LX From Your Lady
LX
From Your Lady
That evening, she went to the library because it was the only room in Matlock House where being alone did not feel like being dismissed.
Georgiana found her there an hour later with the petition open before her, not because she needed to read it but because the eye sometimes requires an object while the mind arranges itself for endurance.
Georgiana came in, closed the door, and crossed to the sofa opposite.
“I have heard,” she said.
Elizabeth looked up. “From whom?”
“Richard, which means my uncle, but in fewer words.” Georgiana’s gaze dropped to the paper. “Is it very bad?”
“It is very clever.”
“That was not what I asked.”
The corners of her mouth pulled despite herself.
“Then yes,” she said. “It is bad enough to be inconvenient and not, I think, bad enough to prevail. Which is almost more vexing.”
Georgiana considered that. “Because it wastes strength. Divides your efforts.”
“Exactly.”
The younger woman rose, came around the table, and without asking, folded the petition closed and set it aside.
“Then do not waste yours on reading it again.”
“You make that sound easy.”
Georgiana sat beside her. “When I was six, and my brother was seventeen, he decided to teach me chess. I was hardly old enough to remember half what he taught me, but I do remember when he said there are positions in which one must not spend too long admiring the ingenuity of the attack, or one forgets to answer it. He was very tiresome on the subject.”
Elizabeth turned to her. “Did you beat him?”
“After about three years. Once. He did not enjoy it and pretended he did.” Georgiana’s mouth softened. “I miss him very much.”
The plainness of that went directly to the heart.
“So do I,” Elizabeth said.
For a little while, they sat together in the firelight, not speaking. The silence between them had begun to acquire shape — not emptiness, but something inhabited and reliable.
At length, Georgiana asked, “Will you write to him again today?”
“Yes,” she said. “I have been writing every day, but the earl says sending them daily looks too desperate on my part. What I write today will go out tomorrow with tomorrow’s letter.”
“Tell him I miss him.” Georgiana rose. “I shall leave you your silence, since plainly you mean to fill it with my brother and paper.”
When she had gone, Elizabeth drew the writing case towards her and sat, the pen in her hand. The page would have to carry truth without offering too much of it to hostile eyes.
My dearest husband,
Pemberton came today with Sterling’s petition to void the marriage. It is ingenious, offensive, and, I believe, unsound. Your uncle is in a temper that appears to nourish him. I think he has written six letters since four o’clock and damaged two pens in the service of your restoration.
He has also given me work, which I find I prefer to drawing rooms. Hodges and I are to go through every paper you ever entrusted to him, and several you did not.
He is, by your aunt’s lady’s-maid’s account, the most discreet man in London, and by his own account merely the most stubborn.
I shall not contradict either testimony.
Tomorrow, I call upon Aunt Gardiner. I have not yet seen her, for your uncle has been holding me in reserve, with such success that my own family hear more of me through gossip than my own lips, and probably now believe I have shunned them.
I am told I shall be set to work in the City as soon as I have made my first appearance.
I confess I find I prefer that prospect to the alternative.
I shall be of better use in Coleman Street than I should ever have been in Mayfair, and I would rather be useful than pitied.
Georgiana bears herself well, and has asked me to give her love.
I believe she is looking forward to a chess match with her brother soon.
Jane bears me with more patience than I deserve.
Between them, they prevent me from becoming entirely intolerable to the household, though the attempt is not easy.
I have considered your advice that I should not come again and have rejected it with the seriousness due to a bad argument. This cannot surprise you, as you have now had several months in which to study that defect in my character and ought by this time to know it incurable.
I was glad to see you.
There is no useful elegance with which to write that sentence.
I was glad to see you in the light, though the room was hateful and the terms of the meeting more hateful still.
I had not known until I saw you in that room how little reconstruction my mind had required of me in your absence.
Your face is the most familiar thing in the world to me.
I can feel the line of your jaw beneath my fingertips at any hour of the day without effort.
I know the weight of your hand at the small of my back, and the shape of your shoulder against my cheek, and the place under your ear where my mouth has rested a hundred times.
I find I should rather be in that cell with you than at Pemberley without you.
I should rather sleep on the floor of that cell beside you than in a bed in any other place in England.
