Page 30 of Miss Bennet is Gone

Lady Matlock sat back. The card lay in the circle of candlelight, beautiful and false, and she found her hands were not quite steady, and let them not be, since there was no one to see.

It is not mine. She had known that from the moment it came out of the folds of the gown at her feet. The hand only finished what her invented mother had already proved.

But there is a difference between knowing a dreadful thing and sitting alone at your own table with the proof of it under a candle, and the difference went through her now like cold water.

Someone had sat for hours with her letters spread out as she had just done, studying the way she made her M, learning to counterfeit the love she bore a girl she had chosen and had done it well enough to help send that girl into the dark.

Lady Matlock did not send the card to her nephew, and she did not go to him. What she sent was three lines in her own true hand, carried by her own man, to be put into no hand but Darcy’s.

Come to me at Matlock House at six, and bring with you the bottle you took from the modiste. Tell no one but Richard. Do not come before six and do not go anywhere else first; on your love for her, do not. I have one thing I must do alone and unhurried, and by six I shall have for you more than I have now, and a great deal more than condolence. It is the last thing I shall ask you to bear blindly.

She sealed it herself and stood over the man while he took it, and told him to wait for no answer, which was as near as she could come to preventing one.

Then she sat at the head of her own long table, with the card face down beneath her hand, and only then, alone, did she let herself go the last step of the way.

For the question was not, now, was it forged. She had the proof of that folded in her hands. The question was by whom, and it was not, she found, a question at all, but only a name she had been declining to think for the better part of an hour because thinking it made it real.

Consider what the thing had required. Not merely skill with a pen, though it had required that. It had required knowing that Lady Matlock had taken Elizabeth up, that there was an affection there warm enough and public enough that a gift in her name would be trusted without a breath of question.

It had required knowing the family from the inside, its new tendernesses, the very fact of its kindnesses. It had required knowing, too, that she herself would not be at the fitting to be thanked or contradicted, though that, she granted, was no great feat of intelligence. Any soul in the family knew a countess did not attend a girl at her pins.

And it had required something colder and rarer than knowledge. The particular conviction, held hard enough to act on, that this marriage was a wrong to be undone by any means whatever. That a girl who had presumed to it was not a person to whom the ordinary forbearances were owed.

Lady Matlock ran the whole family through her mind, every soul in it with the wit and the motive and the want of scruple to do this thing, and the list was not long, and at the end of it there was exactly one name, and it had been there from the beginning, and she had simply not wanted it.

Only one woman in the family hated this marriage enough to break the world over it. Only one had spent the last year telling anyone who would listen that it was a pollution and a disgrace.

Only one had the cold certainty of her own rightness so complete that she could forge another woman’s love and feel herself, in doing it, the injured party.

And only that one, this was the stroke that turned suspicion into the thing past doubting, would have used Lady Matlock’s name to do it.

Who would have reached past every other hand she might have counterfeited and chosen, with the unerring instinct of an old rivalry, to commit the crime in the name of the sister-in-law she had spent thirty years resenting for being better loved.

“Catherine,” Lady Matlock said aloud, to the empty room, and the saying of it was a confirmation, the click of a key she had felt turning since the card first came up off the floor into her hand.

Her sister-in-law. The mistress of Rosings, who had come so meekly to town with her apologies and her opened townhouse, and asked so warmly after the wedding. All of it a practiced lie, the worst intentions wrapped in silk, given with contrived reconciliation.

She did not have it proven. A hand she could swear was not her own was not the same as a hand she could swear was Catherine’s.

A name reasoned to alone was not a thing one could lay before a magistrate, or even before a grieving family, and be believed. She would need confirmation, something nearer to certainty than her own ear and her own deductions, something that would stand when she said it aloud to her husband and her nephew and watched their faces refuse to believe her.

But she knew, now, where such confirmation might be got. She knew the house. She knew, better than anyone living, how to read the face of a de Bourgh across a teacup, and she knew that Catherine de Bourgh had a daughter who had never in her life been able to lie to anyone who looked at her directly and waited.

She would go now and she would go alone, and take nothing with her but the card in her muff and her own face, and she would say not one word of it to any living soul until she had been and gone again.

17

Lady Matlock arrived with a calling-card and a manner that announced nothing but an aunt-by-marriage paying an overdue social call on her newly arrived relations. She was not in the least surprised, and took care to seem a little disappointed, when the footman regretted that her ladyship was resting before dinner.

“Then I shall sit with Miss de Bourgh, if she is at home,” said Lady Matlock comfortably, already drawing off her gloves, “for I have hardly had two words with the dear girl since they came up, and I am not so pressed that I cannot wait a little on the chance of Catherine’s coming down. No, you need not announce me, I know the way to a drawing-room, I should hope, at my age.”

And she went up before the man could shape an objection, because a countess in motion is very difficult to stop and she had counted on that too.

Anne was in the small sitting-room with a book, and she rose at the sight of Lady Matlock with a start that she covered almost well enough. “Aunt. We did not... that is, my mother is resting. She will be sorry to have missed you.”

“She will not, and neither shall I, for it is you I find I wanted,” said Lady Matlock, settling herself into the better chair with the air of a woman who meant to stay exactly as long as suited her. “Sit, child, sit. We shall have a comfortable hour. Ring for some tea, or no, do not trouble the house; I see you have a pot there scarcely touched, and I never could abide a fresh pot made for one old woman’s whim. I shall take a cup of yours, if it is not quite cold.”

So they sat, the two of them, over a pot of cooling tea, and Lady Matlock made the kind of conversation she had been making for forty years, the conversation that seems to be about nothing and is, in the hands of an expert, a slow and thorough taking of inventory.