Chapter Fifteen #2
He heard the reservation under the gratitude. Not distrust of him exactly. Distrust of duration. A woman widowed young and badly provided for had learned, he supposed, that every refuge must be measured by the day until it proved otherwise.
They moved next to the bedchamber.
Here the room narrowed further, as if poverty had shut in around the bed.
A strip of carpet by one side. A washstand.
A chair set close beside the mattress in the unmistakable position of long attendance.
On the small table stood the last of the bottles, a spoon, a saucer burned at the edge by candle grease, and a Bible left open with a ribbon marking no place at all.
The air retained a medicinal sharpness under the colder smell of unused linen.
Darcy had seen sickrooms all autumn in his sister’s chambers and all winter in the village.
This one affected him differently because the struggle had already ended and still occupied the room.
One could not look at the chair without seeing the woman who had sat there night after night because there had been no servant to relieve her and no sister in the next room to divide the burden.
Mrs Marsden went to the washstand and took up a hairbrush, a shaving mug, a little cracked looking-glass.
“These are his,” she said. “The mug may go. The brush also. The glass I will keep because it was mine before I married.”
Darcy set the small table aside from the bed so he could lift it later. “There is no need to explain each article to me.”
“I know.”
But she continued to do it. Not to justify herself, he thought, but because naming things gave order to an occupation otherwise too near undoing.
The mug may go. The glass I will keep. This towel for rags.
These sheets to Mrs Hadley if she can use them.
Those papers burnt. The little flask thrown away entire.
She sorted with an exactness almost severe, and only after some time did he understand what made the scene so desolate.
It was not that she chose too much to discard.
It was that so little tempted her to keep it.
The room contained almost nothing a woman might wish to claim as the visible history of a marriage—no cherished trifle, no object invested by use with tenderness, no foolish purchase preserved merely because it had once promised pleasure.
There was a shawl of decent quality folded in the drawer, but she handled it not as a favourite possession but as an article that might still serve.
There was a china bowl painted with a blue border.
She looked at it long enough for him to suppose it would be saved, then set it among the things to leave.
“You do not want that one?” he asked.
“It was a wedding present from a neighbour.”
“Then perhaps—”
“No.” She touched the edge with one finger and withdrew her hand. “I kept thinking I should use it properly when things were easier. There was never a proper time. It ought not to occupy another shelf merely because I once expected one.”
She said it calmly, almost lightly. Yet the last word failed her by the slightest degree.
Darcy understood then, or some portion of it.
Not grief only for the man in the churchyard.
Something more humiliating and more difficult to confess—grief for waste.
For youth spent economizing, nursing, placating, postponing.
For the small domestic hopes by which women were trained to order their lives and which reality, in this instance, had taken one by one and made ridiculous.
He said nothing. He had learned enough of suffering in the last months to know that consolation, offered too soon, became vanity in the speaker.
She went to the window and lifted down a pot in which nothing had survived the winter.
“This may stay,” she said.
“The plant?”
“The pretence.”
That won from him an actual, surprised breath that was near laughter. She heard it and looked back as if startled to have provoked it.
“I beg your pardon. That was ungracious.”
“It was accurate,” he said.
The corner of her mouth moved. It did not become a smile, but the room was easier for the attempt.
They carried the table out together, then the box, then the second chair. On the third journey she asked whether he was certain he did not regret his bargain. The handcart wheel had found every rut between cottage and gate and the weather had left the lane too soft for comfort.
“I regret only the tenant’s letter I am no longer answering,” he said.
“That poor man may be ruined.”
“If so, he should not have expressed it in so many paragraphs.”
She lowered her eyes, and this time the half-laugh came properly, brief and thin and still more affecting than open weeping would have been.
When they returned to the bedchamber she had taken down from the mantel a packet of letters tied separately from the household papers. She stood with them in her hands, not moving.
“These, I think, must come with me at once.”
“Of course.”
She did not put them in the box. She held them against the front of her gown, both hands laid over them as if the pressure alone held her upright.
