Page 31 of Miss Bennet is Gone

She asked after Anne’s health and watched her answer. She admired the townhouse, so well arranged, so quickly, they must have worked wonders to have it all in such order so soon, and watched Anne’s eyes while she admired it.

She spoke of the season, of who had married whom, of a scandal in a family they both knew; and under cover of the chatter she was reading the girl across from her the way she read a difficult room, noting the held breath, the cup taken up too often and drunk from too little, the way Anne’s gaze went again and again to the door as though her mother’s appearance were a thing to be longed for and dreaded in the same instant.

“And poor Miss Bennet,” Lady Matlock said, at last, lightly, as though it were merely the next thing in the chain of small talk.

“You will have heard. Such a wretched business, taken so ill, and the wedding put off, and the whole family in such distress. I have been sitting with her aunt. I came here this morning, if I am honest, half to get an hour away from grief and into a young person’s company.” She let that sit a moment.

“You met her, I think? Before she was taken ill. Catherine brought you to call.”

“Once or twice.” Anne’s voice had gone careful. “She was very lively.”

“She is the most lively creature I have met in twenty years,” Lady Matlock said, and for a moment let the true thing show under the social one, because she wanted Anne to feel the weight of the person they were discussing.

“It is the cruelest part of it. To see a young lady so vibrant made so quiet.” She watched the word land. “You are fond of her too, I think. You have the look of someone who took to her.”

“I — yes.” It came out before Anne could govern it, and she looked, for an instant, stricken at having said it, and reached for her cup again though it was empty.

Lady Matlock set down her own cup. She did it without haste and in the quiet after she looked at Anne directly, the whole of her attention turned and steady.

The look she had spent a lifetime learning to level at a person when she wished the truth out of them, and she said very gently, in the voice one uses for a confidence between women who are fond of one another, “I sent no cordial, Anne.”

She did not say anything else. She had decided, in the carriage, that she would not, that she would lay the one true sentence down between them and add nothing to it, no accusation, no question, no softening, and let the silence do the rest.

For a question can be answered and an accusation can be denied, but a fact, set down quietly by someone who plainly knows it for a fact, leaves a guilty person nowhere at all to stand. So she set it down and waited, and kept her eyes on Anne’s face.

And Anne could not meet her gaze.

That was the whole of it, that was everything. The girl’s eyes dropped, not in the ordinary way of a shy woman’s glance falling, but the way a thing falls that has had its support struck out from under it, and a slow tide of color came up her throat and into her face, and her hands closed on one another in her lap, and she looked at anything in the room that was not the steady kind terrible eyes of the woman across from her.

Anne did not deny it. She did not ask what cordial or I do not understand you or any of the dozen things an innocent woman says in the first half-second, easily, without thinking, because the body produces them before the mind is even engaged.

She said nothing at all, and her silence was a full confession, and avoiding the eyes of her aunt was the signature on it.

Lady Matlock felt the last of her hope go, for she had carried, under the certainty, one small treacherous wish to be wrong, the wish of a woman who did not want it to be her own family after all, and felt it go quietly, and was surprised by the steadiness with which she bore it.

Lady Matlock had her confirmation. It had cost her one sentence and a silence, and it was complete, and it would never stand up in any court or be of the slightest use as evidence, and she did not care, because she had not come for evidence. She had come to be sure.

For a moment she very nearly reached across and took the girl’s knotted hands. There was a part of her, the part that had buried a daughter, that knew an unhappy child when one sat shaking in front of her.

She saw in Anne not the architect of a monstrous thing but a creature who had been made into an instrument of it, and pitied her, and wanted to say so.

She did not. It was not the hour for it, and the pity, however real, would have to wait behind the colder business of the next days. She only let the silence hold a moment longer, long enough that Anne should know, past any doubt, that she had been understood and then she gathered herself to go.

“I have stayed too long,” Lady Matlock said, rising, in precisely the easy social voice she had come in with, as though the last two minutes had not occurred, for she had no wish to leave the girl in a state the returning mother might read, and a countess’s composure, resumed, can paper over a great deal.

“Give your mother my card and my regrets that I missed her. Tell her I shall hope to see her very soon indeed.” She drew on her gloves. At the door she paused, and looked back once at Anne, who had risen too and stood white and wretched by her chair.

And what Lady Matlock said then she said almost kindly, which was somehow the worst thing she could have said. “Take care of yourself, child. You do not look at all well. I think you have been carrying something a great deal too heavy for you, and for a great deal too long.”

And she went out, and down, and gave the footman a pleasant parting, and was handed into her carriage, and did not let so much as a tremor into her face until the door had shut and the horses had taken her round the corner and out of sight of every window of that house.

She drove straight to Matlock House and went straight to her husband’s study, where the Earl was at his correspondence, and shut the door behind her, which she did not commonly do.

“Henry,” she said. “Put down your pen.”

He looked up and put it down at once. Years of marriage had taught him the registers of her voice, and this was one he had heard only a handful of times, and never over anything small. She came to the desk, and from her muff she took the folded card, and laid it on the leather in front of him, as one lays down evidence.

“That card is written in my hand,” she said. “But it is not my hand. It was given to Elizabeth Bennet at her fitting, with a cordial, in my name and with my love, neither of which I sent. She drank it, and within the quarter hour she was carried out of that shop and has not been seen since.”