XIV Reduced Circumstances
XIV
Reduced Circumstances
The night came through the walls from both sides. Through one she knew, without having been told, that the woman next door had an infant and a cough and a husband who came home late; through the other came her mother’s voice, going at intervals throughout the night.
Not crying — Mrs Bennet had moved past crying and into a feverish wakefulness that required Kitty and Lydia to bear it in turns in the room next door. Elizabeth had heard Lydia snap at something around two in the morning, her mother’s voice dropping, then nothing.
The room the three of them had been given was meant for one person, and held three pallets now — hers against the left wall, Jane’s against the right, Mary’s wedged between them and the door in a space so narrow that dressing in the morning required all three to take turns, the ceiling low enough that she could press her palm flat against it if she raised her arm.
There was nowhere in it to be alone, and nowhere to escape one another.
She had lain in the dark and stared at the ceiling and listened to Jane.
Mary had been asleep since half-past ten. She slept without interruption, which seemed, in the circumstances, almost offensive.
Jane had not slept at all.
Jane did not move, did not make a sound, lay with her back to the room in a stillness that was nothing like rest. Around midnight, there was one catch of breath. Elizabeth closed her eyes and did not answer it, because there was nothing to say, and because if she spoke, she would give herself away.
The light came in grey and early, and Elizabeth got up before the others stirred, dressed in the cramped space between the pallets, and went to stand at the narrow window. The street below was already moving — a cart, a woman with a basket, a boy running. London conducting its indifferent business.
She heard Jane roll over behind her. “You did not sleep,” Jane said.
“I slept a little.” She did not turn around. “How are you?”
Jane did not answer immediately. Elizabeth waited, still watching the street, and did not fill it.
“I am well enough,” Jane said.
She turned then. Jane was sitting up on the pallet with her hair loose around her shoulders, her hands in her lap, her back very straight.
She had been holding herself like that for two and a half weeks — arms close, shoulders drawn in, as though making herself smaller was something she could do deliberately and maintain.
She had come back from the outing with Blackwood sitting exactly like that in the carriage and had not said a word the whole way home.
Her eyes were dry. She had been crying long enough to run out, which was worse than tears.
“Jane.” Elizabeth sat down beside her. “Whatever happened, you may tell me.”
“There is nothing to tell.”
“There is something. I can see it.”
Jane kept her eyes on her hands. Her voice when she spoke was careful and flat.
“He showed me the room that will be mine. Upstairs. The one at the end of the passage, away from the rest of the house. He took me there himself — not his housekeeper. He unlocked the door with a key he kept on his person, and when we had gone in, he closed the door behind us and stood with his back to it.”
“Jane, he did not…”
“He pointed out to me that there was no bolt on the inside. He said a wife had no use for one, and he had ordered any such fitting removed in each of the rooms she would have the use of. He said it in the way a man might point out the brasswork on a fireplace.”
She was still looking at her hands.
“Then he came to stand behind me. There is a looking-glass above the dressing table. He turned me towards it, put his hand on the back of my neck — not squeezing, only resting, the whole weight of his palm — and held it there while he told me, very quietly, what he expected of a wife, and that he was a patient man but required obedience and would not be crossed. While he spoke, his other hand began at my waist.”
Elizabeth’s face heated. “No…”
“Then he pulled my fichu out of the way. He did not tear it. He drew it loose from where it was pinned, the way a man undoes a parcel he means to look into, and let it fall about my shoulders, and then he put his hand under the muslin of my bodice and onto my skin.”
Her voice still did not rise, but it had taken on a kind of dreadful evenness.
“I said his name. I said, Mr Blackwood, please. I said, please, sir, not before the wedding, I beg you, do not disgrace me. I do not think I had ever in my life used the word beg before. I used it three times. He did not stop. He did not even slow. He went on speaking about a wife’s duties, with his hand where it was, and his hand on my neck did not move, and he was staring at me in the glass where he… ”
“Oh, Jane… Oh, God…” Elizabeth clamped a hand over her mouth to keep the bile from surging forward.
“He told me to stand straighter, so I stood straighter. He told me to put my shoulders back. I did, and the front of my bodice fell open further where he had loosened it, and the air in the room was cold, and I felt it on me — on my breasts, on the skin he had been touching — and I knew he could see me, plainly, in the glass. He looked his fill. He did not hurry. He told me that was better, that he was pleased with what he had bought. He stood looking at me for what seemed a long time, and the cold did to me what cold does, and he saw that too, and he smiled once, very slightly, as though I had answered a question he had put to me.”
The oddest part was that Jane shed no tear. She was entirely blank, as if she had drawn a curtain over the feeling. That terrified Elizabeth more than anything. How would her sister survive such a man?
“Jane… did he… do more?”
Jane swallowed and turned her hands over in her lap.
