Jane’s Letter
XL
Jane’s Letter
Angus was coming up from the village road as she turned through the gate, his breath showing white, a packet under one arm.
“Post,” he said, and held it out.
She took it and saw the hand on the top, and a pleasure she had not had on any morning in a great many months ran through her. Two letters in the same week, after months of nothing. She tucked the packet under her arm before she could let herself feel any of it too clearly.
“Thank you. How is it below?”
He fell into step, slightly behind, giving the question its due consideration. “MacAulay’s second boy has taken the Sutherland girl from Braehead. Morag.”
“Has he?” She had spoken with Morag Sutherland at the harvest and come away thinking there was not a shrewder head within five miles of Auchengray, which made young MacAulay considerably more fortunate than he knew. “When?”
“Saturday last, at the minister’s.”
“I must send something for the house. Something useful. I will ask Mrs MacLeod what would serve them best.” She shifted the packet. “And Mrs Gillies? Her time was very near.”
“Tuesday last. A boy. Both keeping well.”
“Good.” She had sat with Agnes Gillies in October when the woman’s back had been giving her trouble, and they had talked about nothing important for an hour and it had done them both some good.
“I want coal enough sent for them through January. A new baby needs a warm house. And old James, is his roof holding after Dougal went up last week?”
“He says it’ll do.”
“He says it’ll do or it will do?”
Angus gave her something near a smile. “It will do.”
“Good. The minister was asking about Christmas?”
“Aye. The whole village will be watching what the house does. It has been some years since there was a laird here for it.”
She stood with her hand on the kitchen door. The whole village would have its eyes on the house. Herself standing here as the person who decided what it did.
“Then we shall do it properly,” she said. “Let me speak with Mrs MacLeod.”
The housekeeper heard her out without interrupting, which was a form of respect she extended to very few things.
Elizabeth had laid it out plainly — something for every household, coal or salt meat or flour as was most wanted, Mrs MacLeod would know better than she did what each family needed.
Something for Angus and for herself that was not merely useful but was a genuine pleasure.
For the house, another attempt at Yorkshire Pudding and better wine than usual, enough to mark the occasion without making a project of it.
“There’s still six bottles o’ the old Madeira in the lower cellar, mistress.
Sixty-three, if the chalk’s to be trusted.
The old laird swore they’d no’ be touched till the house saw Christmas properly again.
I’ve kept them this long, so I suppose we may as well see whether he kent what we was saving them for. ”
A slow smile stole over Elizabeth’s face. “And in all those years, Mrs MacLeod, you never thought to sample the Madeira for yourself?”
“Aye, and if I’d drunk the whole cellar dry, ye’d scarcely blame me after thirty winters rattling about this place wi’ nought but Angus for company.
Though I’ll no deny one bottle met an honourable end the year the east roof near came down atop us.
Another after the old mastiff died. Beyond that, I kept my hands off the laird’s cellar better than most men would have managed. ”
Elizabeth laughed. “You will hear nothing on the matter from me, Mrs MacLeod. You and Angus shall have a bottle for Christmas, and so shall the baron and I. As to the rest, I will ask him. Whatever his preferences, we will still send to the tenants. He would want the village to have what it needs.”
Mrs MacLeod turned back to her shelves. “I’ll see to it.”
Elizabeth nodded and went back to the library with the satisfaction of having done as he would have wanted. That much, she need not ask.
She knew parts of him now with an intimacy more aggravating than ignorance had ever been — the jaw rough at the end of a long day, the clean angle of the cheekbone, the broad brow, the straight nose.
None of it yielded an entire face when she had no visual markers to compare it to, but now that she had a prospect, the details were now beginning to match with alarming clarity.
What pressed hardest was not the face, but the intricacies of understanding she had pulled from him, thread by thread. And she was confident of it now.
He knew Longbourn.
