Chapter Seventeen
The next morning Jane asked for the writing case before breakfast was cleared.
Nothing in the request ought to have signified.
In a house still living by trays, lists, physic, and messages run quietly from one floor to another, paper was as innocent a necessity as broth.
Yet Elizabeth, propped against pillows with the larger ledger still lying closed on the table by her bed, knew uneasiness at once.
Jane had that look which never belonged to anger in its first heat. It belonged to resolution after wakefulness. She had not slept enough, and her eyes told that plainly. But want of sleep alone did not set her mouth so still.
Martha brought the case, ink, sand, and a sheaf of folded paper. Jane thanked her, waited until the door had shut, then carried the things to the small table near the window.
Elizabeth watched her arrange them with too much care. “You are going to write a treatise,” she said, “or a bill of indictment. I hope, for the credit of the household, it is only the first.”
“A letter.”
“To whom?”
Jane dipped the pen and did not look round. “To Uncle.”
Elizabeth straightened at once, forgetting prudence before pain reminded her of it with a hard pull through the injured leg.
“No!”
Jane set down the pen. “Yes.”
“Jane, you must not!”
“Must not?”
Elizabeth heard, too late, the danger in the quietness. Jane rarely raised her voice. When she ceased softening it for other people’s comfort, the loss of softness did the work of force.
“I mean only that a letter may do harm if it goes at the wrong hour, or by the wrong hand, or says more than ought to travel by post.”
“And I am to judge that on no knowledge at all?”
“I told you there was danger.”
“You told me there was danger and then required me to behave as if vagueness were information.” Jane turned at last. In the clear morning light her face looked paler than the day before, and older by some painful increase of understanding.
“I have borne it while you were feverish. I have borne it while you scarcely knew me. I have borne it while men discussed whether you should keep your leg and when you could do nothing but suffer, because only a monster would demand explanations from a woman half-delirious with pain. But you are not delirious now. Yesterday you spent an hour over estate accounts correcting Mr. Darcy, laughing with him, arguing over false charges as if the world had narrowed to columns and cartage. You are strong enough for figures. You are strong enough for wit. You are strong enough, it seems, for tomorrow whenever tomorrow concerns anything but the truth. And I—”
“Jane—”
“No. No! Let me finish, for I have earned that much. I have tried to be glad you are improved. I am glad. God knows I am glad. Yesterday I looked at you and thought I had my sister back for half an hour. Then I looked again and saw that while I have been waiting beside your bed, you have still kept from me the very thing that brought you to this house, and you would now forbid me to write to the only person who may help us judge what is to be done. I will not be managed so. Not by Collins, not by fear, and not by you.”
The words were not loud. Elizabeth would almost have preferred loudness. Loudness spent itself. This was pain held upright by dignity.
She looked away to the ledger, the pencil still left where Darcy had forgotten it. Yesterday had indeed given her back too much animation to continue pleading weakness with any honour. Jane had seen it. Worse—Jane had seen Darcy see it.
“Is this about Mr. Darcy?” Elizabeth asked, because cowardice always seeks a smaller battlefield.
Jane gave her a look so sorrowful that shame went through Elizabeth like cold water.
“Not in the contemptible sense you mean. Though I should think you much less of a fool if you would permit yourself to confess that he likes you. And I should think him blind if he did not know you like him. But that is not my present misery. My misery is that he has shown us every kindness in his power while remaining ignorant of what danger may have entered his house with my sister. Yesterday I watched you both over the same page and thought, with all the charity I possessed, that if you were well enough for that, you were well enough to stop making me an accomplice in ignorance.”
Elizabeth shut her eyes.
There it was. Not jealousy. Not wounded vanity. Jane’s moral patience had come to its edge at last and found there not romantic foolishness but practical alarm.
When she opened them again Jane had resumed her seat at the writing table, though she had not taken up the pen.
“I am writing to Uncle today,” she said. “If you will tell me what ought and ought not be trusted to paper, I shall be thankful. If you will not, I shall write what I know, which is already more than is safe for any man to shelter in innocence. You may choose which you prefer.”
