The Entail
IX
He had come for the funeral with his hat already in his hand and his face composed in the expression long practised before a mirror for rehearsing grief.
Charlotte was beside him, quieter than Elizabeth had ever seen her, with the stillness proper to a woman who had made her accounting of a situation and found the numbers did not come out well.
Elizabeth had not spoken to Collins at the funeral.
She had stood at the graveside with Jane’s hand in hers, and her mother’s crying somewhere behind her, looking at the box going into the Hertfordshire earth and thinking about the Rasselas that would now never arrive.
She had not spoken to anyone she did not have to.
Collins had spoken to everyone. At length. She had heard his voice carrying across the churchyard, offering Lady Catherine’s condolences — apparently, he had been authorised to convey them. She kept her eyes on the grave, her hand in Jane’s, and did not turn around.
He came to the house the morning after. He came with papers.
He stood in the entrance hall of Longbourn with the papers in one hand and his hat in the other, looking around at the walls, the furniture, the long window at the turn of the stairs — as if he had been imagining the ownership of a room for years and was now comparing the reality to the inventory.
Elizabeth came out of the drawing room and stopped in the doorway.
He turned, saw her, and set his face into the expression of bereavement, which sat on him like a costume.
“My dear cousin. I trust you slept. These are hard days. Very hard days.” He shook his head slowly. “One does not prepare for loss. One cannot.”
“No,” Elizabeth said. “One cannot.”
“Lady Catherine herself said as much to me. And she has had cause, very recently, to know something of grief — poor woman, quite prostrated.” He pressed his lips together.
“A great man. A very great man. Lady Catherine is quite undone. I flatter myself I was of some comfort to her in the first hours, but a loss of that magnitude — one does not recover.”
“Yes.” Elizabeth ducked her face to dash a private tear from her cheek. It would not do for Collins to see it and chide her that sorrow was a selfish indulgence. “My father was a great man.”
“Yes — yes, of course, Mr Bennet was — yes. A very respectable gentleman. But I was referring, as I ought perhaps to have made clearer, to Mr Darcy. Of Pemberley.”
Elizabeth blinked. “Mr Darcy? What has he to do with this?”
He drew himself up slightly. “Did the news not reach Hertfordshire? I had assumed — why, it was in the papers weeks ago. But I suppose you do not take the fashionable papers.”
She shook her head. “What was in the papers? Did he marry Miss de Bourgh? I cannot think why I should—”
“My good cousin, he has died! Did you really hear nothing of it?”
Elizabeth’s mouth fell slack. “Died? Mr Darcy! But he seemed so healthy. Was it quite sudden?”
“Terribly, I am afraid. A carriage accident on the Dover road. Very sudden. The signet ring identified him — his father’s ring, I believe — and Lady Catherine was informed within the week.” He drew a breath and released it with eulogist’s gravity. “A great loss. To the family. To the country.”
A carriage accident? A healthy man, a strong one, with the best-maintained carriage in the neighbourhood? It seemed wrong, inconsistent with what she knew of him — which was not much, but included the impression that the world did not inconvenience him without difficulty.
She swallowed. “Indeed, I am sorry to hear it.”
Miss Darcy would be shattered. The colonel would be shattered. Miss de Bourgh — even Lady Catherine, beneath all the performance of consequence, had clearly loved her nephew in the way she loved everything she considered hers.
She opened her mouth to say something of this, and Collins said, with a brisk forward motion — one piece of business discharged, another waiting — “But you will forgive me, these are matters for another time. I should speak with you about the question of the house.”
The question of the house.
She closed her mouth. The information about Darcy — his death, its strangeness, the grief it would cause people she hardly knew or had never met — went to the back of wherever she was keeping things, behind her father’s last sentence, the pale rectangle on the wall, the Rasselas that he would never read.
She turned and went back into the drawing room.
Collins followed her to the doorway and said something else about Lady Catherine’s devastation, something about the blow to the family.
She stood with her back to him, her eye on the fireplace.
He was more moved by Mr Darcy’s death than by her father’s.
She had no space left to be astonished by this, and so she was not.
Collins followed her in. He had a way of moving through Longbourn that was already proprietary — a half-step of possession in his gait, a tendency to touch the doorframes as he passed through them, lightly, with the tips of his fingers, as though confirming that they were solid and real and his.
He spent the morning going through the house.
He did not ask permission, and no one offered him any.
