Page 41 of Miss Bennet is Gone

But she was not quite the woman who had walked into a modiste’s a month before, and she knew it, and did not pretend otherwise to the one or two people she would have told the truth to.

There was a watchfulness in her now that had not been there before, a way of marking the exits of a room, a flinch, small, mastered, but real, at the sound of a key in a lock.

Elizabeth thought it would fade. She thought most of it would fade. She had decided not to grieve the small remainder, whatever it proved to be, because it was the price of having survived a thing, and she would rather pay it and be alive than not.

She said so to Darcy once, on the second day’s drive, and he had taken her hand and said that he would learn the parts of her that stayed, and love them too, and they had left it there.

Jane and Mr. Bingley travelled with them, in the next carriage and the next inn, Jane unwilling to be parted from her sister by so much as a county and Mr. Bingley unwilling to be parted from Jane.

Lady Matlock had gone on ahead to Pemberley some days before, to see the house made ready and, Elizabeth suspected, to have the ordering of things in hand so that the bride should arrive to a house already turned toward a wedding and not have to lift a finger of the arrangement herself.

It was the kind of fierce managing love the countess did instead of speeches, and Elizabeth had learned to receive it in the spirit it was given.

Mr. Bennet had been sent for, by a letter careful enough to bring him without frightening him, and he reached Pemberley a day after they did, ahead of the rest of the family, exactly as Elizabeth had arranged it for she would not have him hear the thing in a houseful of people, and she would not have her mother in the room when he did.

She took him into the library the morning after he came, the great quiet book-lined room that was the one room in any house her father was sure to love, and she shut the door, and she told him the truth.

Elizabeth told it plainly and entirely, from the cordial to the locks to the stairs, sparing herself nothing and him only the very worst of her own fear, because he did not need to carry that and she did not want him to.

And Mr. Bennet, who had a remark for every occasion of his life, who had met every grief and every folly of his fifty years with a dry word held up between himself and the feeling of it, Mr. Bennet heard the whole of it without one word.

He sat in the leather chair by the cold morning hearth and listened, and his face, which she had watched make light of everything since she was old enough to watch it, did not make light of this.

He simply took the blows, one after another, the cordial and the carriage and the barred window and the long days of it, and went grey, and older, and very still.

When she had done, the silence went on a long time. He looked at his hands. And when at last he spoke it was not any of the things she had braced for, not the self-reproach, not the fury at Lady Catherine, not the dry deflecting joke that was his way.

He said only, in a voice she had never heard from him, stripped clean of every defense, “And you are well? You are truly well, Lizzy? Not telling me you are well, the way they have all been telling me you were ill, but well in yourself, truly?”

“I am truly well, Papa,” she said. “Mended. Worn a little, and changed a little, but well, and getting better every day, and very much alive, and about to be very happy.”

And her father put his face in his hands and wept. Mr. Bennet, who had not wept in front of her in her life, who she would have said could not, wept silently, his shoulders going, in the library at Pemberley, for the daughter he had nearly lost without ever being told she was in danger.

Elizabeth went and knelt by the chair and put her arms around him, and held her father while he shook, the second time in a month she had held someone steady through the spending of a grief too long carried, and thought that she was becoming, through no choice of her own, a person who knew how this was done.

“I knew,” he said, when he could, into the dreadful muffled voice of a man talking through his hands. “Not what, I could not have dreamed what, but I knew the letters lied. I read Jane’s careful letters and I knew, the way you know a tooth is going bad, that something underneath them was wrong, and I told myself I was an old fool starting at shadows, and I let them keep me in Hertfordshire because it was easier to be reassured than to get in a carriage and find out. I sat in my library reading novels, Lizzy, while you — ”

He could not finish it. “I shall not forgive myself the sitting still. A man knows his own child’s hand is missing from a letter and he sits still.”

“You will forgive yourself the sitting still,” Elizabeth said, “because I am going to require it of you, as your favorite daughter, and because the sitting still was the right thing, Papa, though it does not feel so. If you had come, my mother would have come, and the whole of it would have been in the papers within the day, and Lady Matlock spent her health and Jane spent her conscience precisely so that you should be able to sit still in Hertfordshire and not bring that down on me. Your staying away kept my name. It was a gift, though no one could tell you so at the time. I am telling you so now.”

She tightened the embrace. “And you are here now. You are going to give me away the day after tomorrow, on your own feet, in a chapel full of trees, and that is the part that signifies, and not one hour of the part before.”

He came round, by degrees, as she had known he would. By the time they left the library he had found his way back to himself far enough to say, drily, blowing his nose, that he supposed he must now be grateful to the man who had carried her out of that house, and that gratitude to a son-in-law was a most disagreeable sensation and he hoped Darcy would have the decency not to make a habit of deserving it.

Which was Mr. Bennet’s way of saying the thing he could not say straight, and Elizabeth, who spoke her father’s language fluently, heard the whole of it, and was content.

The rest of them came the next day, the whole Longbourn family, and the cover held to the last. The family arrived believing in a long illness now happily mended, and were given no reason in the calm of Pemberley to believe in anything else.

Mrs. Bennet swept in restored to her full glory, her nerves entirely forgotten in the splendour of a daughter marrying ten thousand a year and a house she walked through with her mouth open.

Her one true grievance, aired to anyone who would stand still for it, was that the wedding was to be in Derbyshire where none of her Meryton acquaintance could see it, which she considered a waste bordering on the criminal.

Elizabeth bore it, and was even, to her own surprise, glad of it for her mother’s loud ordinary silliness was the surest sign in the world that the secret had held, that whatever else those days had cost, it had not cost her the thing it was spent to save, and there is a comfort in a mother’s nonsense when the alternative would have been her knowing.

The morning of the wedding was bright and still, the Derbyshire hills shone green beyond the windows, and Elizabeth dressed for it in a quiet upper room of Pemberley with Jane to attend her and her Aunt Gardiner standing by, and was, to the astonishment of both, perfectly calm.

She had thought she might not be. She had thought the morning might bring back the other morning, the gown on its form, the church she never reached, and she had braced for it.