Chapter Seventeen #2
“Then you married Mr. Marsden, and for a little while the whole matter altered its face. There was hope again. Distance. Another house. Another centre of concern. Uncle breathed easier. Even Collins moderated himself for a season, because prosperity in others can make a petty man fear he has misjudged his leverage. The pressure, when it came back, was the same old pressure—the debt, the estate, the entailed expectation—but by then the lull had done its damage. Uncle had come to trust that time would help us. Mama had stopped assuming the worst of every caller. I had stopped watching the post. And then Collins was at our door again and nothing of the moderating had fastened. One paper became central.”
“I do not understand.”
“Uncle believed that if the debt could be shown as already satisfied, several lines of threat would collapse together. The lender himself was dead. His son was in London. The old records were disordered. Nothing had yet been formally moved in law. There was an interval in which a lie might pass for a lost convenience of business and save us all from being cornered while the men decided how much of female dependence could be sold respectably.”
Jane was watching her now with an expression Elizabeth could not bear and yet must endure: not accusation merely, but the dawning terror of a good woman seeing the point at which goodness had failed to protect those she loved.
“You forged it,” she said.
Elizabeth laughed once, without mirth. “I see I have been wasting time on introductions. Yes. I forged it. Not the debt itself. Not every paper in this packet. The acknowledgment of its payment. I wrote a paper meant to appear as if the lender’s side had received satisfaction through Uncle’s hand and released further claim against the Bennet household effects remaining to Mama’s use.
That acknowledgment is the thing for which I may be hanged if I am taken.
There are other false helps about it—copied notes, altered particulars, bits of scaffolding to let the lie survive a first glance—but the acknowledgment is the true felony. ”
Jane made a sound Elizabeth had never heard from her before—not a sob, not an exclamation, only breath failing under moral shock.
“Oh, Lizzy.”
“Do not make me gentler than I was. I was frightened, angry, and very tired of being instructed by men who called coercion order. None of those improve the legal quality of forgery.”
“But… but one paper! Surely, one paper, for which the man whose name you forged lost nothing—”
“It is still forgery, Jane. A capital offence. And the rest of the packet is not all of one kind,” Elizabeth said, before Jane could speak.
“Some papers are genuine. Memoranda. Extracts. Collins’s own letter.
Things he meant to draw out of their proper place and produce separately, so that ordinary confusion might look like fraud and helplessness like contrivance.
Those I took. Call it stealing, withholding, or removing them from his reach as you please.
It is ugly enough. But it is not those papers that would hang me. The acknowledgment is.”
Jane pressed her fingers to her lips. Tears had risen but did not fall.
“Did Uncle know?”
“Not all of it. Not the full execution. He knew the thought. He knew a paper of that kind, if it existed among older things, might buy time. I let him remain half in the dark because I could not endure to see better men dirtied by my own action. That was noble only in the sense that cowardice often borrows noble language.”
She laid Collins’s letter on top of the other paper.
“This is why I fled. Collins had written through an attorney’s clerk.
Mama was near hysterics. Uncle was trying to manage every side at once.
If the packet remained at Longbourn or passed openly through Uncle’s hands, he might be dragged into it beyond denial.
If it remained with me there, Collins’s man of business might find the forged acknowledgment—or discover that the genuine papers I had taken out of their reach were missing and ask why.
I thought the safest thing—the least dangerous thing for everyone except perhaps myself—was to take the papers, take the little money Uncle had forced upon me, and get out before any man could decide my movements for me again. ”
“But why the road alone? Why not travel with Uncle's maid or someone you could trust?”
“I did not begin alone. Uncle put me on a coach for Scotland with a manservant he trusted, because if anyone asked, that was to be the truth nearest truth: that I had been sent safely out of immediate reach. But safety with a witness was no safety for him. I rose before dawn at an inn, left the man sleeping, and went out by another door before he could say he had followed me farther or knew where I meant to go. After that I travelled alone. I went south first so Hertfordshire might suppose me gone one way. Then north when south grew too obvious. I meant, if I could, to reach you eventually, or at least Derbyshire, where Aunt Gardiner has family nearer Lambton and where Collins’s guesses would have to widen before they narrowed upon you.
