Chapter 31
Chapter Thirty-One
By ten o’clock on the day after the walk Elizabeth had been at the writing-table in the parlour for nearly an hour and had produced two opening sentences, each worse than the last, and had burnt them both.
She had started with her aunt and uncle Gardiner in Cheapside, which was the only letter she had any business writing at all. She had set My dear aunt and uncle at the top of the sheet and got as far as I am obliged to beg of you before she had set the pen down.
The trouble was not the words. The trouble was the sheet itself, with her hand upon it, being set into a mail-bag at the north end of a post-road and drawn south by stages through Derby, Leicester, Northampton, St Albans, and into a London office where a letter from Derbyshire addressed to an address in Cheapside known to be that of her only uncle in trade was exactly the letter Mr Collins’s attorney, if he was any good, would be instructing some clerk to watch for.
She did not know whether Mr Tilney of Gray’s Inn had instructed any clerk to watch for anything.
She had to assume he had. She had spent long enough on the flight north understanding what she was running from to know that any attorney retained to recover property of the value Collins meant to recover would have placed a hand on the post at both ends, and that a sheet of her writing travelling from Derby to Cheapside was, by itself, a summons.
She drew the pen through I am obliged to beg of you and fed the sheet to the fire.
The second had been to an old cousin of her mother’s in Bristol whom Elizabeth had last seen when she was eleven and whom she could not now be sure was still alive.
She had written My dear Mrs Fenton and then she had stopped, because Bristol was further than her uncle’s courage had been able to stretch in January, and because Mrs Fenton, if she was still alive, would answer any enquiry from an unknown Miss Bennet of Hertfordshire by writing first to Longbourn to confirm that such a niece existed.
A letter from Bristol to Longbourn asking after Elizabeth would reach Collins within four days. She fed Mrs Fenton to the fire as well.
She sat with the blank third sheet in front of her and the pen rested against the inkstand and the pale February light coming thinly through the parlour window, and she could not produce a correspondent at all.
She could not write to Longbourn. Her mother would receive any letter from her with the composure of a woman informed her rabbit had caught fire, and would show it to every caller for a week.
She could not write to Mary or to the younger girls.
She could not write to her father’s old attorney in Hertfordshire without alerting the wrong men in Hertfordshire that Miss Elizabeth Bennet was drawing ink from a northern inkstand.
She could not write to anyone without leaving a trail. She could not not write to anyone without having no plan at all. These two impossibilities had been sitting opposite one another at the writing-table all morning, and she had not yet found a third position they could be persuaded into.
She set the pen down.
The leg under the table was stiff from the walk yesterday but not painful in any way that mattered.
Mrs Hadley had examined it at nine and pronounced herself pleased on every count she knew how to measure.
The wound was closing cleanly. The flesh above the wound was beginning to fill out.
The knee would bear her unsupported weight within a fortnight, she had said, perhaps ten days if Elizabeth did not do anything foolish—a pointed glance—between now and then.
The news had been good. She had received it as she would have received the sentence of a judge.
Ten days. Then she would be a woman with two working legs and nowhere to put them.
She had seen the water.
The thing that had happened at the bank yesterday would not leave her alone.
She had dreamt of it twice in the night.
Her finger, then the cleared circle, then the dark moving back into the clearing with what Old Bess had called the reluctance of a thing reminded of an older obligation.
She had touched the water and the water had answered.
No one in this valley, except perhaps Bess, had ever touched water that did that.
Georgiana had bathed in it all winter and had received from it the gradual returning of her colour and her breath, but she had not had water clear under her hand.
Tom Pemberton had been offered the waters and had not been answered.
Hadley had laboured on the shore of it for thirty years and treated it as a difficult tenant.
The water had not spoken to him in any language he had reported.
The woman who had answered the water, on the evidence Elizabeth now had, was herself.
And there was further evidence she had not yet catalogued until this morning.
The lamb Mrs Reeves had fetched from the yard three afternoons ago had lain in the basket by the kitchen ashes for a night and a morning without moving, and had on the second afternoon stood up and taken milk from a cloth, and by now was being a nuisance.
Nan had taken a cough in the first week of Elizabeth’s time in this house and lost it within four days.
Mrs Hadley’s rheumatism, which had been her daily companion through twenty Derbyshire winters, had left her by mid-January—she had mentioned it once in passing, irritated, suspicious of gifts she could not audit.
Georgiana had been playing the pianoforte again for a fortnight, an hour at a time, with no wrist-swelling after.
Things had been mending in this valley at a rate no one had quite taken the measure of because no one had been asked to measure it.
All of it had begun, Elizabeth had been forced to admit sometime between three and four in the morning, when she herself had arrived.
She did not know what this meant. She knew only that the evidence added up to a pattern no sensible person would own aloud, and that the pattern had at its centre her own body and the water, and that leaving the valley with that body would mean, so far as she could read the evidence, leaving with something the valley needed in order to go on mending itself.
She could not stay. She could not go. She could not, additionally, be the thing the valley needed her to be, because what the valley apparently needed her to be was a woman who remained here as long as the water required—and she was not that kind of woman, and had no right to become that kind of woman in this particular house, under this particular roof, whose owner was by family the nephew of the woman who had sent Collins north after her.
The three impossibilities sat on the writing-table with the three abandoned letters.
She did not hear Jane come in. Jane had learned, since the lane, to move quietly in the parlour, and Elizabeth had become accustomed to looking up from a book to find her sister already in the chair by the window with the work-basket open.
“Good morning, Lizzy.”
“Good morning.”
Jane took her chair and her basket. She did not look immediately at the writing-table.
She did not immediately begin sewing. She arranged her skirt, her basket, her thimble, her thread in the small practised sequence by which a woman got ready to sew, and Elizabeth, who had watched Jane do this a thousand times since they had been girls at Longbourn, knew at once that Jane was not going to sew.
“You are at your writing,” Jane said.
“I was.”
“To whom?”
“I cannot decide.”
Jane lifted her eyes from the basket to Elizabeth’s face.
“Three sheets?”
“Three. None sent.”
“I thought I smelled a paper in the fire.”
“You did.”
Jane did not say anything. Her hand rested on the cuff-seam in her lap.
Her face was composed in the particular composure it had taken since the day of the lane—the composure of a woman keeping, by act of will, a level surface over the ground beneath, for the sake of a sister who did not deserve it and who she loved anyway.
“Lizzy,” she said, “I am going to say something, and I am going to say it without preamble, because if I preamble I will not say it.”
Elizabeth set her pen down beside the inkstand.
“Say it.”
“I think you should tell him.”
Elizabeth closed her eyes.
“Tell whom what?”
“Whatever it is that keeps altering every room you are in. Whatever it is he knows enough of to be frightened and not enough of to act justly toward. Whatever it is you half-trust me with and half-hide. I think you should tell him before all of us are made meaner by not knowing.”
The sentence struck with the force of love sharpened by exhaustion. Elizabeth could not answer.
“Lizzy.” Jane had not lowered her voice.
“He is not a stupid man. He has not been a stupid man at any hour since you entered his house on a hurdle in January. He has watched you all winter with an attention he has been restraining from the question he could see wanting to be asked, and the restraint has cost him something every day he has paid it. Do you think he is blind? Do you think he accepts at face value the story of a Hertfordshire lady who arrived in his valley on the ice with a leather bag she will not open? Do you think he does not read the looks you give him, and the looks you do not give him, and whatever it was that happened on the path yesterday that brought you home in a state it has not been in my power to name?”
“Jane.”