Page 29 of Miss Bennet is Gone

Madame had sent the gown home that morning. She had at last done the only decent thing left to her and had it wrapped in clean muslin and had it carried round to Gracechurch Street with a note of six lines that apologised for all of the trouble.

“I cannot,” Mrs. Gardiner said, when Lady Matlock asked her, quite gently, what she wished done with it. “I have walked past it four times today. I know what is under the muslin. I cannot be the one to open it, and I cannot have it standing in my hall, and there is no third thing to be done, so it stands there.”

“Then I shall open it,” said Lady Matlock, “because I am not yet her aunt, and old women are useful for precisely this, and you are to stay where you are sitting.”

And she went down herself and had it brought up, and laid it along the table under the window, and turned back the muslin with her own two hands, the way one turns back a sheet.

The silk came up out of its wrapping cool and pale and entirely finished, every seam taken in and let out again to the shape of a living girl who was not inside it. Lady Matlock stood over it a moment and let herself feel the whole of what it was.

Then she took up the train to spread it straight, and something small and cream-coloured slipped from the folds of the bridal silk and landed, face upward, at her feet.

She knew the hand before she bent to retrieve it. She knew, too, that she had never written a word of it.

She read it standing at the window in the light, and read it a second time, because the first reading was only her own name coming up off the paper at her, and the second was the one that did the work.

It wished the dear girl every joy. It bade her take a little for her nerves, the way Lady Matlock’s own mother had once made her do before her wedding. It was signed, your Aunt Margaret.

She had given Elizabeth the brooch. That was hers. She remembered the warmth of the girl’s hand closing over it. She had sent nothing to any fitting.

No bottle, no draught, no kind note about nerves. And she had never in her life told Elizabeth Bennet the story of her own mother and her own wedding, for the excellent reason that there was no such story.

Her mother had been eleven months dead before her wedding. There had been no one to make her take anything, and she had stood up to be married white and frightened and entirely unfortified, and she had never told that to a soul in sixty years because there was no fond little anecdote in it to tell. There was only a girl of nineteen going up an aisle wanting her mother.

Whoever had written this had done a great deal more than forge her hand. They had invented, in her name, a tenderness she had never in her life been shown, and had put it into the hands of a girl who would drink down anything that came to her with that name on it.

And if it had not come from her hand, then someone had used her name. Someone had reached into the most intimate channel of the family’s new affection, the brooch, the welcome, the aunt-by-marriage taking the country girl warmly in, and had counterfeited it, precisely, lovingly, in a forged card in a hand near enough to her own to deceive the people who knew her.

They had used that counterfeit to put something into Elizabeth’s hand that had made her, within the quarter hour, go white and strange and beg to be left alone.

Someone who knew the family well enough to know that a gift from Lady Matlock would be trusted absolutely, drunk down without a question, wept over with gratitude. Someone inside the circle of that trust, or near enough to it to wear its voice.

Behind her, in her chair, Mrs. Gardiner was still innocently grieving a kindness that had been a weapon, and must on no account be allowed to see what she had seen. And so Lady Matlock put the treacherous card into her muff, and turned round with her face entirely arranged.

“I shall have the gown taken up out of your way, my dear,” she said, in the same low register she had used all afternoon, “and then I shall leave you to sleep, for you have not slept. I shall come again the day after tomorrow.” And Mrs. Gardiner, who had not looked up, thanked her for her kindness.

16

Lady Matlock got down the stairs and into her carriage without hurrying, because a countess who hurries is a countess who is remarked upon, and she had spent forty years not being remarked upon at the wrong moment.

She gave the coachman Matlock House. Then she drew the blind on the street side, and sat back in the dim and the rocking with the card in both hands in her lap, and permitted herself, for the length of Cheapside, to shake.

She did not go to her nephew. She thought of it, and put it aside within the half-mile, and was to be glad afterward that she had; for what she carried was not yet a fact but a violent supposition.

Darcy in that hour was a loaded thing, and a supposition put into his hands would go off before it could be aimed.

What she wanted first was her own writing-table, and her own letter-books, and an hour with the door shut.

She had them all by noon. Her letter-books going back nine years, the drafts she kept of anything that mattered, a bundle of her own returned notes that Georgiana had sent back one summer for a joke.

She spread them the length of the table under a branch of candles, though it was not yet dark, and laid the card in the middle of them, and made herself look at it as the thing it was.

It was so nearly right that no one working from the outside could have caught it; not by memory, not by comparison, not by a hundred baffled hours of holding one paper against another.

It could be caught only by the one person who wrote this hand from the inside, who did not remember how she made her letters but simply made them, and so knew without looking the dozen small unconscious things a forger could not know to copy.

And once she looked for those, they were everywhere. She never crossed a t left to right as this forger had. She crossed hers with a backstroke, right to left, a habit some long-dead governess had failed to beat out of her and she had carried all these years.

The forger had joined the th. She never joined a th, never had. The t always stood alone before the h with a hair’s breadth between them, and it was so in every letter on that table, in every year of them.