The Worst Hour
LXIV
Elizabeth had learned the shape of her days by trial.
The mornings were tolerable; she could write, read, work with Hodges on whatever papers had come down from the upstairs library in the night.
Noon was bearable; she ate when she could and rested for an hour with a book she did not read.
The trouble came at three. Some unkind clock in her body had decided that three was the hour for grief, and grief arrived at three whether she had invited it or not.
She had been sitting on the chaise by the window of the small drawing room set aside for her use, with a book she was not reading and a shawl Mrs Hatchett had brought up half an hour ago, and the grief had come up in her without warning.
She had set the book down. She had put her hand on the small curve at the front of her gown that she could feel under her palm as plainly as her own pulse, and she had thought, with the cold clarity that came over her at this hour and could not be governed, that the child she carried might never see his father.
The tears had come up before she had had time to refuse them.
She had let them come, because she had learned that refusing them only made them stay longer.
She had wept into the shawl with both her hands pressed against her face, quietly, because she was at the upstairs window of a house that contained too many people who would come at the sound of her, and she did not wish to be comforted by any of them.
She did not know how long she had been at it when the knock came.
“Mrs Darcy.” Whitford’s voice, low, through the panel.
“A moment, Whitford.”
She drew breath. She wiped her face once with the shawl, and then again with the back of her wrist. She crossed to the glass over the chimneypiece and looked at what was there.
Her face had gone red about the eyes and along the bridge of her nose.
There was nothing she could do about it in the time she had. She drew breath again.
“Yes, Whitford?”
“Mrs Gardiner is below, ma’am. She asks if you are disposed to see her.”
“I am. Show her up. And would you ask Mrs Hatchett for tea, please.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She pinched her cheeks, sucked in a gulp of fresh air, and put the shawl back where Mrs Hatchett had laid it.
She put her book on the table beside the chaise, then straightened it.
Then she went back and tipped it crooked again, and opened it to a random page in the middle, to make it look as if she had been pleasantly engaged when her aunt came up.
She passed a mirror and stopped. The redness about her eyes would not go away.
She gave up trying to make it go away and sat down in the chair by the fire, because the chair by the fire had a better light than the chaise, and her aunt would see what was there in any case.
Mrs Gardiner was, in her ordinary way, the most welcome face Elizabeth had seen since Tuesday.
She was wearing the dark green pelisse Elizabeth remembered from a Coleman Street afternoon in February, and she had a small parcel under her arm, and her face was warm and grave and entirely unsurprised by what she found in the chair by the fire.
She crossed the room and took Elizabeth’s hands and looked at her once and did not, mercifully, say anything about her face.
“Your uncle sends his love and a small jar of the lemon preserve, which he tells me is good for the constitution and which I personally consider better than any wine. I have brought it up myself in case Mrs Hatchett should imagine it required for the household tea.”
She tried to laugh. “Tell him I have not had lemon preserve since last May, and shall consider it sovereign against everything.”
The light through the window fell across her aunt’s face, and Elizabeth registered, properly for the first time in weeks, that her aunt had been worried about her.
Mrs Gardiner did not let it show in her voice, but Elizabeth knew the small alteration about her aunt’s mouth that meant she had been losing sleep, and she felt, sharply, the additional weight she had become.
“You have been crying.”
Elizabeth nodded miserably.
“For long?”
“An hour. Less. More. I have not been counting.”
“Are you in any pain?”
“No. Nothing of the body.”
“Then you may have it out with me, and we shall be the better for it.”
Her aunt crossed the rug, sat down on the arm of Elizabeth’s chair, and drew Elizabeth’s head against her shoulder. She did not say anything — she just put one hand against the back of Elizabeth’s head and the other over Elizabeth’s hand where it lay in her lap, and she held her.
Elizabeth wept against the wool of her aunt’s pelisse.
Her aunt smelt faintly of lemon and of the woodsmoke from the Coleman Street fire, and the smell undid Elizabeth more thoroughly than any of the words had.
