Steps
XII
The advertisement had appeared in the Morning Chronicle on Thursday.
She had seen it at the breakfast table when her uncle left the paper open — a notice in the auction column, a desirable family residence in Gracechurch Street, freehold, to be sold on the fourth of July, particulars to be had of Messrs Haldon and Platt.
The auctioneer’s handbill had gone up in the front-parlour window the same afternoon, so that any man walking down the street might know what was for sale, and at what price.
She had known it was coming. She had known it since the afternoon in the sitting room when her uncle’s voice had gone quiet and careful, and the tea had gone cold.
Knowing it had not made the column easier to bear.
Tomorrow, the sale would close. By Thursday, they would need to be out.
Her uncle had done what he could. He had made enquiries through his club, found two men looking for wives, and brought the matter to a conclusion in the space of a week with the driven efficiency proper to a man with no time and no alternatives.
Jane was to marry Sir Horace Blackwood, a widower who needed an heir.
Elizabeth was to marry Mr Thomas Sibley, a man of new money who wanted a gentleman’s daughter.
The weddings were set for the third week of July.
Neither man required a dowry. This was the first of several matters her uncle had not commented upon, though his silence on the point had been careful.
Both settlements were generous on the gentleman’s side — unusually so, for women bringing nothing to the match — and in each case what had been most insisted upon was the lady’s youth, her gentle birth, and her being handsome.
Blackwood’s man of business had written of pleasing appearance without embarrassment.
Sibley’s had written a fine figure. Both had been prepared to pay for the privilege.
She and Jane would sleep on pallets in whatever rooms the Gardiners could find to let in the weeks that remained.
Her mother would go to the Philipses after the weddings.
Kitty and Lydia would go with the Gardiners wherever the Gardiners went, which was not yet decided.
Mary’s situation was not yet fixed — her uncle had a clerk he thought might do, a decent young man of no distinction who would at least be kind — and kindness, the plain character of being unlikely to cause harm, was the highest praise available to any of them now.
She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth.
The nausea had been coming and going since the carriage ride home from Mayfair yesterday, and it was coming now — a small, pale, rising thing at the back of her throat that she would not permit to arrive.
She breathed through her nose to keep from retching.
Yesterday.
She could not stop going back to yesterday.
The carriage to Blackwood’s house in Mayfair — a large, cold house, immaculate in a way that had less of care about it than control — and Blackwood himself meeting them in the drawing room.
A tall man, spare, somewhere in his fifties, with colourless eyes that moved over Jane like a man assessing a horse to purchase.
He had been perfectly civil. He had said all the correct things.
He had poured sherry and pressed it on them with a warmth that did not illuminate his face and never quite left off the character of instruction.
Jane smiled stiffly and answered his questions.
Elizabeth sat beside her, and something cold came into her chest that made her shiver in the July heat.
Her eye had gone to Jane — just once, a quick flicker of a glance — and Jane was smiling at something Blackwood had said, her hands folded in her lap, her back very straight, her face entirely unreachable.
That was the moment. Not Blackwood’s colourless eyes.
Not the house. Jane, letting herself be the sacrificial lamb.
Sibley arrived half an hour later. Shorter, red-faced, with the loud good humour proper to a man who had recently acquired the money to be as loud as he wished.
He took in Elizabeth up and down with an appreciation one degree removed from being openly insulting, took her hand to bow over it, held it slightly too long.
She did not trouble to smile; he was not watching her face.
She answered his questions about Hertfordshire, her accomplishments, her education, sat very upright, kept her voice even, and thought about nothing at all — because to think about anything would have meant thinking about this room, this man, and what her life was to look like in little more than a fortnight.
She was not letting herself think about it now, either.
There was a door in her mind she had pushed shut the moment her uncle told her of the arrangement, and behind it was everything she knew about the shape of the life ahead of her, and she was keeping it shut because if she opened it she would not be able to close it again, and there were still things she needed to do before she was permitted to fall apart entirely.
Her uncle had been there throughout, sitting slightly forward in his chair, his eye on both men.
Gardiner had tried everything he could think of to establish that the ground was solid, and was nonetheless listening for it to shift.
He had asked what could be learned of them.
There had been nothing anyone would say directly against either man.
That was the most anyone could tell him. It was not very much.
Her uncle had done everything he could afford to do. He had come home to his wife that evening and said so; his wife had held his hand in silence. He had not slept.
She knew all of this. She was going to marry Thomas Sibley anyway, because the settlement provided for her mother and gave her younger sisters something, and there was nothing else.
There was nothing else.
The settlements were signed. She had stood at Blackwood’s study yesterday afternoon while her uncle took the pen and put his name to them on Jane’s behalf, the light coming through the long windows, her uncle’s hand less certain than it had ever been — he had not yet finished when Blackwood’s solicitor cleared his throat and asked whether Miss Bennet had any remark upon the terms. Jane said that she had not.
Sibley’s solicitor, when his turn came, asked the same of Miss Elizabeth.
Elizabeth said the same. It was the formality that answered the question of consent without requiring any signature from the parties whose lives the document arranged. Her uncle signed on Elizabeth’s behalf.
She had curtsied when Sibley laughed and shook her hand at the end.
However ungentlemanly he chose to be, he would find that she, at least, had decent manners.
She did not turn to Jane again until they were in the carriage going home, and by then Jane was watching the street go past in the same sort of numb reverie.
She snapped back to the present when a passerby slowed.
Many had, today, but they stopped to look at the handbill in the window.
This one was stopping before her, on the steps.
A man doffing his hat, coming along Gracechurch Street from the direction of the City.
She looked up without expectation, and then her mouth ran dry.
Colonel Fitzwilliam?
Here?
Her breath stopped in her chest.
He was in civilian dress, hat in hand, and grief was on him the way it was on people who had been carrying it long enough that they had stopped marking the fact — not acute, not performed, just present, worn into the set of his jaw and the lines around his eyes.
He took in the window above them first — the window with the handbill — and then her face, which he plainly had not expected to see.
The carts went on past behind him. Somewhere a dog was barking.
“Miss Bennet.” He stopped as though her name had used all the air he had. “Forgive me — I had not thought to find you in London.”
“I had not expected to be here myself. Yet, I suppose I must be somewhere.”
He almost smiled. “May I?” He gestured at the step beside her.
She moved her skirt. He sat, hat still in his hand, and neither of them said anything. The street went on around them, carts and voices and the ordinary business of a London morning with no interest whatsoever in either of them.
“You have been crying,” he said.
“The sun is in my eyes.”
“Yes.” He glanced past her at the handbill in the window. His brow had drawn in slightly. “This is your uncle’s house?”
“It was.”
She let him take it in — the way his jaw set, the small ticking of his cheek muscles. He had not known. The sight of it registering on his face made it real in a way that sitting alone with it for two hours had not quite done, and she turned her eye to the street before her own face betrayed her.
“Why are you here, Colonel?”
He had not been ready for the question. She heard him weigh it, the slight intake of breath that was the beginning of one answer and then another.
What he gave her at last had no arrangement to it.
“The notice was in the paper at my club yesterday. A Gracechurch Street freehold, to be sold at auction, the particulars to be had of Messrs Haldon and Platt. A good neighbourhood, this. Drew a deal of interest, and no little speculation. The, ah… the price was wrong for a man moving up in the world.”
“Ah.”
“I could not put it out of my head. I came to see whether the address matched the name I was afraid of. I had not thought to find anyone I knew on the steps.”
She replied with a flat smile.
“What has happened? If you are willing to tell me.”
She was, it turned out. She had not expected to be, but the question arrived in a voice with no agenda attached to it, and she was very tired, and she told him.