Chapter 5 Confinement
The physician came at ten o’clock on Thursday morning, summoned by Darcy through a channel that Elizabeth had not authorised and would not have approved.
He was a small, dry man named Forsyth, whose bag preceded him into the room like a herald, carried by the same arm that had been carrying it, one presumed, since the reign of the previous King. He smelt of camphor. He had opinions.
“Mrs. Darcy,” he said, setting the bag on the chair Mrs. Gardiner had vacated, “I am told you have been experiencing pain in the lower back and episodes of dizziness.”
“I have been experiencing fatigue. My husband has been experiencing alarm. These are separate conditions.”
Forsyth was not amused. He was, Elizabeth gathered from the way he took her pulse — two fingers, firm, counting against a pocket watch whose face was scratched almost to illegibility — a man who had attended enough society women to have developed immunity to wit.
He asked his questions in the manner of a clerk verifying an inventory: the duration of the pain, the frequency of the dizziness, the last meal consumed, the hours of sleep obtained.
Elizabeth answered with the irritated precision of a woman who understood that truthfulness was the fastest route to the man’s departure.
“Four months,” Forsyth said, releasing her wrist.
“I am aware of the arithmetic.”
“Four months, and you have been — what, precisely? Your husband mentioned late nights and considerable exertion.”
“I have been managing a household. In London. During the Season.” The lie came easily — it was the cover story, the one that explained the Darcys’ residence at Gracechurch Street, the comings and goings, the late hours.
Forsyth did not require the truth. He required a narrative that permitted him to issue his instructions.
“You will rest,” Forsyth said. He said it as a judge pronounces a sentence — with the quiet finality of a man who has considered the evidence and reached a verdict he does not expect to be appealed.
“Complete rest. No carriage rides. No social engagements. No stairs, if they can be avoided. You will eat three meals a day, drink nothing stronger than barley water, and remain horizontal for the better part of each day until the pain in your back has resolved and the dizziness has not recurred for a period of at least one week.”
“A week.”
“At minimum.”
“I have obligations —”
“You have a child, Mrs. Darcy. Your obligation to that child supersedes any engagement your calendar may contain.”
The sentence landed like a man who had delivered it before, to other women, in other rooms, and who had learned that the word child operated on expectant mothers as a dropped anchor operates upon a ship.
It stopped movement. Elizabeth felt it stop hers — not the argument, which she could have continued, but the impulse beneath the argument, the forward momentum that had carried her from Pemberley to London to Bath to this room, this morning, this chair.
The momentum stalled. She looked at her hands, resting in her lap, and the hands were still, and the stillness was not peace but paralysis.
Forsyth gave instructions to Mrs. Gardiner in the passage.
Elizabeth heard the murmur of his voice through the door — barley water, red meat, no coffee, absolute rest — and the murmur of her aunt’s replies, which were affirmative and businesslike and contained, Elizabeth suspected, the pragmatic assessment of a woman who had borne four children and understood both the necessity and the impossibility of what was being prescribed.
The door closed. The front door closed. Forsyth was gone.
Mrs. Gardiner reappeared with the morning’s post. Among the letters — two for Mr. Gardiner, one from the bookseller’s intermediary that Elizabeth recognised by its seal and would open later, in private — was a packet from Longbourn, thick as a novella and addressed in her mother’s hand with the emphatic penmanship of a woman who regarded the postal service as a medium for emotional projection.
Elizabeth opened it.
