CHAPTER 58 #3
It was Fitzwilliam who saw the flower-woman first and asked the coachman to draw up. Elizabeth looked at the baskets and felt for one foolish moment that choosing flowers was harder than reading leases, refusing Collins, warning servants, or closing a house against enemies.
She chose violets, wallflowers, and a little rosemary. Nothing large. Nothing costly enough to make a virtue of grief. The flower-woman tied them with plain thread, and Fitzwilliam paid her before Elizabeth had found her purse.
In the carriage again, Elizabeth held the flowers with both hands.
“She liked wallflowers,” she said. “They come back when they are meant to, and do not require admiration for doing it.”
Fitzwilliam looked at the small bundle, then at her face.
“Then they are well chosen.”
Elizabeth nodded. She had thought she might say more, but the words did not come, and he did not ask for them.
The Marwoods lay in a quiet burying ground behind a church whose stone had darkened with weather and London air.
Mr. Marwood’s name stood above his wife’s, as was proper; hers had been cut below it with clean dates and no ornament beyond what the mason had insisted must be allowed.
Elizabeth had approved the wording herself.
At the time she had been proud of not crying over the proof.
Now she stood before it and discovered that a year had not made Mrs. Marwood smaller.
Fitzwilliam remained beside her, not too near at first. It was his first kindness, that he did not force comfort upon her before grief had found its footing.
Elizabeth laid the flowers down. She arranged them once, then again, then stopped because Mrs. Marwood would have told her that no flower in creation improved under excessive handling.
The thought should have made her smile. Instead her eyes filled.
Fitzwilliam offered his hand.
He did not look as if he required her to take it.
She took it.
For a little while they stood so, her fingers held in his, the damp churchyard quiet around them. Somewhere beyond the wall, wheels passed over the road. A bird called once, was answered, and then thought better of conversation.
“I am glad she took me,” Elizabeth said at last.
His thumb moved once over her glove.
“I have not always known how to say that without feeling I had betrayed Longbourn.”
“You need not say it against them,” he said.
“No.” Elizabeth looked at the stone. “That is what I am trying to learn.”
The flowers lay very still. Violets, wallflowers, rosemary. Modest, correct, almost severe.
“I think my parents loved me as they were able,” she said. “Papa was fond of me. Mama was overwhelmed by me. Jane loved me as much as a child can love when every hour of the house is full of someone else’s distress. I do not wish to make them cruel. They were not cruel.”
“No.”
“But I do not think they would have loved me as well as she did.”
The words, once spoken, did not shock her. They stood between them, plain and sorrowful, but not false.
Fitzwilliam turned toward her.
Elizabeth kept her eyes on the grave. “There was a price. I know that. I did not grow up with Jane as I might have done. I do not know Mary, Kitty, or Lydia as sisters who shared my childhood. Sometimes I am their sister, and sometimes I am a visitor, and sometimes I am a purse, and sometimes I am the grievance left over from an old decision no one quite knows how to name.”
Her hand tightened in his.
“But Mrs. Marwood kept me. Every day. She knew where I was, what I read, whether my shoes pinched, whether I lied, whether I was bored, whether I had been proud, whether I needed more Latin or less cake. She did not love me prettily. She did not often love me softly. But she loved me well.”
Fitzwilliam’s voice was low. “As you needed to be loved.”
“Yes.”
She closed her eyes for a moment.
“I think I have been afraid to be grateful,” she said. “Because gratitude to her seemed to accuse them. And because if I admitted I was glad, then I had also to admit I would not choose differently.”
Fitzwilliam was silent. Then he said, “You were not wrong to be loved well.”
That was all.
It reached her more surely than any longer consolation could have done.
Elizabeth’s tears came then, though quietly.
She turned slightly, and he stepped nearer at once.
He did not draw her into an embrace; they were in a churchyard, and she was still herself.
But he held her hand between both of his, warm and steady, and she leaned into his arm as if she had only just understood that it had been offered.