Mrs Bennet had barricaded herself in her bedroom, where she had been largely resident since the night Mr Bennet died.
Jane sat in the drawing room with Kitty on one side and Mary on the other, her hands folded in her lap with a visible effort.
Lydia seemed equally distressed over her father’s death and the fact that the Brighton scheme evaporated.
She sat in the window seat with her knees drawn up, her face pressed against the glass, looking out at the garden.
It was the longest Elizabeth had ever known her to be quiet.
Elizabeth followed Collins.
Not to be agreeable, but because someone had to, because Jane could not do it without breaking, because she knew every room in this house as well as she knew her own face. She could not stand to let him move through it alone with his papers and his proprietary fingertips.
He went through the dining room without comment.
The sitting room. The morning room, where he opened two drawers of the writing desk, looked into them, and closed them again.
He went to the study — her father’s study, the room already beginning to smell of another man’s arranging — Collins having moved the desk on his first visit yesterday so that it faced the window differently, the lamp in the wrong place, the chairs wrong — and stood in the centre looking around with a satisfaction he did not bother to conceal.
Then he went to the library.
He stood in the doorway looking at the shelves.
Two hundred years of accumulated reading, more or less — her father’s forty years of additions layered over the Longbourn collection proper, the spines all colours, the arrangement entirely personal, the shelf-height adjusted twice to accommodate oversized folios that her father had bought from a man in Meryton who had not known what he had.
Elizabeth had spent a third of her life in this room. She knew where everything was.
Collins gestured to the shelves. “These, of course, will remain with the property.”
“Not all of them,” Elizabeth said.
He turned to her with mild surprise, with an expression not accustomed to being contradicted. “My dear cousin, the contents of the house pass with the entail. The books are part of the house.”
“The books on that shelf,” Elizabeth said, indicating it, “are my father’s personal library, set aside by me this week.
Purchased by him over forty years, most of them.
Many inscribed. Many given as gifts, with the names of the givers written in them in the givers’ own hands.
They are not fixtures of the building. They are not part of the entailed property, and they do not pass with it. ”
“I think you will find—”
“I think you will find,” Elizabeth said, “that a man’s personal possessions are entirely distinct in law from the property of the estate. If you intend to claim otherwise, you will need to demonstrate the legal basis for that claim. I will wait.”
Collins’s expression shifted from mild surprise to something cooler.
“Lady Catherine took a considerable interest in the library when I described it to her. There are volumes here of some age that properly form part of the estate’s history.
I should be failing in my duty as the new master of this property if I allowed them to be removed without proper assessment. ”
“Lady Catherine’s interest in my father’s library is not a legal instrument.”
Jane appeared in the doorway behind Collins. “Lizzy…”
“No,” Elizabeth said. “You know I am right, Jane.”
Collins turned to Jane with the relief proper to one who had found a more reasonable audience. “Your sister is understandably distressed. I do not hold it against her. In her position, one naturally feels—”
“My sister,” Jane said, with a gentleness that had steel somewhere behind it, “is making a legal argument. She is not distressed.”
Collins turned back to Elizabeth. His colour had risen. His eye went to the shelves, returned to Elizabeth, and stayed there — the calculation he made this time not of cost and convenience but of something older, something nearer to insult.
“My dear cousin. I have been patient. I will not debate legal points with a young woman in a state of bereaved agitation. The library remains.”
Bereaved agitation. The phrase arrived in her chest like a hand closing.
She did not meet his eye. Her eye went to the shelf she had indicated — the shelf she had sorted in the evenings after the funeral, crying at the desk over volumes her father would never open again, writing each inscription into a list because her eye could not manage the words on their own pages — and she held her voice.
“The shelf I have indicated contains my father’s personal property. You will not have it.”
Whatever Collins had come into the room prepared to yield had left him. In its place was the posture proper to a man whose dignity had been challenged in his own house by a woman who had not been offered it.
“We shall see,” he said, and turned on his heel and went.
Elizabeth did not follow him. She stood where she was until his footsteps had descended the stairs, and then stood a little longer, looking at the shelf where the gap already was — the old worn copy of Johnson gone, taken on Collins’s first visit, a loss she had not yet found a way to think about directly.
The gap was shaped exactly like the thing that was missing.
Her hand went to it, flat against the wood, and stayed there — because if she moved, she would either run after him or sit down on the floor, and she could afford to do neither.