Page 37 of Miss Bennet is Gone

It was the Colonel who spoke then, from his place by the door, the first thing he had said in the room. “She goes north with her mother,” he said. “Not as a punishment. As the only place there is. She cannot stay in town; she cannot be left at Rosings, which I am taking in hand now, on the family’s account, until it can be settled what becomes of it. And she will not be turned out into the world alone with nothing, whatever she has done, because we are not her mother and we do not do things that way.”

He looked at Anne, not unkindly. “You will go to Inverness. You will have your own portion of the allowance, paid to you and not through her, so that you are not at her mercy for your bread the way you have been your whole life. And when she dies, and she will die first, cousin, they always do, you will be of an age to do as you like with what is left of your life, which is more than you have ever been permitted before. It is not much. It is not a reward; you have not earned one. But it is a door that is not locked, and you opened one of those today for someone else when you had every reason not to, so I find I am willing to leave one open for you.”

Anne looked at him, and then at her uncle, and then, last, and longest, and with something in her face that none of them could read, at her mother, who had not once looked at her since the stairs and did not look at her now.

She inclined her head, very slightly, and accepted the whole of it. She had learned, at eight-and-twenty, on a staircase, the one freedom no allowance could buy her, which was that she need not ever again be afraid of that voice in the hall.

Lady Catherine sat through all of it in the best chair of the drawing-room she would leave that night and never see again, and accepted the terms, when the Earl required her to say the words aloud, in a level voice and without a tremor.

Not because she was sorry, for she was not, and would die in the north in just that state, and they all understood that they were not watching her repent, but watching her calculate.

She had wanted to save the family from a Bennet. She had succeeded only in sending herself into exile and her daughter after her and putting Anne Darcy’s brooch back at the very throat she had taken it from.

It was the most complete defeat the Earl had ever watched anyone sustain, and he found, going down his sister's stairs for the last time, that he could not feel the triumph he had climbed them expecting, but only a great and final weariness.

And for the girl going north and not the woman, the faint unwelcome stirring of a pity he would have to decide, on some later and easier day, what to do with.

21

It was in the carriage, with the house behind her and Darcy’s hand in both of hers, that Elizabeth’s body at last understood it was safe, and began, without asking her leave, to come apart.

It started in her hands. She had held them so still in her lap through every visit paid by Lady Catherine and Anne, flat on the table through every long afternoon, steady on principle, steady as a discipline. But now, safe with Darcy, there was no need for caution.

The shaking came up her arms , and her teeth went, and she could not have spoken if she tried and she was distantly amazed at it, at the violence of it, at how much she had been holding and how hard.

She had not wept in the barred room except at the appointed hour, and she did not weep now. She was past weeping, deeper than weeping, the body spending in ten minutes the terror it had been forbidden to spend for all those long and lonely days.

Darcy did not try to still her. He had the sense not to say you are safe now or it is over, not to press her hands flat or hold her too tight, but only to let the thing run its course, the way one lets a fever run, because it had to come out and there was no out but through.

“I have you,” was all he said, once, low, when the worst of it shook her. “I have you. You need not do anything at all. I have you.” And the carriage carried them east through the early dark toward Gracechurch Street.

Mrs. Gardiner was on the steps. She had been on the steps, the maid said afterward, for the better part of an hour, since the first runner had come ahead with the word that they had Elizabeth at last and were bringing her home.

She had stood out on the cold steps without a shawl, watching the corner, and Mr. Gardiner unable to make her come in, and not trying very hard, because he understood that his wife was owed her vigil on the steps.

And when the carriage came, and the door opened, and Elizabeth was handed down still half-shaking into the lamplight, Mrs. Gardiner moaned and sobbed again, and came down the steps, and the two of them met at the bottom and held on.

It was Elizabeth who spoke first, into her aunt’s shoulder, because there was a thing that could not wait, a thing she had carried in the room alongside the count and the cold and meant to say the instant she could.

“It was not your fault,” she said. “You are going to tell yourself it was, for the rest of your life, every time you look at me, that you let me out of your sight, that you gave me the minute. I know you. So I am telling you now, before another hour goes by and it sets, that it was not your fault, that it was hers, only hers, that she would have had me out of a hundred rooms you watched as easily as the one you did not. I will not have you spend one more day of the long happy life I mean for us all to have now believing you handed me to her. You did not. You handed me a glass of water at a fitting, like the good aunt you are. Do you hear me?”

And Mrs. Gardiner wept then, on the steps, in the lamplight, with her niece holding her up instead of the other way about, which was, Elizabeth understood, the only medicine in the world for what ailed her, and the one no one but she could administer.

Then the household closed around them and drew her in out of the cold. Jane was there taking Elizabeth’s face in both hands as soon as she could, and looking and looking as though to be sure of every feature, and then simply holding her without a word, sister to sister, the way they had stood in a hundred doorways their whole lives.

Mr. Bingley hovered with a great uncomplicated gladness that was its own kind of welcome after so many awful days. Mr. Gardiner got the door shut and the cold out and quietly took command of the practical salvation of his niece.

The fire was built up, the doctor sent for, broth set to warm, a hot brick wrapped for the bed, and being a man who loved by doing, and who had days of helpless love stored up, he meant to spend the whole of it tonight with blankets and broth and brandy.

They did not have her talk much that first hour, and she found she was glad of it. The telling could wait, all of it, the third floor and the locks and Anne on the stairs, it could keep for daylight and strength.

What could not wait was the simple restoration of Elizabeth to their midst, and the women of the house saw to it, Mrs. Gardiner and Jane and a devoted weeping housemaid, with a thoroughness that brooked no argument.

A bath before the bedroom fire, hot as she could bear, the awful days of that house soaked and scrubbed out of her skin; her hair washed and combed and dried at the hearth; clean warm linen that smelled of lavender and home and not of the grey blanket she would never have to lie under again.

The doctor came and was gentle and brief and pronounced her, to the great and visible relief of the doorway full of faces, unhurt in any way that would not mend, worn very thin and badly frightened and wanting nothing in the world that food and warmth and rest and time would not restore.

He left a draught, which she did not mean to take, having had her fill of draughts, and he went and they put her into her own bed in the small back bedroom, banked the fire, and would have dimmed the lamp and left her to sleep.