Elizabeth almost smiled at the severity of the choice. It was so entirely Jane’s version of force: not violence, only the removal of every decent avenue except truth.
“Help me with the bag,” she said.
Jane did not move at once. “The bag?”
“Yes. If I mean to tell it properly, I had better tell it with all the ugly little witnesses present. It is under the mattress on the wall side.”
Jane stared at her one instant in disbelief, then came to the bed. She slipped a hand beneath the mattress and drew out the worn travelling bag Elizabeth had nearly tried to drag from Northmere in delirium and despair.
Jane looked at it as if she had found a live thing hidden among the blankets.
“Set it on the coverlet, if you please. I cannot reach far without cursing, and I should like to postpone blasphemy until the proper point in the narrative.”
Jane obeyed, but the calm of her hands had altered.
Elizabeth untied the strap with fingers not quite obedient and drew out the linen-wrapped packet. At sight of that plain bundle Jane’s colour changed.
“Lizzy.”
“Do not pity me yet. The worst part is not the danger. It is that much of it was made by my own hand.”
Jane sat down hard in the chair beside the bed.
Elizabeth could only at first look at the packet. She had thought, many times, that if ever she told this story she would do it quickly, plainly, with contempt for all ornament. Yet once begun, the thing demanded order. Shame, like housekeeping, benefits from sequence.
“You know the broad beginning,” she said.
“After Papa died, Longbourn was to go to Mr. Collins. That was not new. It had hung over us all our lives. While Papa lived, it could still be laughed at. He made amusement out of Collins and called that philosophy. After he died, amusement became arithmetic, which is a much harsher science.”
Jane lowered her eyes. This much she knew, and both had lived it. Elizabeth went on.
“Collins offered for me once, and I refused him while refusal was still an action with no price except Mama’s nerves.
After Papa was gone, he did not renew the proposal in person.
He did something worse. He renewed his power by letter.
Sanctimony, hints, condolences, little passages about feminine humility and the comfort of submitting one’s judgment to better guidance.
All of it amounted to this: if I repented my refusal in the proper spirit, he might yet arrange our future mercifully. ”
Jane’s hand tightened on the bedclothes.
“He wrote to you directly?”
“To Mama sometimes. To me sometimes. To Uncle by implication, though never so openly as to give him easy grounds for challenge. He wanted obedience without ever naming the bargain in plain terms. Plain terms might be produced against him.”
Jane said, with sudden bitterness rare enough in her to startle them both, “He always did value righteousness most where it could not be cross-examined.”
“Exactly so. Uncle tried to help. He had not much ready money to spare, but he thought of situations, economies, temporary arrangements. There was even some notion that I might go as companion to a connection of his. It was not a cheerful prospect, but it was honest. Then another pressure began.”
She unfolded the first paper and laid it between them.
“Papa had left a debt imperfectly discharged with a local lender. Not ruinous by the scale men use for one another, but ruinous enough for women who possess no room for error. The debt itself was real. The use Collins made of it was not. He learned of it—I believe through Lucas Lodge, though I cannot prove the road by which gossip travelled—and began to suggest that if matters were not composed to his satisfaction, questions might be asked. About household goods. About whether Mama had retained things under valuation too favourable to female distress. About whether our portions and claims had been represented too conveniently. About our ability to meet demands without scandal. About whether legal enquiry, once begun, might not sweep more widely than anyone wished.”
Jane went very still. “He meant to bring me in too?”
“All of us. Mama’s nerves. Kitty and Mary’s dependence. Your future. My refusal. Uncle’s anxiety. He put a finger on every bruise and called it pastoral concern.”
Jane looked at the paper but did not seem to see the writing. “I thought—I knew he was odious. I did not know he meant to count even my prospects among his instruments. I credited our situation with Papa’s loss alone. You did not say otherwise.”
“Neither did I at first, for you had enough to bear. Men like Collins improve upon themselves when given time.”
Elizabeth paused. The next part remained the hardest because it moved the story from persecution into complicity.