Chapter 38 #2
In the afternoon, two letters went out: one from Wainwright’s office by express to Derby counsel, another in Ellison’s legal hand to Collins, carefully phrased to suggest more evidence, more witnesses, and more gentlemanly indignation than perhaps yet existed, though all could be assembled if provoked.
Darcy signed only one document that day with his own name, and it was enough.
Mrs Hadley came up after her dinner with a covered basket and a colour in her face that suggested she had walked the lower lane faster than was sensible for a woman who had been off her hip three weeks together.
She would not sit in the kitchen. She would not be put off by Mrs Reeves.
She came as far as the parlour door, asked very civilly to see Miss Bennet, and was admitted.
Georgiana sat by the window with a needle in her lap and a sympathy in her face she had borrowed from no schoolroom. Elizabeth was on the settee. The crutches were across her knees, where they had been since Mrs Reeves’s last attempt to put them out of sight.
Mrs Hadley curtsied to them both, set down her basket, and took Elizabeth’s hand in both her own.
“I’ve brought up the eggs Mrs Marsden said you favoured. And the news from the village, which is good, miss, and I shall tell it first because it is good. Mrs Pemberton walked to her gate this morning with no stick and her hands open the whole way. She showed me. She is to bake on Friday.”
“That is more than good,” Elizabeth said.
“There’s the meadow water as well. Hadley says he has not seen such a colour off the weir since he was a boy of twelve. Mrs Pemberton went down to look at it and cried for an hour. She is a great crier, you know, when she is happy.”
Georgiana, who did know, gave a small sound.
Mrs Hadley took an envelope from her apron pocket and held it a fraction longer than was necessary before laying it on the table beside the settee.
“And this from Mrs Marsden, miss. She asked me to wait while she wrote it.”
The envelope was very thin. There was no inscription on the outside.
Elizabeth did not at once take it up.
“Did she eat anything today, Mrs Hadley?”
“Half a piece of bread with the second cup of tea, miss. She is in her body well enough. She is only quiet.”
“Quiet.”
“Quiet, miss. As one is when one has resolved on a thing one would rather not have had to resolve. I cannot put it plainer than that. It isn’t my place to.”
Elizabeth opened the envelope.
It was not long. The hand was Jane’s. The warmth was not.
I shall not return to Northmere. I have written to my aunt Gardiner and shall travel to her as soon as I am able, which I trust will be by the end of the week.
I should be obliged if my trunk and writing-case might be sent down with Hadley’s cart when he next comes up.
I have asked Mrs Hadley not to wait for an answer.
J.M.
That was all of it.
She read it twice. The first time for the words. The second time for what the words had been forced to make room for, by the leaving out of them.
She refolded the paper along its already-made crease. She set it back on the table. She did not look at Mrs Hadley, because Mrs Hadley had known what was in the envelope when she handed it over, and any look exchanged would be the answer she had been told not to wait for.
“Thank you for bringing it up,” Elizabeth said.
Mrs Hadley pressed her hand once and rose.
Georgiana turned to the basket.
When the door had shut, Elizabeth looked at the window.
The afternoon was very still. The light came across the lower lawn in a long quiet wash and reached, beyond it, the upper edge of the mere, which was holding the sky in the way it had not held the sky in twenty years.
Mrs Pemberton’s hands. The colour off the weir.
A woman crying for an hour at a meadow returning to itself.
And Jane—Jane signing herself J.M.
She did not move yet. She set the note inside the cover of the book on her lap. The next thing was coming up under her ribs as the dark had come up the night they brought her in, and she did the same thing now she had done then. She did not let it speak, and she did not let it stop.
But it had begun.
Hadley entered, his cap in his hand, the cap turned by the brim through his fingers in the gesture by which he delivered a piece of news he had not yet decided how Mr Darcy would receive.
“Two bits of news, sir.”
“Yes.”
“The first piece is the water, sir. She is drawing truer today than she was yesterday. Not right. Truer. The line on the post at the boathouse this morning is two inches lower than it was Monday evening, the rust is gone from the inlet, the reeds at the western end have lifted off the surface. I have not seen her so close to right since the autumn before last. I should have come up at any time today to tell you. I am telling you now because I came up to tell you the first thing, and the second thing belongs in the same telling.”
“The second piece?”
“Miss Bennet has gone down across the meadow. I did not see her go, sir. Mrs Pemberton’s boy saw her.
She was on the cane. She did not call to him as she went past, and the boy did not call to her, because the boy has a piece of judgement on him for nine years old.
He come up to the dairy ten minutes ago and told his mother, and Mrs Pemberton sent up word. ”
Darcy had risen from his chair. He did not afterwards remember rising. “Where on the meadow did the boy see her?”
“At the upper gate, sir. Going down the south path.”
“How long has it been?”
“At twenty past the hour by my reckoning. I beg pardon, sir, that is—forty-five minutes, sir. Mrs Pemberton’s boy did not come up to the dairy at once. He had a goose to look to.”
Forty-five minutes.
And she still with her name on a warrant, walking about the village where anyone might find her.
He went past Hadley at the door of the study and along the passage to the door of the dining parlour and into the dining parlour to its south window.
The window gave onto the lower meadow and gave onto the bank of the mere as far as the bend of the south path.
The bank was empty between the willow at the eastern end and the cropped reed-bed at the western end.
No figure on the cane. No figure on the bench.
The water, as Hadley had reported, was holding the morning in long bars of pewter and pearl, very still, drawing truer than he had seen it draw in eighteen months.
He turned from the window. Mrs Reeves was at the door of the dining parlour. Whatever was on his face made hers pale, without comment, without delay.
“Miss Bennet is out alone, and could have fallen. Or… Just send Norton to the lower water. Send Hadley. I shall be on the south path.”