Chapter Fifteen #3
He thought that a remarkable generosity toward a husband who had, by implication if not direct accusation, given her too little comfort in life. Yet perhaps generosity cost her less now than remembrance.
The workbox proved lighter than it looked. Thread, buttons, scissors, a packet of needles, three lengths of ribbon, and beneath them all a piece of fine muslin folded around nothing.
Mrs Marsden touched it and went still.
Darcy turned away at once to the window, affording her the decency of privacy even in a room too small to contain much. After a time she said, very quietly, “This may go too.”
He looked back. Her eyes were wet, though no tear had yet fallen.
“It need not, if you—”
“It ought,” she said. “I bought it in September because I meant to make curtains for the bed when Mr Marsden was better and we had the room painted. I had measured the window twice. It appears I was planning for a life much given to postponement.”
The composure cracked then, not with display but with fatigue. She sat on the edge of the bed and covered her eyes briefly with her hand.
Darcy set the workbox down and remained where he was. Near enough, should she require assistance. Far enough not to turn grief into spectacle.
“I am sorry,” he said, and because anything larger would have sounded false in that poor room, the plainness served.
She lowered her hand. “Forgive me. This is ridiculous.”
“No.”
“I am not crying for him, you see.” The words came low and ashamed, as if she were confessing a hard defect.
“That is the unpardonable part. I did grieve for him. I do grieve for him, in a manner. He suffered. He was frightened. At the end he was kinder than before, and that ought to matter. But this—” She looked round the bedchamber, at the bare table, the drawer left open, the muslin in her lap.
“This is not for him. It is for all the little improvements that were always to be made later, and the easier season that never came, and the house I kept waiting for until there was no house left to keep. One should not be vain enough to mourn a plan.”
“One may mourn wasted hope without vanity.”
Her mouth trembled once. “That is a very gentlemanly doctrine.”
“It is one I mean.”
She bowed her head. When she spoke again, the voice was held. “You are good to me, sir.”
Darcy did not know what to do with such sentences except try to deserve them a little better than he usually did.
By noon the cottage had been reduced to what the landlord’s woman might strip without injury to memory—the broken crockery, the poor mattress, the useless bottles, the scraps of fuel, the remains of a life no one would covet.
The handcart stood full. The two better chairs, the chest, the box of linen and books, the workbox, the surviving cups, the glass that had been hers before marriage, the packet of letters she would not set down.
Mrs Marsden took one last turn through the rooms, not lingering, only verifying. Darcy remained by the door with the cart handle in hand.
When she came back she had the key and nothing else.
“That is all,” she said.
Not everything. Only all.
He closed the door behind her and waited while she turned the key.
“I can send the landlord payment for another week if you require more time,” he said.
She shook her head. “No. If I leave anything more in there, it will only be because I have mistaken delay for mercy.”
He looked at the small house, then at the woman beside him.
She stood straight, the packet of letters in one hand, the other gloved again and closed round the key.
Not relieved. Not undone. Something more difficult than either.
A person who had finished an office no one else could have done for her and discovered that finishing it solved less than one had hoped.
As they turned back toward Merebank, he took the heavier side of the cart before she could think to touch it.
She let him.
That, more than her thanks, told him how tired she was.
He said nothing further about Hertfordshire, aunts, younger sisters, or the winter road that had carried Elizabeth Bennet into his valley.
Mrs Marsden had answered what she meant to answer and defended what she meant to defend.
Yet the very caution of her silences had its own force.
Whatever had driven Elizabeth north had not been ordinary family duty.
Whatever history lay behind those guarded letters and that missing information, Mrs Marsden thought it dangerous enough to carry close and disclose to no one.
Darcy should, perhaps, have found that only inconvenient.
Instead he found himself thinking of Elizabeth in the parlour at Merebank, clever enough to laugh in pain and stubborn enough to call half the household to account while unable yet to cross a room alone, and of the sister who guarded her with silence as fierce as love.
By the time the house came into view above the lane, he knew two things more clearly than before.
The first was that Mrs Marsden had not wept this morning for her husband so much as for the life marriage had promised and never delivered.
The second was that Elizabeth Bennet had not come north for any simple reason a gentleman might accept at first asking.