My dearest Lizzy — I write to you with NEWS that cannot wait for the penny post to deliver at its own wretched pace — Jane is DELIVERED of a boy, a BEAUTIFUL boy, seven pounds and as fair as his father, born on Tuesday at half past three in the morning after a labour of nine hours which I endured at her side as I endured ALL of my own, and Mr. Bingley was in such a state as I have never witnessed in a grown man, pacing the library until the carpet showed the track, which I told him was the mark of a devoted husband and I have ALWAYS said he would be —
The child is to be called Charles Edward, which I approve of, though I had suggested Fitzwilliam as a middle name in honour of your husband’s family, which Jane declined on grounds I consider INSUFFICIENT — but no matter, the child is healthy and Jane is well and Mr. Jones says she will be on her feet within the fortnight, and I am to stay at Netherfield until she is recovered, which suits me admirably as your father has developed a COUGH that he insists is nothing and which I am certain is consumption or something very like it, though he will not see Mr. Jones and prefers to sit in his library with the window open, which is the CAUSE of the cough in the first instance —
I must tell you also that Lady Lucas has called TWICE to congratulate us, which I received with perfect graciousness though she was clearly calculating whether Jane’s boy outranks Charlotte’s girl in the general estimation of the neighbourhood, which of course he does, being a BINGLEY and an heir, and Charlotte’s girl being merely a Collins, which is a respectable name but not, I think, a name to BUILD upon —
The letter continued for three more pages.
Elizabeth read them all. She read about the baby’s hands (perfect), his appetite (prodigious), his resemblance to Mr. Bingley (total) and to the Bennet side (also total, which was arithmetically impossible but emotionally certain).
She read about the christening gown, which Mrs. Bennet was having made by the Meryton seamstress at her own expense.
She read about Kitty’s new bonnet. She read about Mary’s opinion of infant baptism, which was theological and lengthy and which Mrs. Bennet reported with the bewildered fidelity of a woman who did not understand a word of it but recognised that it constituted an opinion and therefore required documentation.
Elizabeth folded the letter. She pressed it against her chest, above the child she carried, and closed her eyes.
Jane had a son. Jane, who had written to her in September about the new curtains at Netherfield, who had not asked a single question about London or Bath or the reasons Elizabeth had left Pemberley, because Jane understood — in the way that only Jane could understand — that the questions Elizabeth did not answer were the questions that mattered most, and that silence, from Elizabeth, was its own form of trust.
She had a nephew. The world contained a new Bingley. And somewhere in this same world, in a house near the harbour at Boulogne, another child — four years old, dark-haired, answering to Sophie — waited for a rescue that her mother could not discuss and her father would never forgive.
Elizabeth placed the letter on the bedside table, beside the barley water she had not drunk and the toast she had not eaten, and looked at the ceiling.
Elizabeth looked at the ceiling of the Gardiners’ spare bedroom — the same ceiling she had slept beneath as a girl, visiting London with Jane, the plaster cracked in a pattern she had once imagined was a map of Africa.
She was lying on the bed. She did not remember lying down.
Forsyth must have directed her there during the examination, and she had complied, and the compliance itself was alarming — her body obeying an instruction her mind had not endorsed, the muscle and bone making a separate treaty with the physician while her mind continued to resist.
She was confined. The word sat in her chest like a stone swallowed whole.
Darcy came in twenty minutes later. He carried a tray — tea, toast, a pot of honey Mrs. Gardiner kept in the pantry for the children — and he set it on the table beside the bed with the careful movements of a man handling something he considered breakable.
Elizabeth was not breakable. She looked at the tray and then at her husband and said nothing, because the things she wanted to say — that he had summoned a physician without consulting her, that the physician’s instructions amounted to imprisonment, that she had an operation running and a child to rescue and an intelligence network to dismantle and none of these could be accomplished from a horizontal position — would have been true, and would have been fair, and would have accomplished nothing except the infliction of pain on a man who was already in pain.
“Thank you,” she said.
“You are angry.”
“I am confined.”
“They are the same thing, in your case.”
She looked at him. He stood by the bed, his hands at his sides — not clasped, not in his pockets, just there, the hands of one who had carried everything he could carry and was waiting to be told what else to lift.
His face was drawn. He had slept badly, or not at all.
The lines around his mouth were deeper than they had been a week ago, aged by the accumulation of nights spent sitting in chairs and mornings spent riding to wharves and afternoons spent holding a composure that cost him more than he would admit.
“Holt sails tonight,” Elizabeth said.
“I know.”
“The letter is ready. The seal is pressed.”
“The Colonel brought the ring yesterday afternoon. Mr. Gardiner has the letter. He leaves for Folkestone at noon.”
“And Gravière? The interrogation?”