the house where it was kept.

He folded the note into his pocket, where it would stay all that day, and turned from the window, because it was his wedding morning, and there was no longer any work in the world that could be done before the hour the wedding would not happen.

On the morning of the eighth day, which was to have been her wedding day, Elizabeth woke at first light.

She had slept, against her expectation, quite well. She had lain down the night before with the deliberate intention of sleeping, because she had known what the coming day was, and she had wished to have her wits about her.

Elizabeth rose and washed her face in the cold water of the basin. She took down her hair, which she had been pinning up each morning with the combs she had been wearing the day she was taken and combed it through and braided it and pinned it up again, because there was a dignity in being kept, and she meant to keep it.

She stood at the window and watched the sky slowly lighten over the roofs beyond the mews. A thin drift of snow had fallen in the night and lay in narrow white lines along the slates of the opposite houses. A pair of sparrows flew down to the cobbles and hopped about and flew up again.

Elizabeth thought of Fitzwilliam. She thought of him rising at Darcy House, of him going to a window and looking out at the same morning sky and knowing that she was somewhere under it.

I am here, she said to him, in her mind. I am here, and I am not broken, and I have not signed the letter, and I shall not sign it. It is our wedding day. I shall keep it in my heart, though we cannot keep it at the altar.

Elizabeth stood at the window a long time. When the maid came in with the tray she turned and accepted it civilly and sat down and ate her bread and drank her tea, and did not weep.

She was not yet ready to weep. Elizabeth had learned, in this room, the difference between the grief that is chosen and the grief that assails.

At midday, Lady Catherine came. She sat down, as she had done every morning and she looked at Elizabeth. She seemed almost uncertain.

Elizabeth spoke first. “It is my wedding day, ma’am.”