Page 33 of Miss Bennet is Gone

He looked at his uncle. "You wanted the knowing and the acting in the same stroke. Very well. I know. Let us act.“

And the Earl, who was a slow man but not a stubborn one, and who had heard the truth in it, that Anne’s discovery had already started a clock that no amount of careful placing could stop, looked at his nephew a long moment, and then went to the bell and rang it.

He began, in the flat fast voice of a man who has changed his whole plan in the space of a breath, to give the orders that would put them all in motion within the half-hour.

The light was already going grey and thin when the carriages came into the quiet costly street where the de Bourgh townhouse stood with its blacked railings.

Richard had been collected on the way and had asked three short questions and made one short plan and otherwise said nothing.

He went round to the mews and the back with two of the Earl’s men before the front bell was ever rung, so that whatever door Catherine might think to use should have a soldier behind it.

Darcy went up the steps with the Earl at his shoulder, and did not wait to be admitted. The footman who opened to the bell found the door taken out of his hand, and Darcy was into the hall and asking, in a voice that brought a stop to the whole house, for Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

She came out to them. That was the thing Darcy had not expected, and ought to have. She did not hide, did not bar a door, did not run for the back.

Lady Catherine came out of the drawing-room into her own hall with her chin up, the mistress of the house receiving callers, and she looked at her nephew and her brother standing in her hall with the cold afternoon at their backs, and she was not afraid.

He saw that at once and it chilled him worse than fear would have. She was not afraid, because she did not believe herself to be in the wrong, and a person who does not believe herself in the wrong has no fear to be worked upon.

“Fitzwilliam,” she said. “And my brother. You have come a great way into my house without invitation.” She did not trouble, this time, to offer them chairs.

She had seen the bottle in her brother’s man’s keeping as they came in, and her brother’s face, and her nephew’s. She was a great many unpleasant things, but she had never been slow, and she knew to the inch how much they knew. She did not waste a breath denying it.

Lady Catherine only stood very straight in the middle of her own hall, the mistress of a house she understood she had already lost and regarded her nephew with the cold composure of a woman who, having nothing left to gain, had settled on the one thing still in her power to take.

“Where is she?” Darcy demanded, his rage barely held.

“You will find her,” Lady Catherine said. “You have men on my stairs and a soldier at my mews. I am not such a fool as to think otherwise. You will have her out of here within the hour and you will think you have won something.”

Her chin came up. “So I shall not waste my breath on where she is, since you will have it regardless. I shall spend it on the only thing worth saying to you, nephew, the thing your devoted Lady Matlock and my dear brother have been far too tender to put to you plainly, and I find I should like you to carry it out of this house along with your prize.” She came no nearer, and her voice did not rise.

“You told the world she was ill. You built it yourselves, all of you, brick by brick, the low fever, the physician, the darkened room, the wedding only postponed, so that her vanishing should not ruin her. A pretty piece of work. I have admired it. But consider what you built, Fitzwilliam, now that you are so determined to have her back. By your own tale she has lain ill in a loving family’s care, wanting nothing, free to send for anyone she chose. But she did not send for you. She did not marry you from her sick bed. By your own story, she did not become Mrs. Darcy. I give you that to keep. I find it is the one wedding gift of mine you cannot refuse.”

When Darcy spoke his voice was perfectly steady, and perfectly cold, and that coldness was a thing she had not reckoned on, because she had aimed the blade at a man half-mad with grief and found instead a man who had gone entirely quiet.

“She did not send for me,” he said, “because you drugged her at the modiste and carried her out a back door and have kept her behind a barred window. That is why she did not call. I know it, you know it, and still you stand in your own hall and offer me her silence as though you had not been the one to lock her in it. There is no cruelty left in you that can reach me, Aunt. I have spent days now imagining the worst that one human being might do to another, and you are smaller than all of it. You are an old woman who has lost, and cannot bear it, and has nothing left to spend but spite.” He did not raise his voice. “Get out of my way.”

She did not move. She did not stand aside, and she did not answer. In the silence of that refusal, before any of them could break it, a voice came from the staircase behind her.

“Stop.”

Anne stood on the fourth stair, one hand on the rail. No one had seen her come. She had been standing in shadow listening for some time, and had heard her mother, beaten and unrepentant, reach for the cruelest thing left within her grasp, and had reached, herself, the end of something.

She was white to the lips. She did not look at Darcy, nor at the Earl. Anne looked at her mother, and what was in her face was not defiance, which her mother would have known how to break, but a terrible quietness, the quiet of a person who has ceased, finally and entirely, being afraid of the one thing she has been afraid of her whole life.

“Anne,” said Lady Catherine, and there was a warning in it that had governed her daughter for eight-and-twenty years.

It did not govern her now.

Anne took her hand from the rail and turned, not down the stairs toward them, but up toward the dim landing and the floors above, and said, without turning her head, in a voice that shook and did not stop, “She is on the third floor. The back room. It has a bar on the window and two locks on the door, and I know, because I stood in it before they brought her, and I have the key in my dressing-room, and I will fetch it, and I will take you to her myself.”

And she went up, into the dark of the stair, leaving her mother’s warning unanswered in the hall below. Darcy had pushed his aunt aside and was already moving after Anne, and the house that had kept its terrible quiet came all at once awake.

19

Anne went up the stairs ahead of them, and Darcy went after her, and the Earl after Darcy.

The second footman started forward from the half-landing and then, seeing the soldier’s coat that was Richard come in from the back, thought better of it and flattened himself against the wall to let them pass.