“I miss her,” she said.
“I know.”
“No.” Her voice shook. “I mean, today I miss her without arguing with her.”
His hand closed more firmly around hers.
“Then let today be only that.”
She stood there a long while, letting the truth of it settle.
At length she said, “I thought she taught me management.”
“She did.”
“Yes.” Elizabeth looked at the flowers. “But not only that. She taught me how to keep someone. How to notice what they need before they can ask. How to make a house answer fear without making fear the centre of it.”
His hand was very still around hers.
“I did not know I was doing it,” she said. “Not at first. Not with you.”
He looked at her then.
She turned from the grave enough to meet his eyes. “I thought I was arranging fires and baskets and work and rooms. I thought I was giving you respectable reasons to come back.”
“You were.”
“Yes. But it was more than that.”
His expression changed, not quickly, but deeply.
“You brought me home by it,” he said.
Elizabeth could not answer at once.
The words were too simple. They were also true.
“I think I did,” she said.
He lifted her hand and held it against his chest, not dramatically, not as a vow, but as if he needed her to feel the steadiness there and believe it.
“Then I am grateful to her for more than your sake.”
Elizabeth looked back at the stone. Mrs. Marwood’s name remained exact, unsoftened by sentiment, unimproved by grief.
She had died, and still her love had travelled: into opened rooms, into warm food, into a husband’s place by the fire, into a frightened girl’s dry stockings, into Kitty’s chance to be useful without being clever.
“If I knew what to do for Georgiana,” Elizabeth said, “it was because someone had once known what to do for me.”
“Then I am grateful to her twice.”
Elizabeth drew a breath that hurt and steadied her together.
“So am I.”
They remained until the air began to cool and Elizabeth’s gloves felt damp at the fingertips. Fitzwilliam did not hurry her. When at last she turned away, he kept her hand on his arm all the way back to the carriage.
On the return to Portman Square, she was very quiet. Fitzwilliam did not disturb it. Once, when the carriage jolted, his hand came over hers. She did not pretend not to need it.
That seemed to Elizabeth, in its way, a considerable progress.
The house received them without drama. Mrs. Albright was in the hall; one glance at Elizabeth’s face was enough to satisfy her that no practical question should be asked there. She took Elizabeth’s bonnet and gloves herself.
“Miss Darcy and Miss Kitty are in Mrs. Marwood’s sitting room, madam,” she said. “Mrs. Doddridge is with them.”
Elizabeth paused.
Mrs. Albright added, “The fire has been laid very small.”
“Thank you.”
Fitzwilliam followed her upstairs.
The door of Mrs. Marwood’s sitting room stood open.
Inside, the curtains were fully drawn. Afternoon light lay across the carpet.
Kitty and Georgiana sat near the window, heads bent over the same sheet of drawing paper.
Kitty was explaining something with more confidence than accuracy; Georgiana was listening with the careful seriousness of one who had not yet learned which errors were harmless.
Mrs. Doddridge sat nearby with sewing in her lap, looking as if she had been placed there by Providence to prevent young ladies, dogs, and memories from exceeding their proper bounds.
Lord Pomington slept in a patch of sun near the hearth.
Not on the rug.
On Mrs. Marwood’s chair.
Elizabeth stopped in the doorway.
Once, the sight might have felt like trespass. Yesterday, perhaps, it would have been too much. Today she could look at it and breathe.
Fitzwilliam’s hand came gently to her back.
“Is this all right?” he asked.
Elizabeth looked at the opened room: the desk closed but no longer forbidding, the covers removed, the fire small and steady, Georgiana safe in the light, Kitty useful beside her, the ridiculous dog making himself heir to all solemnity.
The room Mrs. Marwood had kept, and the life that had entered because Elizabeth had finally opened the door.
“Yes,” she said.
Her voice was not quite steady, but she did not mind him hearing it.
“I think it is.”
Fitzwilliam stayed beside her until she was ready to go in.