The gesture invited no question. Darcy nonetheless heard himself ask, with deliberate casualness, “You have much family correspondence, then, besides Miss Bennet’s?”
The effect on her was immediate and carefully suppressed. Her shoulders did not stiffen, yet he knew they wished to. Her face did not close, yet the openness left it.
“Not much,” she said. “Only what one does not throw away.”
He should, probably, have left it there.
But the concealments surrounding the two sisters had been visible from the beginning, and his curiosity about Elizabeth—her arrival, her secrecy, the violence of whatever had driven her north in winter—had been sharpening daily whether he approved of it or not.
“Your father is dead, I think?”
“Yes.”
“And your mother?”
“Living.”
Nothing more.
He lifted the smaller box to the chair, giving her time if she chose to use it. At last she added, “My mother and younger sisters are at present residing with an aunt.”
“In Hertfordshire?”
Her eyes met his then, very clear and very guarded. “With an aunt,” she repeated.
The rebuke, though perfectly civil, was unmistakable. Darcy inclined his head as if the fault had been larger than it was.
“I ask too much.”
“No.” Her tone softened a little, perhaps because she knew he had helped her through two rooms’ worth of humiliation and deserved some reward less chilly than silence. “You ask what any reasonable person would ask. I am only not equal to answering reasonably on every point.”
He accepted that. It had the sound of truth.
He took up the box. “Then we shall confine ourselves to the unreasonable. It is a more diverting category.”
This time she almost smiled without sorrow undoing it at once.
Back in the front room she knelt by the remaining stack of books.
There were fewer than Elizabeth would have called decent and more than Darcy might have expected in such a house.
A prayer book, a volume of sermons, two novels shabby from repeated reading, a medical tract bristling with markers, and a Virgil whose binding had failed in one corner.
“You keep that one?” he asked, indicating the Virgil.
“It was my father’s.”
“Then certainly.”
“Yes.” She brushed the cover with her thumb. “He taught us all badly and enthusiastically. We learned more noise than grammar, but I suppose that is still an inheritance.”
The sentence altered her face. Not happier. Younger. For an instant he saw the daughter before the wife or widow.
“You and Miss Bennet were educated together?” he asked.
“As all sisters are, where there is no governess worth the name.”
“And always close?”
She chose the next book with too much attention. “Not always easy. Closeness is not ease.”
“No.”
“No,” she repeated, perhaps surprised that he did not make a jest of it. “But yes. We were close.”
He hesitated, then ventured farther under cover of moving the books into a basket. “Was that why she was travelling? To join you?”
Mrs Marsden set down the prayer book very gently.
“She meant to see me.”
“In such weather?”
“Yes.”
The answer excluded more than it contained. It rebuffed him and made him more curious than before.
“I had supposed,” he said, keeping his voice as idle as he could, “that sisters who are merely fond do not generally take winter roads alone.”
“Then you suppose correctly.”
There was nothing to be done with that except admire, against his judgment, the calm with which she guarded her sister. Elizabeth had secrets enough to make half the county industrious if they were once spoken of in a drawing room. Mrs Marsden meant that none of them should be hers to speak.
He tried once more, very lightly. “And was Miss Bennet always so determined?”
Mrs Marsden looked at him over the basket of books. The answer, when it came, was the nearest thing to open feeling she had yet given him in the whole morning.
“Always. Only not always wisely.”
He did not know why that sentence affected him as it did. Perhaps because it was said with such exhausted love. Perhaps because it described a quality in Elizabeth he had already seen too clearly with his own eyes and should have liked, for prudence’s sake, to find less compelling.
The last things to be sorted were papers from the table drawer and a small workbox from beneath the bed.
The papers she divided into three neat parcels—those concerning the rent, which she kept, those relating to doctors and apothecaries, which she wished burnt, and Mr Marsden’s unfinished notes, which she looked through without expression and then returned to the drawer.
“You will leave those?” Darcy asked.
“There is nothing in them but remedies he meant to try when he was stronger, letters he meant to answer when he was less tired, and figures for money we never had. The dead are entitled to privacy in some matters.”