Chapter Thirty-Nine
The mere came into view at the end of the south path between the bare willow branches.
It was not black, and not pretty. Winter water keeps memory better than summer’s bright deceit, and the middle of the mere was dark enough this morning to suggest depths that did not explain themselves to the eye that wished to plumb them.
But the shallows—between the dun-gold reeds and the bank where Hadley’s sticks marked the level—were clear.
Stones showed beneath the edge. The faint rust the inlets had carried for as long as she had been at Northmere was gone.
The surface held the morning in long bars of pewter and pearl, and held them still, because there was no wind on the south side of the willow and the water had had the night to find its way to flat.
She stopped at the bank.
Last January another woman had come here, fleeing—with a name not her own and a secret that could put a noose on her if it were known. The mere had taken her at the crossing. It had broken her at the leg, and it had given her to a man kneeling on the bank with her blood on his coat.
The cold of that afternoon had had no sequence to it. The man had been a force she had not consented to, then an irritation, then a refuge against the thing waiting in her bag, then a danger to herself for what he was making her wish, and then, at an hour she could no longer place, love.
Now she stood at the same bank on her own legs.
She set the cane against the willow where the bark had gone smooth from a thousand winters’ use.
She bent—the leg did not yet bend with grace—and unbuttoned the boots, the second before the first. The stockings she drew off and tucked inside the boots, and the boots she set on the dry edge of the bank where the frost had not got.
Her cloak’s hem she drew clear of the wet she was about to make.
Her skirt she gathered as high as her hand could lift, and folded over her arm above the elbow.
She stepped in.
The first cold took the breath out of her.
She took another step. The water was at her shins.
She took another until it was at her knees.
She took another, and another, and the water was at the bone where the hip met the thigh—where cold is not cold any longer but a thing more interesting than cold. This was far enough.
The surface beyond her immediate touch was unbroken.
No ripples, no shivers of movement. She stared, uncomprehending at first. That was impossible.
Yet, there it stood—the water ten feet from her was the sheer glass it had been when she came down the path.
The morning sky returned itself to itself in the long bars of pewter and pearl, and the bars went on across her waist as if she had been a reed.
She looked down. The water gave her own face back to her, indistinct, moving as the surface moved. The face was hers, and the other things came up beside it.
Jane, married a year and a half to a man not worthy of her, and the letters Elizabeth had hardly written.
She had told herself she was sparing Jane, who had her own to bear with a husband less than she deserved.
She had not asked Jane what those burdens were.
She had not told Jane what her own were, thinking to spare her that one additional care.
She had not been sparing Jane. She had been keeping her sister at a distance from which nothing that mattered could be asked.
The day she had come north, under a name not her own.
She had told herself she was sparing them all—the uncle who would have given his life to help her, the household at Longbourn already beset with troubles of its own.
She had not been sparing them. She had been arranging her own quiet in a place no one would see.
The bag at the chair in the chamber, closed all the long while before she opened it. She had told herself she could not put Mr Darcy in danger by speaking of it. But she had only kept him from acting, kept him from protecting himself.
The morning at his study door, the answer she had brought down and not given.
She had told herself it was his life, the troubles she would bring to it.
But she heard his voice through the study wall yesterday, when the clerk came.
With or without the consent she wanted to give, he meant to act.
It was only pride and fear holding her back, and so long as she held back, nothing was mended.
Each had been dressed in service. Each had been, under the dress, her own protection.
She did not flinch from any of it. The water did not require her to compose her face.
She had not, walking down the path, expected to be made to see herself in this manner—she had expected, if she had expected anything, a clarification—but what she had instead was the woman in the water, and a great many evenings and afternoons behind her in which she had told herself she was acting for love.
And—somewhere lower than the face she could see—her body began to do something it had not done before this hour.
It was not a correction. It was not the sealing of any wound.
The bone in her leg, the wrong place at her hip, the cold pressing under her ribs since the morning she had read out Mr Collins’s letter—none of it left her.
But the mere had got under it. The mere had got under all of it, slowly, and without permission, and what the mere was doing was the change in the air before a fire takes in another room. Not the heat yet. Only the change.
It remained incomplete, and her body knew it. Some part of the completion was not in the water.
She closed her eyes against the sky for a breath. She might have been alone with the water and the cold and the answer her body was beginning to know, but for the voice that came across the bank then with her name in it.
“Elizabeth!”
He came round the shrubbery already running. The prints of her boot and the lighter mark of her cane went down the path to the willow; the cane stood against the bark, the boots sat on the dry edge of the bank, and the woman herself was in the water before he had got his breath to call her name.
She was in the water up to her hips, upright, silent. Her hair had come down at the temples in a manner Mrs Reeves would scold. Her face was turned to the western reeds.
He called her name.
She turned her head over her shoulder; colour was in her cheeks, and her eyes met his across the bars of light.
He did not slow. His boot was in the water before her glance had finished reaching him; the cold went up his leg without asking, and he did not ask back.
Between the bank and her he ceased to be the man who had run down with his clothes on his body and his preparation in his mouth—his boots filled, his coat went black at the hem, the preparation was undone, and he waded toward her because no other thing in him would do.
The bottom was uneven. He pushed against it.
He should have made the mere into something other than its morning self by walking through it; the water at his thighs ought to have gone forward in rings, and the rings ought to have run out from his progress, and they did not.
The surface ten feet from his shoulder was as still as if he had not entered it—as if the water had agreed not to record his coming.
The bars of pewter and pearl stayed unbroken. He had no place in his head to put it.
He reached her, and did not at once speak or touch her, but stopped where the water between them was one water, not two, and stood there heaving.
She lifted her free hand and put it against the wet of his coat above the place his heart was.
The water at his thighs gave him his face—indistinct in the small movements of the surface, which were her movements, not his, because his progress had not disturbed it. He tore his eyes from hers and gazed down at the water.
And he saw what was not there… what had always been there.
It gave him the rest then.
He had been ten when he had asked his father why the under-housemaid was crying in the linen cupboard, and his father had received the question with grave disappointment: a gentleman’s son ought not to remark on servants’ theatrics, and to mistake the girl’s excitability for distress at ten was a failure of someone’s having taught the boy better.
Darcy had taken his place at the desk and not asked another such question in some weeks.
He had been twelve when he had asked why his mother had begun to sleep through the morning into the afternoon, and his father had answered with the same grave disappointment.
His mother was delicate; she had been encouraged by too much sympathy; the danger to her recovery was a son who treated her as if she were ill, which Darcy, by his question, had just done.
Did Darcy wish to harm his mother? Did he not see that the question itself was the harm?
Darcy had not seen it. He had been twelve. He had not asked again.
He had been fifteen when he had asked why the second footman had been dismissed without a character, and his father had taken the question as evidence of a softness Darcy had not been corrected out of.
The footman had been a thief. The matter was closed.
To remember the footman as Darcy remembered him—civil, soft-spoken, kind to the under-stable boy—was to have been deceived; and the deception had been Darcy’s, not the footman’s.
He had carried out from his father’s study that afternoon a lesson about the discrimination required of a man in his own house, and a less concluded question about whether his memory could be relied upon at all.