“He ran his hand down the front of me, slowly, with the flat of his palm, the way one might measure a length of cloth, over the muslin, and rested it between my legs through the gown. The whole weight of it. He said he would expect a great deal of me in that quarter, and would not tolerate reluctance, and then he stood there with his hand where it was and watched my face in the glass and made a sort of tugging motion, back towards… He waited until I understood that he could have kept his hand there as long as he chose to, and that there was no one in the house who would have come if I had called. I was looking away — I could not watch! But he waited until I finally looked up at him in the mirror — specifically, at where his hand was. Then he took his hand away.”
Elizabeth’s hand went out and gripped the edge of the windowsill. The street below was very busy and very far away.
“He bid me arrange my gown. Once I had, he walked me down the stairs and returned me to the drawing room. My aunt asked if I had liked the house. I told her I had. He kissed my hand at the door and complimented my colour. When he handed me into the carriage, his hand went where it had been in the glass, and he kept it there a moment too long, and he was looking at my face the whole time. As though we had an understanding now.”
The flatness broke. “I have washed and washed, Lizzy. The print of his hand does not come off.”
Elizabeth had been still throughout. She remained so a moment longer, because if she moved at once she did not know what her body would do; she felt the floor of her stomach drop very slowly into nothing, and a heat went up the back of her neck, and her mouth filled with something she had to swallow down twice before it would go.
She had pictured a great many men in her life upon hearing of an engagement.
She had not pictured one who unpinned a girl’s fichu in front of a looking-glass while her aunt sat downstairs and told the girl to stand straighter.
Her first thought was that she would tell her uncle that very morning that he must stop the engagement today, while they still could.
Her second was that she could not, because Jane’s name was already in the registry of the parish, and Mama had already told everyone they ever knew, and the settlement had been paid.
Her third was that none of those things mattered against what Jane had just told her, that Uncle could manage the money, that Mama could be told whatever Mama needed to be told, that the vicar would have to be made to understand — and at the same moment she knew, with the part of her mind that had always been honest with her whether she wished it or not, that the vicar would not be made to understand, that Mama would weep and rail and call Jane ungrateful, that without an alternative offered the engagement would close over Jane like a tide, and that there was no alternative on the table because all of this had been arranged precisely because there was none.
She could put Jane in a coach to Meryton. She could write to Charlotte tonight. It was, after all, Elizabeth who had offended Mr Collins, not Jane. She could write to her aunt’s cousins in Derbyshire — there was a widow who might do with a companion, there was — there was —
There was nothing. There was no cousin with means of her own.
There was no friend in a position to take a portionless girl indefinitely.
There was no living for Jane that did not begin with a man’s permission.
The whole structure of her sister’s safety ran through the hands of men, and they had reached the point at which the only man with means to interpose himself was Blackwood himself, and Blackwood had spent the afternoon explaining in considered tones what he intended to do with the privilege.
She made herself unclench her fists. She made herself draw breath. She made herself look at Jane, because Jane had needed three days to bring herself to say any of this aloud and would not be repaid for it by an audience that broke before she did.
“I cannot do it, Lizzy. I have been telling myself for almost three weeks that I could. I cannot. And yet, tomorrow… it will be done for me.”
Mary stirred at the sound of their voices, turned over, and went back to sleep.
Mrs Bennet was at the narrow table in the larger of their two rooms when Elizabeth came through, already dressed, her hair pinned tight, a cup of tea going cold in front of her.
Kitty and Lydia were in the next room, their voices coming through the wall in the low bickering of two sisters who had spent a week in the same room as their mother and had very little left to give each other.
“You look a fright, girl,” Mrs Bennet clucked when Elizabeth appeared.
“Good morning, Mama.”
“He is coming at ten. Do you mean to go like that? Mr Sibley is coming at ten to take you to call upon his mother and you cannot go looking like that.” She looked Elizabeth up and down with the eye she reserved for occasions that required something of her daughters. “You have not slept.”
“I slept perfectly well.”
“You have not. I can see it. And Jane is worse, I expect — she has been making herself ill for days over nothing at all, nothing whatever, when she ought to be proud. A baronet, Elizabeth. Do you know what that is worth?”
“I have some idea.”
“Then stop carrying on as though you are both being sent to the gallows.” She set down her cup. “You will go, and you will be agreeable, and you will make a good impression on his mother, and you will come home and tell me it went well. That is all that is required.”
“And if it does not go well?”
“It will go well,” Mrs Bennet said, “because you are sensible enough to make it go well. You are not a fool, Elizabeth, whatever else you may be. Mr Sibley is a wealthy man. He has chosen you. He will keep you, and the settlement will keep your sisters, and that is what this family needs.” She picked up her tea again.
“Jane’s nerves are her own affair. I will not let them become yours. ”
“Jane is not being nervy. She is frightened.”
“Jane is always frightened. She has been frightened since she was four. It has never stopped her doing what she needed to do.” She regarded Elizabeth over the rim of her cup. “Now go and dress properly. I will not have you disgrace us today.”
Elizabeth went through to the other room, stood in front of the small glass above the washstand, and studied her own face until studying any longer became useless.
She pinned her hair, put on her coat, went out.
She walked to meet Thomas Sibley without thinking about where she was walking, because thinking about it was a door she could not open.