Chapter Fifteen
Darcy had reached the point in the morning’s correspondence at which every letter had been written by a man determined to be answered at length on a subject not worth three lines.
Hadley wanted timber. Ashby wanted labourers.
A tenant on the south side wanted indulgence over rent and supplied, in justification, four pages of weather, three of conscience, and not one of arithmetic.
Darcy had laid that last petition aside with the intention of giving it a colder reply than Christian charity perhaps recommended when there was a knock at the study door so slight he thought at first the house itself had made it.
“Come in.”
Mrs Marsden stood on the threshold.
She did not enter at once. In the days since her arrival she had learned the habits of the house with the speed of a woman accustomed to entering other people’s arrangements carefully and occupying as little of them as possible.
She had become, in a few days, indispensable to her sister’s comfort, agreeable to Mrs Reeves, respected by Mrs Hadley, and nearly invisible in every interval not spent at Elizabeth’s bedside.
Darcy had begun to understand that this last effect was not natural diffidence but practice.
He rose.
“Mrs Marsden. Is Miss Bennet worse?”
“No.” The answer came too quickly for mere information. She had expected the question and hurried to relieve him of it. “No, sir. She slept tolerably. Mrs Hadley was satisfied this morning. I should not disturb you if the matter were not—”
She stopped. Not because she did not know what to say. Because she knew it too well and disliked having to say it.
“Pray sit,” Darcy said.
“That is not necessary.”
“Neither is standing when one has come to ask a difficult favour.”
A faint colour touched her face at the word favour. He had judged rightly then. She came a step farther in but did not sit.
“I wished,” she said, “to know whether one of the men might be spared this morning to carry some things from the cottage. Only the heavier pieces. A box, a small chest of drawers, the table from the bedchamber if it can be managed. The landlord’s woman is to come tomorrow and whatever remains is to be put aside or thrown out. I had thought—”
Again she stopped.
He waited.
“I had thought I should contrive it,” she finished, which was a manner of admitting she had not contrived it at all.
Darcy looked at her. The composure held, but not easily.
She had not come to beg for charity. She had come because necessity had carried her to the last practical expedient and left her there with no dignity but that of frankness.
The humiliation of it stood plain enough that any gentleness in naming it would only make it worse.
“How much is there?” he asked.
“Very little. I hoped to bring a trunk and perhaps a chest of drawers to the attics here, if Mrs Reeves can spare the corner she mentioned. Or to any outbuilding. I do not wish to inconvenience the house beyond what has already been suffered on our account.”
“The house will survive your box and chest of drawers.”
She looked down briefly, then up again. “If one of the footmen—”
“There is no footman to spare.”
That startled her enough to be visible. “Sir, I did not mean—”
“Nor Hadley. He is at the lower meadow. Norton is gone to Bakewell. Ashby is at the mill race and, if entrusted with a widow’s household goods, would carry them as if they were paving stones. I am the only practical person available.”
The colour left her face altogether. “Oh no. Mr Darcy, that is not necessary.”
“It is entirely necessary, unless you prefer Ashby breaking your crockery for the sake of expedition.”
“You cannot mean to go yourself!”
“I mean exactly that.”
The distress in her face sharpened. “I beg you would not. I ask only for help with the lifting. I do not ask you to concern yourself with such things. Indeed, I would much rather—”
“Would you much rather leave them there to be thrown into the road?”
She pressed her lips together.
He moderated his tone. “Mrs Marsden, if this business is to be done, it must be done by someone. I have named the alternatives. One is absent, one occupied, one destructive. I remain.”
“That still does not oblige you.”
“No. It merely leaves me free.”
The attempt at lightness did not reach her. He tried again, more dryly.
“Besides, I am bored. If I answer one more letter before noon, I shall begin reforming the county out of spite. Allow me the more innocent employment of carrying a box.”
To his relief that won not laughter but something near it, a minute involuntary disturbance at the corner of her mouth that vanished almost before it formed. “You make mock of my embarrassment, sir.”
