Page 7 of Miss Bennet is Gone

The room over the chandler's shop was cold when Sarah got in, and her mother was awake, which was worse than asleep, because awake meant she had been lying in pain there listening for the stair.

"You're late," her mother said from the bed. The two words cost her breath she could not spare.

"I stopped to settle something." Sarah crouched at the grate, and for the first time in a fortnight she built the fire up the way it wanted building, three lumps of coal where lately there had been one, husbanded all evening, and held the candle to the kindling until it caught and climbed.

"Three lumps." Her mother's eyes followed the flame. "Have we robbed a coach?"

"A lady gave me something. For an errand in the morning. A bottle to put into a bride's hands, that's the whole of it. A kind lady. A sad, quiet sort of kind." Sarah came and sat on the edge of the bed and opened her handkerchief in the new firelight so her mother could see the coins lie there and shine.

Her mother had sewn for her living until her chest gave out. Fine work, the sort that went to ladies who never wondered whose eyes had been spent on their hems, and she still priced a thing at a glance, the way a seamstress does.

She looked at the coins a long moment and did the sum, and Sarah watched her arrive at the same uneasy place Sarah kept arriving at and stepping back from.

"That's a great deal of money for a bottle."

"It's a grand family. They don't count it the way we do."

"What's in it?"

"A cordial. Sweet wine, the lady said, for the bride's nerves."

Her mother let the question lie. Not satisfied, Sarah thought, but tired, and warm for the first time in weeks, and worn past the point of turning away a comfort she had wanted too long.

"Tomorrow I'll send for Mr. Adair," Sarah said. "The one off the square, not the parish man."

"Adair's too dear."

"Not tonight he isn't." She drew the blanket up over her mother's chest and tucked it the way her mother had used to tuck her.

The veiled lady came back to her as she did it, the stillness of her, the way she had never once looked straight at the card she spoke of, and something small and cold turned in Sarah, the way a stone turns under a boot.

Then the fire put out a real heat, the first the room had held since her mother took bad. She did not think of the lady again. There was broth to warm, and her mother's cold hands to chafe between her own, and for once the warmth to do both by.

That night, at de Bourgh House, her mother sent for the one man who had come from Rosings with them.

Anne had her place in the drawing room. A low chair near the lamp, her workbasket at her feet, and she kept to it, drawing thread in and out of a square of linen she did not care for.

The house around them had filled, this past fortnight, with people Anne did not know. A cook, two housemaids, a second footman, all of them hired new, and none of them aware they had been engaged for such a purpose.

Her mother had thought of everything. Of wages and characters and the servants’ registry, of which tradesmen would call and which would not, of how a house lately opened might take in one quiet guest and never once be asked to account for her.

She had had the day itself for weeks. The modiste was no secret, the same one half the brides of the season used, and a girl marrying Darcy would be fitted where his money went.

It was the most thorough piece of work Anne had ever watched her mother do, and her mother had done a great many things to a great many people in her time.

The footman came in and stopped just inside the door. He was big, country-built, with hands that sat wrong in white gloves. Her mother did not ask him to sit, and he had not looked to be asked.

"You know the lane behind the dressmaker's," her mother said. It was not a question.

"I know it, my lady."

"Tomorrow, two o'clock. The gray door, the one that gives on the yard. The lady will have been given something to make her quiet so you will have no cause to be rough, and you will not be rough; I will know if you were.

She will walk if she can lean on you. You bring her out the back to the carriage, and you bring her here, to the room that has been made ready, and you say nothing, not on the road, not after, not to the other servants, not to your own people."

"Yes, my lady."

"Your mother has her cottage from me," Lady Catherine said, in precisely the voice she had used for the rest of it. "Your sister has her place in my kitchen. The boy has his apprenticeship because I pay the premium. You will keep all of that in your mind tomorrow at two o'clock."