Chapter 20 #2
“The water’s up to mischief and mercy together,” she said.
“The girl knows some of that already. You need know the rest. A place can go wrong quietly. A place can come right quietly too, but only if the keeping’s honest. No more paper-mending over rot.
No more treating grief as an inconvenience to the accounts. ”
Darcy’s face grew very still. “You speak as though my cousin’s faults remain active forces in the valley. It is merely a matter of accounting—funding and neglect, which I am restoring.”
“Lies linger where folk live by what was promised. Ask Ashby. Ask Hadley. Ask Mrs Pemberton if warmth missed from the meadow last spring is dead and gone because the gentleman who missed it is in the ground. The dead go nowhere fast in a valley this small.” Old Bess pointed, with startling accuracy, not at Darcy’s chest but at something more intangible in him.
“You have a habit, I think, of deciding which truths suit others and which are best borne by yourself.”
Darcy did not move or ask how the old woman could know such a thing. That was answer enough.
“Sometimes,” he said at last, “other people’s burdens do not require my help to carry.”
“Aye. And sometimes a man says that because he means to spare them and ends by sparing only himself the look their faces wear when they hear. Measure which is which carefully. The water won’t do it for you. Neither will I.”
No reply came. Elizabeth looked at him and saw, perhaps for the first time clearly, not only strength and reserve but the cost reserve exacts from the man who practises it.
He stood as if long habit held him upright where others might have moved or bristled or laughed off the old woman’s presumption.
Habit and something akin to shame moved beneath it.
Old Bess, satisfied perhaps that she had said all she came to say, took a step back.
“That’ll do. I’m too old to spend a whole day in a rich man’s room telling him what his conscience should have said sooner. Nan, fetch my basket.”
Nan sprang from the door as if released from enchantment.
Mrs Reeves rose, basket in hand. “You might take some broth before you go.”
“I might not. Your broth’s too good and makes me weak in principle.”
This, said of Mrs Reeves, produced the nearest thing to a smile from the housekeeper Elizabeth had yet seen in company.
At the door Old Bess looked back once, not at Darcy but at Elizabeth.
“Don’t mistake being noticed for being owned. And don’t mistake leaving for freedom if you’re only carrying the same snarl somewhere farther off.”
Then she was gone, Nan after her, and Mrs Reeves following because houses always needed translation after prophecy.
Darcy remained, but there was no purpose in his lingering. It was as if he had forgot how to walk out after them.
Elizabeth snorted and gestured after the retreating party. “Does everyone in Northmere begin acquaintance by diagnosing the moral weaknesses of strangers?”
For an instant he looked almost startled, then something dry and unwillingly amused crossed his face. “Only the most esteemed among them.”
“Then I must learn to value obscurity while it lasts.”
He moved a little nearer the bed. “Are you distressed? I will tell Mrs Reeves you are not to have unannounced visitors.”
It was exactly the question he would ask—not What did you make of it?, not Do you believe her?, but this practical enquiry into present harm—that Elizabeth could not answer lightly at once.
“I do not know.”
“That is not an answer I dislike.”
“Because it is honest?” The words escaped more directly than meant, and the flush of understanding that crossed his face at hearing them.
“Yes,” he said.
There it was between them again—the bargain in the midnight parlour, still governing everything, the whole house somehow more crowded yet.
Elizabeth looked to the window where pale noon light had thinned beneath clouds. “She said I was noticed by the place. Whatever could she mean by that?”
“She said many things with equal force.”
“That is not the same as saying she is wrong.”
He did not reply.
She turned back. “And what could she mean by calling you a shoulder? Why not an ear or a big toe?”
The jest seemed lost on him, for a strange look crossed his face—not vanity, not reluctance, but something more painful than either.
“If the house rests on anyone at present,” he said quietly, “it rests on more shoulders than mine. Your sister’s among them. Mrs Reeves’s. Hadley’s. Mrs Hadley’s. Ashby’s. Perhaps yours, though I do not like to think it because I would rather your business here were easier than that.”
Elizabeth heard in the answer what he left unsaid—that he knew the weight was his in name, whatever others bore in labour, and that he did not trust the name by itself.
He looked at the coverlet, at the shape of the leg beneath it, at the place where pain and saving still contested unseen.
Jane’s step sounded in the passage before the door opened. She entered with Georgiana’s shawl over one arm and stopped, reading the room in a glance—the signs of Old Bess’s passage, Darcy at the foot of the bed, Elizabeth more thoughtful than frightened. Her eyes went to Darcy’s face, then away.
“I passed Old Bess in the hall,” she said. “She told me, without stopping, that I am trying to be two kinds of woman at once and shall ruin my sleep if I continue.”
Darcy said gravely, “Then I perceive you have been honoured.”
Jane gave a tired, genuine laugh. “If honour continues in that style, I shall beg to be passed over next time. I only thought you ought to know what sort of visit you have entertained. She likes to prophesy and fancies it lends her importance. I recall several odd sayings passed about when Mr Marsden was in his last week, and noe one of them made sense. You should pay her no mind, Mr Darcy.”
He nodded. “I shall endeavour to take your advice, Mrs Marsden. What have you there?”
“Miss Darcy asked me to trade this for the blue shawl she left here yesterday. She says the south chamber is too warm for the green one and too cold for none at all.”
“Which means she is stronger,” Darcy said at once.
“Yes.”
The whole of him altered at the word. Elizabeth saw it, and because she saw it, she noted as well the fleeting change in Jane’s face before she lowered her eyes to the shawl and smoothed a fringe needing no smoothing.
Old Bess, Elizabeth thought, had not begun diagnosing nearly soon enough.