Page 35 of Miss Bennet is Gone

"You shall have it back," Darcy said, "if I have to take this house apart to the brick."

The savagery in his voice was so plain, and so unlike the careful contained man she loved, that she understood for the first time the full measure of what those days had cost on his side of the locked door.

And she loved him the more for it, and put her hand to his face to call him back from wherever the thought of the brooch had sent him.

Then she went to the table, and knelt down and felt along the underside, and worked the folded squares out of the gap one after another into her palm.

"I wrote to you," she said, getting up off her knees and brushing them off. "When there was nothing else in the world I was permitted to do. I could not send them, so I put them under her table, and told myself that if I were never found at all they should at least have been written."

She closed her hand over the little packet. "You are not to read them today. But I have kept my own account of this, Fitzwilliam, in my own hand, and it comes out of this house with me."

Darcy held her again. “My Elizabeth, there are no words for the shame that haunts me. You were hidden within our sight the entire time. Had I only taken one moment to think that she was newly arrived, that her behavior never rang true for either of us⁠—”

“Oh my dear Fitzwilliam,” she said and caressed his face. “There are many who will bear shame they have not earned, and I will not have any of you look at me and only see what was done here. Please, for my sake, do not carry the cross that is theirs to bear. You have carried too much these past days.”

Elizabeth looked toward the open door, where Anne still stood pressed to the passage wall, white and unregarded, and her face changed, not to forgiveness, which was not the work of that afternoon, but to pity for the life Anne would lead after all this.

“We will none of us go out the back,” Elizabeth said. “We will go out the front. In the daylight. Let the street see exactly who walks out of this house on her own two feet.”

So they went down, Darcy’s arm about her and hers about him, neither willing yet to be even a hand’s breadth apart, down the three flights and past the servants and the silent soldier and out through the hall.

Lady Catherine stood by the drawing-room door and watched them come, and said nothing now, having nothing left that anyone in the house would hear.

Elizabeth did not hurry past her, and did not cringe from her, and did not spend a word on her. She only looked at her once, full and level and unafraid, the look of a woman walking out of gaol under her own power past the person who had meant to keep her in it forever.

And that look, Darcy thought, was a worse thing for Lady Catherine to receive than any speech could have been, because there was no fear in it for her pride to feed on, and no hatred either, only the plain contempt of the one who had won.

And then the front door, which Anne had come down to open for them and stood holding, one last small office, performed without a word.

Down the white steps, into the grey afternoon, and the cold ordinary air of the street for the first time in many days, and the carriage at the curb with its door let down and a folded cloak waiting on the seat for her.

Darcy handed her up into it himself, as he had handed her up into a carriage on a happier night a lifetime ago, and got in after her.

The wheels moved. The house with the barred room went back over her shoulder and was gone, and she did not look at it. She had no further use for it.

She kept her eyes on the man beside her, and her hand in his, and let the ordinary motion of a carriage carry her toward a door that someone who loved her would be standing behind.

20

So it was the older generation were left to do the cold work, the Earl, and the Countess, who had come on behind the rescue in her own carriage and arrived as Elizabeth’s was pulling away.

The Colonel, who had sent his two men off with the hired servants to take names and addresses and stood by the drawing-room door with his arms folded and his face shut.

They had it to themselves, the family did. That was deliberate.

Whatever was said in the next half-hour was going to be said within the blood and not beyond it, because the entire object of those days’ labour, the lie, the drawing-rooms, Lady Matlock’s grey exhaustion, had been to keep this thing out of the world, and they were not going to undo all of it now by settling accounts in front of servants and constables.

The reckoning would be a family reckoning. It was, the Earl thought, looking at his sister, almost the cruelest part of what she had done.

She had made them all complicit in the covering of it, so that justice and mercy alike had to be administered in a closed room by the people she had wronged.

Lady Catherine had seated herself. She sat in the best chair of her own drawing-room with her hands folded and her back not touching the back of it as was her habit, and she watched her brother cross to the hearth and turn.

She waited for him to begin with the composure of a woman receiving a morning call she found slightly tedious. It was the composure that undid the last of the Earl’s restraint.

“Do you know,” he said, and his voice was shaking, which his wife had heard perhaps twice in forty years, “I have spent the drive over, and the climb up your stairs, and the whole of the time since, trying to find the thing I might say to you that would reach you. Some sentence that would make you understand what you have done. And I have given it up, Catherine, on the threshold of your own drawing-room, because I have looked at your face and seen that there is no such sentence, and there never was. I have been a fool to keep believing there might be. You drugged a girl. You had her carried off and shut up behind a bar. You forged your own sister-in-law’s hand and her love to do it. You let that boy, who you have known since he was an hour old, walk the streets of this city for days half out of his mind. And then, Catherine, this is the thing I cannot get past, the thing he told me himself on the way here, in a voice I hope never to hear from a man again. On the very day he should have married her, the day your work had arranged that he should spend in mourning instead, you put on your grey and you went to his house and drank his tea and sat with that broken boy and counselled him, gently, that Providence had intervened, and that he might use the pause to reconsider the match. You advised him to give her up, in his own drawing-room, while you held her behind a bar a mile away. And you are sitting there now as though I had come to complain of a draught.”

“I did what no one else in this family had the courage to do,” said Lady Catherine.