Not the facts a paid inquiry could gather, but the intimacy of emphasis — the scale of the rooms she had grown up in, the flurry and busyness of a household with five daughters, the way the pianoforte had angled just so away from the window, and the way she always littered books haphazardly around the house.
A report could not teach that. Someone who had stood in the house could. And so, for four months now, she had been going quietly through every man she had ever known, and the list… was very short. And not particularly satisfying, but there it was.
She had gone to the portrait in the solar again today, and again, it had set her off.
She had thought first of Colonel Fitzwilliam, and dismissed it as a trick of the painter; but the colonel would not stay dismissed.
He had never been to Longbourn, but he had talked to her enough to have pictured it.
He had found her on the steps in Cheapside and looked stricken at what she told him, as though he would have liked to pull her from the wreckage of her life himself.
And yet, early at Rosings, he had been at some pains to teach her that a younger son had no means to marry where he liked — said plainly enough to put out any expectation before it could catch.
That had argued against him for weeks. But a man with something to hide might say exactly that, and if the colonel had gone to ground from his own regiment and sheltered here behind a borrowed barony, she could very nearly picture it. It was preposterous. She could see it anyway.
What she could not make fit was the plain measure of him. The man whose shoulders her hands had learned ran past six feet by several inches; the colonel did not.
Collins came next, and only because height insisted on him.
There had been length enough in Mr Collins to satisfy the rough reckoning of shoulders and brow.
But there had never been a particle of kindness in the man, and kindness was the one thing the man in the dark had never failed in — and Collins, in any case, was four hundred miles south, installed in her father’s house, eating her father's dinners off her father’s plate.
Whatever the height, he could not be sitting across a table from her in Aberdeenshire.
After that, she was reduced to ticking off the rest. Bingley, who was not so tall, and who was all open warmth besides; the man who came to her each evening carried himself like a door held shut by hand, and to put Charles Bingley’s candid face behind that whisper felt indecent.
One or two of her uncle’s connexions from the City, men who had dined in Gracechurch Street and had some means and the odd generous impulse — but none had ever spoken to her at any length, and none knew Longbourn.
The list thinned. The list ran out.
And at the end of it, where she had been refusing to let him stand, remained Darcy.
He matched. That was the trouble with him; he matched where none of the others would.
The height was right, and so was the rest — the dry turn in an argument, the silence with force held down inside it, the press of intelligence under his manners, the sense that he cared far more than he would ever consent to show.
And he had a sister. Good heavens, how was she only just now thinking of that? A younger sister who played beautifully and whom he claimed to adore. Georgiana. A name that seemed too close to be a coincidence.
By every measure of resemblance, it was him.
And by every measure of possibility, it could not be.
He was dead. And even had he lived, the Darcy she had known had looked at her across every room in Hertfordshire as though cataloguing her deficiencies; he had never paid her a compliment that was not also a correction; he had made it plain that he thought her beneath his notice.
Such a man did not vanish into a borrowed name and a chosen whisper on the edge of the world.
He did not hide his face from his own wife.
He did not spend his pride so cheaply on a woman he had never troubled to admire.
It was the surest argument she had, and she made it to herself, but it did not take.
Too many bells were ringing at once. She could dismiss the colonel and Collins and the rest in a breath each, and she could not dismiss Darcy at all, however dead he was, however little he had ever thought of her.
She stood a moment with the unopened packet in her hand and did not let herself finish the thought — only felt the edge of it, the thing she was not going to name yet.
Elizabeth went to the library, took the chair by the fire, and broke the seal on the packet.
Jane’s hand! And the script was large and flowing, not the cramped lettering she had seen from her sister last. Jane was in excellent spirits. She settled in beside the fire and prepared to spend a very pleasant quarter hour.
My dearest Lizzy,
I write with more good news than I have had occasion to send in some considerable time, and I find I hardly know where to begin except at the beginning, trusting you to read through to the end before you form opinions, which I know has never precisely been your habit.