Page 6 of Miss Bennet is Gone

They sat with that a moment, the small wrongness of a generosity neither of them could explain.

"When I was a boy," Darcy said, "she gave me a watch. A very fine one, that had belonged to her husband, Sir Lewis. I was perhaps ten, and for the better part of a week I believed it meant she loved me. Then I understood she had given it to me because Richard had wanted it, and she did not care for Richard, and the whole pleasure of the gift, for her, lay in pressing it on the wrong boy while the right one looked on."

He frowned at the remembrance of the story. "Everything she has ever given has had a second person in it, someone meant to be wounded by the kindness. I have spent this entire drive trying to see who is meant to be wounded by today."

"And if there is no one?"

"Then she has truly changed, and I shall be glad of it, and I shall also have to make the acquaintance of an aunt I have never once met."

"I should like it to be true," Elizabeth said at last, and was startled to hear how much she meant it. "That is what unsettles me, more than the apology did. I came ready to be unmoved and glad of being unmoved, and here I am instead, wishing a woman I have every reason to distrust has truly changed, because the alternative, that she has not, and is merely this good at seeming to, is not a thing I wish to believe of anyone I am about to call family."

Darcy took her hand. He did not hand her a verdict. He had the grace, which she loved in him, not to manufacture a certainty he did not feel. "We will let her prove it," he said. "Slowly. There is no harm in that."

"No," Elizabeth agreed. "There is no harm in that."

3

The bell over the modiste's door was a soft one, and Anne de Bourgh was grateful for it. She had asked for the plain carriage and donned a veil at home and took up the velvet case, and her mother was well pleased with her.

She had left the carriage to wait around the corner and come the last of the way on foot. A carriage at a dressmaker's door was a thing people remembered, a plain woman in a plain bonnet was not, and being overlooked was the one talent her mother had never thought to forbid her.

Inside the shop, a bolt of gray silk lay half-unrolled across the counter where someone had been called away from it. Madame came through from the back, took in the veil, the plain pelisse, the absence of a maid, and arranged her face into the careful blankness such shops keep for ladies who would rather not be named.

"I'll speak with your young one," Anne said. "Sarah. The girl whose mother is poorly."

Madame's brows rose and settled. She did not ask how a veiled lady came to know the name of a junior hand, she inclined her head and went to fetch the girl.

Anne waited at the counter. The shop did good trade, by the look of it. Half-made gowns standing on forms in the back, and a girl's voice counting pins somewhere out of sight.

The whole place was humming with other people's weddings and mournings and christenings, not one of which had ever been hers. She laid one gloved finger to the edge of the gray silk and made herself leave it lying as it was, unsmoothed.

The girl came out wiping her hands on her apron, nineteen perhaps, with chapped knuckles and a curtsey that dropped a half-second too soon. The curtsey of someone warned to take care with this customer. Up close she had the scrubbed, sleepless look of a person nursing somebody at home.

Anne set the velvet case on the counter and lifted the lid. The bottle inside was small and dark and sealed. The folded card beside it bore a direction in a looping, confident hand.

"A wedding gift," she said. "For a Miss Bennet. She comes to you tomorrow at two for her last fitting. You'll have her in the book."

"Yes, my lady." The girl's eyes were on the case.

"When she comes, you give her this, and the card with it, and you say it comes from a lady who wishes her every joy, and that the card will explain the rest. No fuss made of it. Say it back."

"From a lady who wishes her every joy. The card will explain the rest. No fuss." The girl hesitated. "And if she asks what's in it, my lady?"

"A cordial. Wine, and sugar, and a little of what helps a bride sleep the night before her wedding." Anne kept her eyes on the girl and off the card. The card she had sat up many nights making, copying her aunt's hand until it ran easier off her pen than her own.

"Tell her to drink it there, in the fitting room, where it's quiet. Brides rarely sleep well. She'll thank you for it."

The girl nodded, and Anne watched her put it away, the bottle, the card, the words, and the time of two o'clock, with the close attention of a person for whom a muddled errand might mean a lost place.

She would not muddle it. Girls with a sick mother and one position between themselves and the street never did.

Anne laid the coins beside the case then, a small stack, more than the errand was worth, and meant to be more. The girl looked at them and made herself look away, as if the lady might reconsider.

"For your trouble," Anne said. "And a proper doctor for your mother. Not comfrey. Something that works."

"God bless you, my lady." The girl said it fast and low and entirely meaning it, and her hand closed over the coins.

"Two o'clock," Anne said, and drew her veil close, and went out. The girl's blessing followed her into the street. She let it follow and did not slow for it, blessings were cheap, and she had a great deal to see to before tomorrow, and the only thing in the world she truly wanted lay on the far side of all of this.