She had not been held by anyone like this, not being permitted to simply crumble and let her tears have mastery of her, since Fitzwilliam had comforted her in their darkened room.
Mrs Gardiner was not him. She could not reach into Elizabeth’s soul with a whisper or give her courage with a mere touch. But Mrs Gardiner was doing what Elizabeth could not have asked anyone in this house to do, which was to hold firm while she could not.
When Elizabeth drew back, her aunt produced a second handkerchief from somewhere about her person, pressed it into Elizabeth’s hand, and stayed where she was.
“Forgive me.”
“There is nothing to forgive. You are five months from holding your first child and four weeks from your last visit with your husband, and you have been confined to a house that treats you like a prisoner. It would be remarkable if you were not weeping. I should be concerned if you were not.”
Elizabeth dabbed at her eyes with the handkerchief. She did not, at once, trust her voice to work. She kept her hand against her face for a moment longer than was useful and then lowered it because pretending was not going to help her with her aunt.
“I had been managing perfectly well this morning,” Elizabeth said.
It came out unsteady. She drew breath and tried again.
“I had been at the desk. I had been reading. I had been — useful, I thought. And then the clock struck three, and it all came up at once, as it does, every afternoon, and I cannot — I cannot govern it any more than I can govern the weather. I sit here, and I think of him.”
“Of course you do, my dear. You must think of little else.”
She pressed the handkerchief against her cheek. “And of his child. I cannot keep them separate anymore. They were separate things to think of in February. They are not separate now. I think of them both at the same time and I cannot —”
She stopped. She had not meant to speak it. The words had been in her without her permission for weeks, and they came out now because her aunt had asked her a question and she had not the strength to refuse the answer.
“I think of the child not knowing him.”
Mrs Gardiner tightened her hand over Elizabeth’s.
Elizabeth fisted the handkerchief at her mouth, and what followed was more sob than words.
“I think of a boy of three or four standing at a window I do not know, in a house I have not yet seen, asking me who the man in the small portrait is. And I do not know what I shall say to him. Or I know what I shall say, and I know it will not be enough, because nothing I say will be sufficient to the man I am trying to describe, and the child will grow up knowing only what I was able to put into words, and I shall fail him in that for the rest of my life.”
She had begun to weep again before she had finished. She had not realised until she heard it spoken aloud how completely it had taken her over. She pressed the handkerchief against her mouth.
“Forgive me. I had not meant to —”
“Lizzy.” Mrs Gardiner slid down from the arm of the chair and knelt on the rug at Elizabeth’s feet, which was a thing Elizabeth had never seen her aunt do in her life. She took both of Elizabeth’s hands in her own.
“Listen to me. You shall be equal to it. Whatever you are required to be equal to, you shall be. I have known you for twenty-one years, and I have seen you rise to a great many things, and I should not undertake to predict the limits of you. If it falls to you to tell that child about his father, you shall tell him, and you shall tell him better than you presently think you can, because you will have years in which to learn the words for it, and you will have all of us helping you find them. I will help you. Your uncle, Jane, the colonel, even the earl, I fancy. We shall pool what we know, and you shall not have to do it alone. You have always been clever with words, and you will be clever when you have to be. Am I quite understood?”
Elizabeth swallowed the hard knot in her throat and swiped again at her eyes with the handkerchief. “Yes.”
“Good. I shall not say it again. I dislike paying compliments, and you dislike receiving them, and we have, mercifully, never required them between us. I shall return to it only if you forget that I have said it once.”
Elizabeth laughed, briefly, against the handkerchief. It came out broken. “Please, Aunt, divert my mind elsewhere. Tell me of Coleman Street and what Lydia’s letters have said, and how Uncle’s warehouse is doing presently. Tell me about any of it.”
“That is why I have come. Drink the tea your housekeeper is presently bringing, and I will tell you.”
Mrs Hatchett put the tea on the small table at Elizabeth’s elbow and withdrew without remark. Elizabeth poured for them both. Her aunt waited until she had taken a swallow before she began.