Matlock House is an excellent house for sleeping badly in. It is large, orderly, and full of persons who mean well. It has not, in any of its chambers, the one person in whom my heart rests.
I remain, despite Sterling, the Crown, the Tower, and your own poor judgement in wives,
Yours,
Elizabeth Darcy
Darcy received the letter at noon. The warder who brought it in was the older of the two assigned to his passage, a decent man who performed roughness with professional care whenever anyone might be judging him for it.
“From your lady,” he said, placing it on the table beside the untouched broth.
Darcy looked at the seal.
The man, to his credit, left without speaking further.
There are, in confinement, experiences so violent that they make no outward show whatever. Darcy sat down before opening the letter because he had the obscure conviction that if he remained standing, he would try to put his fist through the stone wall.
He broke the seal.
By the second line, he was very nearly lost.
He read it once quickly, once slowly, and a third time because the sentence about the right silence had gone into him like a blade finding its own sheath.
He could see her writing it. Could see, more dangerously, the room from which she had written — a Matlock desk under good candlelight, her hand against the paper, her mouth firm with the effort of leaving out what could not safely be said.
She had written my dearest husband. And signed it with the name that could destroy her or be the making of her.
No gaoler, no petition, no court in Westminster could do much with three plain words. That was the brilliance of it. The letter was as irreproachable as it was ruinous.
He drew paper towards him and sat a long while before writing, not from uncertainty of feeling but from the opposite problem. The feeling was exact. The page would have to take only as much of it as could safely cross the walls.
My dearest wife,
Your letter has been received and has already done me more good than the physician attached to this place would consider decent.
I am not surprised that you rejected my advice. I was not, in truth, surprised when you rejected it in person. I offered it because I am still vain enough to imagine I can prevent consequences by placing myself in their path. You are correct that the argument does not improve under examination.
I am relieved beyond expression by every line touching my uncle, my sister, and your own sister.
Please tell Georgiana that I expect her to beat me at chess again if she means to boast of it in my absence.
Tell Miss Bennet that I am conscious she has been handed a family more complicated than any woman should have thrust upon her between breakfast and dinner, and that I am in her debt.
I am particularly obliged by your account of Grosvenor Square.
Hodges, I should tell you, has been your partisan since Netherfield.
He observed, from the small material available to a valet, that I had come to fancy a woman of more than ordinary character, and he has been waiting since to have a proper occasion to be of use to you.
He has it now. He will not give you trouble.
He will, if anything, give you rather more loyalty than you have asked for. I should let him.
You say you were glad to see me. I have read the sentence several times and find it suffers very well by repetition.
It is a strange thing to discover how much of one’s peace resided in the knowledge that another person was in the next room.
I had not understood that knowledge fully until it was removed.
You write of touch and sight. I have been thinking instead of sound and taste.
I remember the rhythm of your breath when you have just fallen asleep against me.
I remember the small catch in your voice in the half-second before you say my name.
And I remember the salt at the hollow of your throat after you had been walking the headland.
I remember the trace of wine on your mouth after supper, which I had thought I should not be permitted to remember.
Memory is a poor substitute for the thing itself only because it is so exact.
You must continue to sleep, whether the house deserves the honour or not.
You must continue to eat, however little appetite London or its barristers produce.
I know too well the habits by which you deny yourself what is necessary when your mind is occupied elsewhere.
Consider this not advice, which you would reject, but instruction, which you may disregard if it pleases you, and which I shall issue all the same.
I have spent an ungenerous quantity of thought on the precise forms in which my own acts are now being paid for by you.
Prison encourages the study. If London, law, and my family are all to descend upon you at once because I first chose concealment, I can at least require of you that you do not meet them faint for want of rest.
I remain, with better judgement than when I first held your hand and infinitely less peace,
Yours,
F. D.
He read the letter over and held it in his hand after the sand had dried, then sealed it.
The room had not changed. Stone remained stone.
The broth remained bad. The window admitted the same mean strip of winter sky.
Yet the world inside his confinement had altered by a measurable degree.
Her hand had crossed into it. Her mind had crossed into it.
The distance between them had not lessened; it had acquired traffic.
When the warder came to collect the letter, Darcy surrendered it without comment.
That night, he slept no better than before. He slept, however, in possession of her words.