I managed all this with the intelligence of a heroine in the first volume of a bad novel and ended by walking onto dangerous ice.
” She looked down at the packet. “There is justice in that if one cares for literary symmetry.”
Jane’s tears fell then, sudden and quiet. “Do not jest.”
“If I do not, I may begin screaming, and Northmere has been put to enough expense on my account.”
“Lizzy.”
The rebuke contained no force now, only anguish.
Jane took up Collins’s letter with hands she tried and failed to still, and read enough to understand its tone if not every line.
Disgust moved across her face so plainly that Elizabeth, even in misery, knew a savage little gratitude.
At least one other person now saw the man in his native vileness.
“And Mr. Darcy knows none of this?”
“No particulars. Only that there is danger southward, that I had reason to hide the bag, and that I have behaved like a woman trying to hide her presence in his house at all costs. He does not know the law’s name for what I carry.
He does not know that by sheltering me he may be taken for aiding a felon if the matter is pressed hard enough.
That is why I must go, as soon as possible, and that is why you must get as far from me as you can.
That is why I forbade the letter before.
A letter might miss Uncle and meet someone else’s curiosity first. Or it might bring Uncle down here by a road already watched.
Or it might force explanations before I had decided whether to ruin one man more in saving myself. ”
Jane rose from the chair and crossed to the window, the letter still in her hand. For some little time she stood there looking not at the view but at the paper held just above the sill, as though daylight itself might improve its meaning.
When she turned back, grief had not left her. It had arranged itself. “Very well,” she said. “Now I understand the prohibition. I do not like it better. I understand it.”
Jane came back to the bed and laid Collins’s letter beside the packet with deliberate care. “You have done a terrible thing.”
“I am aware.”
“Under terrible pressure. That is not the same as innocence.”
“No.”
“And you have been monstrously wrong to keep the whole of it from me this long.”
Elizabeth met her eyes. “Yes.”
Jane’s mouth trembled once. “I might have helped you bear it if you had trusted me.”
That, more than any mention of law or shame, struck home. “I know,” Elizabeth said. “That is the part least pardonable.”
Jane sat again, but nearer now, at the bed’s side rather than by the window. She took Elizabeth’s hand, though the gesture shook between tenderness and reproof.
“I do not know yet whether I am angry with you more for the forgery or for believing I would rather be spared than burdened. Perhaps I shall decide by degrees. But we have done with secrets and lies. Do you hear me?”
Elizabeth’s throat tightened. “I hear you.”
“Good. Then I shall not write blindly.” Jane looked once at the packet, once at the closed ledger on the table, as if the two objects together named the whole strange crossroads of this house.
“But neither will I go on helping you hide danger from men who have earned better usage than deceit. Uncle must be reached wisely, yes. And before long Mr. Darcy must know what it costs him to shelter you.”
Elizabeth flinched despite herself.
Jane did not relent. “No, listen to me as I have listened to you. I do not say this because he likes you. I say it because he is a gentleman under his own roof, with a sister to protect and a name that may be dragged into your necessity whether he chooses it or not. You had no right to decide the whole matter for him indefinitely.”
The sentence struck with merciless justice because it was true.
Elizabeth turned her face aside. “I thought he was safer not knowing. A man who acts in an emergency stands clear of the law. A man who learns, and is silent, does not.”
She closed her eyes. “And I was afraid.”
Jane’s fingers tightened around hers. “I know. That is why I can forgive so much and so little at once.”
They remained thus, joined over the hateful little bundle of papers. The fire had burnt low. Morning light lay cold on the writing case by the window.
At last Jane said, with the calm of a woman accepting labour rather than relief, “We will think first whom to write, by what hand, and how much may be committed to paper. After that, we shall decide what is to be told here and when. But you will not put me off again. If I ask, you answer. If I warn, you hear. If I see danger where you see only sacrifice, you will remember that I have earned some judgement in this matter too.”
Elizabeth turned back and saw in her sister’s face not softness defeated, but softness armed.
“Yes,” she said.
Jane brushed the tears from her own cheeks with an impatient hand, then took up Collins’s letter once more.
“Very well,” she said. “Let us begin by hating him properly, and afterwards we will determine how not to be ruined by him.”