Page 28 of Miss Bennet is Gone

“Then I will say it.” She set down her cup. “I have wondered, these last days, and I have reproached myself for the wondering, and wondered all the same, whether there is not some meaning to be read in this. I do not say it to wound you. But consider, Fitzwilliam. You were eight days from a marriage that the whole of your family, myself among them, once thought unwise, and I include myself in the wrong of how that was said to you, you know I do. And then, eight days out, with no warning and no cause, the thing is stopped. Halted. As though some hand larger than ours had reached down and said wait."

Her voice was very soft. "I am not a superstitious woman. But I have lived a long time, and I have learned that when Providence troubles to intervene so pointedly in the affairs of a family, it is generally because the family was about to do a thing it had not thought through to the end, and is being given, at great and cruel cost, I grant you, one last chance to think.“

Darcy said nothing. He could not have said how he kept his face. He held it while the rest of him went very cold, listening.

“All I ask,” she went on, “is that you do not waste the chance the way grief makes men waste things. When she is recovered, pray God she is recovered, the marriage will be there to take up again, if you still wish it. Nothing is lost by waiting. But you are given, now, this strange terrible pause, this gift in its dreadful wrapping, a stretch of days in which you are not yet bound, in which you might ask yourself whether this is truly the life you want. Most men never get to ask it. You have been given the asking, Fitzwilliam, at a price, and I should think it a sin against Providence itself not to at least sit quietly with the question while the chance is here. That is all. That is the whole of my cruelty. I will not say it again.”

He was a long moment finding a voice he could trust, and when he found it, it came out level, which afterward he counted the single accomplishment of the entire dreadful day.

“You have always had my interest at heart, Aunt,” he said. “I know that you believe you do. I will tell you what I am able to tell you, which is this, there is no question in me of the kind you describe. There never has been. Whatever Providence may or may not have intended by it, it has not given me a doubt, because I had none to be given. When Elizabeth is well, I shall marry her, as soon as it can be arranged, and not one hour later. That is the whole of my answer, and I am grateful for your concern, and I find I am very tired."

It was, he thought, exactly the answer of a devoted man, which was precisely the answer he needed it to be and if there was an edge under the level of it, she might lay that to grief, as she might lay anything to grief that day.

Lady Catherine rose, and pressed his hands again, and said that she had expected nothing less of him, that his constancy did him honour, that she had only wished as the nearest thing to a mother he had to be sure the question had at least been heard.

And she went, in her sorrowful grey, down the stairs and out to her own carriage, leaving behind her the faint expensive scent she wore.

He did not know what he had just been handed. He thought he had endured a hard, well-meant, intrusive kindness from a newly amenable aunt, and that it had cost him more than it should have because the day had already cost him everything it could hold.

He thought he would not tell Elizabeth of it, when he had her back, that it was the sort of thing one quietly forgot, an old woman’s clumsy sermon delivered on a bad day.

Darcy could not yet know that he would remember this half-hour to the end of his life with a particular and bottomless loathing. That he would sit, weeks hence, and understand that his aunt had sat in his drawing-room enjoying his grief like a fire she had laid herself.

15

Lady Matlock came to Gracechurch Street the day after the wedding day, because she had learned, across a long life, that the day after is worse than the day itself.

The day itself is terrible to hold. It is the morning after, when the dreaded hour has come and gone and changed nothing, that the strength a person has been hoarding gives way.

Lady Matlock had buried a daughter, many years before, in the first winter of the girl’s life, and she had learned then the cruelty of the second morning, and she had never forgotten it.

It was this knowledge, more than any other, that put her into her carriage and brought her east to a merchant’s house in a street she would not, a month before, have known how to find.

She came without sending ahead, because a visit announced is a visit a grieving woman can refuse, and she did not mean to give Mrs. Gardiner the chance.

She came plainly dressed, with no servant but her coachman, and she asked the maid who opened the door not to announce her, and went up unattended, and found Mrs. Gardiner in the small upstairs sitting-room with her hands idle in her lap and her face turned to a window.

“No,” Lady Matlock said, as Mrs. Gardiner began the automatic motion of rising, of composing herself, of becoming a hostess. “No, my dear. Not with me. I have not come to be received. I have come to sit with you, and you are to do nothing at all on my account, not rise, not ring, not find me anything to drink, not be well. I had a notion you might have run out of people you could be unwell in front of, and I have come to be one.”

She sat in the chair beside Mrs. Gardiner’s rather than the one across from it, and did not fill the silence, and after a little while Mrs. Gardiner’s rigid composure, which had survived so many days of being needed, came quietly apart in the presence of a woman who required nothing of it.

Mrs. Gardiner did not weep loudly. She wept the way the long-exhausted weep, almost without moving, the tears coming as though some vessel had simply been filled past its edge, and Lady Matlock took her hand and held it and let her.

It was a long while before either of them spoke, and when Mrs. Gardiner did, it was in the wandering, unguarded way of a person too tired to govern the direction of her thoughts.

“I keep going back to the fitting,” she said. “That afternoon. I have gone over it so many times I have nearly worn it through. It was such an ordinary afternoon, you understand. That is the cruelty of it. She was so happy, and so well, and so very nearly a bride, and I sat there in that warm little room being pleased with the whole world, and I let her be taken not ten feet from me, and I have not yet found a way to live with that, and I do not expect I ever shall.”

“You could not have known,” Lady Matlock said, gently, the thing everyone had surely said to her a hundred times, and which helped not at all.

“No. So everyone tells me.” A ghost of something that was not quite a smile. “And do you know, the thing I keep thinking on is the smallest thing of all. The cordial.”

She turned her wet handkerchief in her hands. “There was a card with it, and she opened it and read it and her eyes filled, I saw them fill, and I asked her who it was from, and she said presently, in that way she has when she is saving a pleasure up. She meant to tell me when she came down off the stool. And she never came down off the stool.”

She folded the handkerchief and unfolded it. “Somebody meant that girl a kindness in her last easy hour, and I have wanted a year of Sundays to find the woman and thank her for it, and there is no finding her, because Lizzy took the name away with her, and the card went wherever Lizzy went.”

She pressed the handkerchief to her eyes, and Lady Matlock let the silence be, and did not say the thing she was thinking, which was that she did not care for the sound of that cordial at all; that a gift arriving from nowhere at such an hour, from a woman nobody could name, was a thing she would want looked into. But she was certain Darcy would have thought the same and seen to it.

It was the maid who turned the afternoon, coming up with a question about the parcel that had been standing in the hall since ten.