“I make mock of paperwork. Your embarrassment I would relieve if I could, but as I cannot, I propose to shorten it by practical means. Give me a quarter of an hour. I will find a handcart and meet you at the kitchen door.”
She still looked as though she thought the whole arrangement preposterous. Yet necessity had not altered merely because she blushed under it.
“You are very obliging,” she said at last, and because the sentence was too formal for gratitude and too sincere for politeness, he understood what it had cost her.
“No,” Darcy said. “Only available.”
He meant to spare her the burden of thanks. He was not sure he succeeded.
The cottage stood at the farther edge of the village road, small and stone-built and damp in the fashion of every dwelling in the valley that had less money than walls required.
Darcy had seen it before only from outside when sending broth, linen, and messages.
Entering it now with the handcart behind him and Mrs Marsden before him, he had at once the uncomfortable sensation of crossing not into a stranger’s house but into the remains of a campaign fought privately and lost.
The front room had been sitting-room, sickroom, dining room, and probably in harder weather kitchen as well.
Nothing in the room declared the wreck. It was the commonplace of everything that did.
A narrow table by the hearth scarred with heat.
Two chairs, one sound, one mended twice.
A row of brown medicine bottles on the mantel not yet cleared away.
A blanket folded square over the settle.
Books in a stack on the floor because there was no shelf unoccupied by other necessity.
Everything clean. Everything worn. Nothing superfluous except suffering, of which the room had evidently had too much.
Mrs Marsden set down the key and removed her gloves finger by finger as though she could not yet trust her hands to anything larger.
“I am ashamed,” she said, not looking at him, “that you should see it in this state.”
Darcy glanced around. “It is in a state of being inhabited by people with too little leisure and too much illness. I have seen grander rooms in worse condition.”
“That is kind.”
“It is accurate.”
He waited while she chose where to begin. That, he quickly understood, was the greater labour. The lifting would be simple enough. The real work lay in deciding what a life had amounted to and which fragments merited carrying into another house.
She crossed to the chest of drawers first, a plain walnut thing with one handle replaced by cord.
From the top drawer she took linen, folded it once more though it had plainly been folded already, and laid it in the box on the table.
From the second she drew stockings, two neckcloths, a worn shawl, a workbag, a bundle of household accounts tied in faded blue ribbon. The third held Mr Marsden’s things.
Her hands stopped for a breath. Darcy saw it.
“Those may go,” she said.
“Go where?”
She looked into the drawer as if the answer might be written there. “To the church poor, if they can be used. Or burnt, if they cannot. I have no opinion.”
The garments themselves justified the indifference. They were threadbare, stained by medicine at the cuff, altered and let out more than once. No relics of tenderness there. No cherished coat kept for memory. Only the exhausted wardrobe of a man long ill and not easy to nurse.
Darcy lifted the chest when she had emptied what she wanted from it.
It was heavier than its appearance warranted and awkward in the narrow passage.
Mrs Marsden moved ahead to clear the door, apologizing once when apology was absurd and again when it was unnecessary.
He set the piece on the cart outside and returned to find her kneeling by a low cupboard under the window.
“Leave that,” he said at once.
“I can rise again.”
“I do not doubt it. I still prefer not to have you prove it on a stone floor.”
Something in the sentence reached her where gentler civility might not have done. She stood, brushing her hands together.
“The dishes are few,” she said. “Most of them are not worth taking.”
Most of them, he saw, were not worth owning. Two cracked plates, three sound ones, a jug with the glaze gone at the lip, six cups from at least three sets. She chose four, wrapped them in linen, and left the rest without apparent pain.
“You keep less than any lady I have ever seen pack a room,” Darcy said, because silence under such labour grew oppressive and because he hoped the neutrality of observation might serve her better than sympathy.
She gave him a brief look. “That is because most ladies expect to inhabit another room of their own at the end of packing. I expect only to borrow one.”
He set the surviving cups into the box with more care than crockery of such humble origin ought perhaps to have inspired. “You will do more than borrow while you are at Merebank.”
She bent again over the cupboard, drawing out a small tin of tea, a cloth bag of barley, two candles, half a packet of needles. “You are generous enough to say so.”