Chapter 33
Chapter Thirty-Three
She did not, in arranging her own mind to begin, look at him. She looked at the corner of the table by her elbow where the small pile of household letters lay. He waited. He had waited longer than this to know what she meant to tell him, and what was left to wait of it would not be a hardship.
She drew the small breath that was the breath the telling required, and gave it.
“After my father died, Longbourn went to Mr Collins. That part is no surprise, merely English law in its most domesticated form. My mother had her jointure, my sisters and I our very small portions, and all the gentility in the world with which to starve respectably if no better arrangement were made. Mr Collins offered for me before my father’s death.
I declined him. Not wisely perhaps, in the strict mercantile sense, but with spirit at least. My father allowed himself the luxury of amusement at Collins’s expense.
My mother did not. After my father died, what had been farce became ledger.
Collins renewed his power not by renewing the proposal but through letters, through sanctimony, through hints that comfort and propriety might still be arranged if I showed a more humble mind regarding my refusal. ”
A flicker passed over Darcy’s face at the word humble. “I take it you remained… disinclined.”
“I would rather have gone into service,” she said.
“I do not doubt it. I do have some passing acquaintance with the man.”
She looked away.
“My uncle Gardiner tried to help. Money where he could spare it without injuring his own children. A notion of companionate employment with a cousin’s connection.
A scheme by which Jane might remain with us part of the year.
It might have answered for a time, if Collins had not, in the interval, got wind—through Lucas Lodge, I believe, though whether by accident or design I cannot say—of a debt paper my father had left unresolved with a local lender.
Small enough by gentleman’s standards. Fatal by ours. ”
Her hand, which had been in her lap, went to the edge of the table. Darcy’s did not move from the arm of the chair she had put him in.
“The debt itself was real. The use made of it was not. Collins hinted that if matters were not composed within his sense of propriety, questions might be asked about my father’s management, my mother’s ability to pay, the terms by which Jane had been settled on Mr Marsden, and whether certain household goods at Longbourn had been retained under a valuation too convenient to female distress.
He found that legal process, even proved unsuccessful, can ruin a woman who has no place to defend herself except the house being taken from her. ”
“And your uncle?”
“Fought what he could. Argued. Appealed to Collins’s vanity and to Charlotte’s better sense where he could.
But he had trade to mind, a family of his own, and not enough ready money to purchase peace for all of us against every species of clerical extortion.
Then Jane married Mr Marsden, and for a while everything rearranged itself around hope again. ”
She stopped. Darcy waited.
“It is fashionable in novels to make the husband in such a marriage either ideal or intolerable. He was neither. He was a decent man, older than Jane by some years, too pleased at having brought some comfort to a woman in difficulty, and not strong against weather or the chest complaint that took him. Jane did not love him as a woman ought love the man she marries. They got on well enough, or so it seemed to Mama. Jane was grateful to have a home. In her circumstances gratitude was almost the same currency as survival.”
Darcy’s face did not change. Only his eyes lowered briefly.
“It was in that season that I did the thing I came north not to answer for. I will tell it to you in the order it happened. My uncle still trying. My mother frantic. Collins more poisonous because thwarted. One particular paper becoming central. And the thing I did with that paper, which cannot be undone.”
She stopped. She was not yet ready to name it. She set the piece of it aside and went on.
“Jane had been largely lost to us by then. You understand, perhaps, how a house closes around an illness—the wife of a failing man does not answer the letters she once answered, and the family, once reassured that she is tolerably looked after, ceases to press her. My mother stopped writing when Jane stopped replying. My sisters were young enough not to press the matter. I had a handful of brief letters from her across the two years of her marriage—enough to know she was in Derbyshire, enough to know the house was quiet, enough to know Mr Marsden had been failing through the autumn. I had not told my uncle what I knew of her situation. I had not told anyone. Jane’s silence was her one privacy in the marriage, and I was not going to spend it for her.
“My uncle’s plan for me, when flight became unavoidable, was Scotland.
He put me on a coach with a manservant he trusted, because if anyone came asking after me, the story nearest the truth was to be that I had been sent safely out of reach.
I did not go to Scotland. I rose before dawn at an inn and left the man sleeping, and 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 to reach Jane, if I could.
I thought—I had nothing sounder to think—that a sister in a quiet Derbyshire house married to a failing man would be the last place Collins would look, and that if I could get to her I might rest for a space and write to my uncle from there.
“I arrived at Merebank on the afternoon you found me in the snow, believing I was coming to a house that contained my sister and a sick brother-in-law. I learned on the path up from the road that Mr Marsden had died five days before I arrived. Jane had not written of it. I had not known. We buried the news, she and I, in the first quarter hour of my being carried into her house.”
She rose, bracing on the table. He started forward. She lifted one hand to stop him. The crutch was against the far wall. She did not need the crutch. She wanted the bag.
“Stay there.”
He stayed.
She rose—slowly, with the crutch, the leg protesting the demand—went to the chest, and reached behind it into the narrow recess where the bag had been since the afternoon of the lane. She brought it back to the table and set it down, then sat again, more heavily than before.
“Here it is,” she said. “Since you might as well see.” She drew the packet out and laid it on the table between them.
“Collins had no legal standing to make what he made of an unresolved debt. He had only the standing of a man whom frightened women had no resources to refuse. My uncle believed—God forgive him, and me far more—that if a certain letter of acknowledgment existed among the older papers, declaring that old debt satisfied by payment through his hand and releasing further claim against the Bennet household goods, several wolves would lose the scent at once. The man who had held the debt was dead. His son was in London. Records were disordered. Such a letter, if produced, would not easily be contradicted.”
She drew a breath. “My uncle did not forge it. I did.”
Darcy did not start or curse or move. He sat very still. “Explain.”
“I had seen the old man’s hand once or twice on receipts.
Not enough to imitate well to an expert.
Enough, I thought, to satisfy confused household papers if the matter never reached hostile scrutiny.
My uncle argued against it when my meaning was clear.
Then for it. Then against it again. In the end the thing was mine because my desperation was mine, and because men, however good, often let women commit terrible acts under the excuse that they merely fail to prevent them. ”
His mouth moved, small and terrible, as if to shape a smile it could not produce.
“Do not admire me for it,” she said. “I had no grand principle. I was frightened and angry and sick of being bartered by men who called their appetites duty. I wrote the acknowledgment. Then copied the lender’s son’s style upon the outer note that purported to have forwarded it.
Then, because one false paper begets others, I altered a date on a related account memorandum, and carried with me, when I fled, the packet that would either support the lie if needed or damn me entirely if exposed. ”
She unwrapped the linen and laid the papers out one by one under the thin February light from the window.
“The acknowledgment. The forwarded note. The altered memorandum. And this.” She touched the sealed slip still unopened. “A letter from Collins, which I kept because if I burned it I should lose the only proof his threats had shape enough to drive anyone mad.”
Darcy did not reach for them at once. His hand closed and opened on the arm of the chair. “May I read the letter?”
“Yes. I should have given it to you two months ago.”
He picked up Collins’s letter and broke the seal with a careful impatience.
Hunsford Parsonage Kent
Madam,
Though your former conduct toward me deprived you, through youthful self-will, of the protection it had been in my power and Christian inclination to extend, I remain unwilling to see the widow of a respectable man and the daughters of my late honoured cousin reduced, by feminine imprudence and pecuniary misapprehension, to consequences more publicly mortifying than need be.
It has come to my notice that certain accounts left in irregular posture at the late Mr Bennet’s death have not been regularized to the satisfaction of those entitled to enquire into them, and that goods now occupying the house which, by the legal course of entail, revert to me, may stand in a relation to such accounts less simple than ladies are apt to suppose when guided chiefly by feeling.
I would be most unwilling to expose your excellent mother or your estimable sisters to the scrutiny which formal adjustment sometimes necessitates.
Yet I cannot in justice to my own future household permit ambiguity where rectitude is demanded.
If, however, a spirit of proper submission and renewed confidence were shown, I have reason to think much may still be softened which otherwise must proceed in the ordinary channel.
I remain, madam, your well-wisher,
William Collins
He read once, and then again, more slowly. “He threatens legal ruin as courtship. And calls extortion softness if accepted under clerical phrasing.”
“That was what I made of it as well.”
He laid the paper down with a motion that showed exactly how much he wished to tear it. “Your uncle saw this?”
“A copy. Not this original. By then he had advanced more money than he could safely spare and was trying to find me a place with a family near Lambton where my name would not be first on anyone’s lips.”
He straightened. “Lambton?”
She took the letter back. “My aunt, you see, was raised there. I could not bear to show him another instrument by which I had become an expense.”
He looked down. “You were never an expense.”
Her hand on the memorandum slid the breadth of a knuckle across the table toward his where it lay on the chair-arm between them. It stopped and stayed for the length of a breath, and then she drew it back into her lap because it had begun to shake. He had seen the movement. He did not move his own.
She could not answer him.
“I fled before the arrangement could be completed. That was the final folly, though perhaps the most understandable. Collins had written through an attorney’s clerk—a Mr Tilney of Gray’s Inn, whose name I believe you know.
My mother was in hysterics. Jane was beyond reach in Derbyshire.
My uncle wept when I said goodbye to him in the coach yard at St Albans and gave me the last of what he could spare.
I took the mail to Nottingham, and from Nottingham by stages to the Derby road, and from Derby I walked.
Eleven days. You know the end of it. I did not intend to be found in any valley.
I intended to disappear. And I came within a quarter mile of succeeding by a route I would, afterwards, have preferred to any other. ”
“Do not ever say that to me again.”
She met his eyes.
“I will not. I only mean that I did not come here in the hope of rescue. I came here because I had run out of options. Your valley was the last available one because it did not appear on any map I had ever read. I did not know there was a house at the end of it or that you were its master. I knew only that the snow might hold me, and that if it did not, there would at least be no returning to anywhere I had been.”
Neither of them spoke for some time.
“This may seem irrelevant to the subject at hand,” he murmured, “but in my mind, the two are nearly one and the same. A few days ago, when we walked to the water, something happened. You did not speak of it, but I saw. What explanation have you?”
A shiver traveled down her spin. When she answered, her voice had left the cadence of the legal account behind.
“The dark drew back from my hand and I could see the stones under it. I pretended I had gasped at the cold, but the gasp was because the water had cleared, and then because it had answered me. I did not understand what that meant. I do not entirely understand now. I know only that the water has been mending things in this valley since I arrived—my leg, Georgiana, the lamb, Nan’s cough, Mrs Hadley’s rheumatism—and that it has been failing in the same way these last few days, when you tried to be kind but neither of us dared be honest with the other. ”
He did not speak.
“I think,” she said—and here her voice did not quite hold the level she had been keeping—”I think the mere has been telling your steward the truth.
I think it is drawing dark because of what lies between us in this room.
I think it will draw darker until one of us lifts the silence off it.
I have lifted what I can lift. The rest is yours. ”
A log in the grate broke and resettled. Neither of them looked at it.
“I will not act on any of this tonight. Any answer I give you in the hour after you have put this into my hand will be the answer of a man whose judgement is not his own. You have given me the truth, now let me be worthy of it by waiting until I can tell you what I mean to do with it, rather than what I feel in the seven minutes after hearing it.”
She nodded. “That is more than fair, sir.”
“I will speak with you tomorrow morning. Early. Before the household is stirring. Without Mrs Marsden present, if you will.”
Elizabeth swallowed. “Of course.”