Chapter Forty
She let him take her up out of the water onto the bank. The cane was still where she had set it against the willow—the cane she had walked down on, and would not walk back up on. After some breaths she said, “I shall not need that. But what I do need… I need to see Jane.”
His brows rose. “Now? But you are soaked through. Surely—”
“I need my sister. Please, I have made her wait on me long enough. Surely, I can bear a little humility for her.”
Darcy nodded and bent to help her wring the worst of the water out of her petticoat.
She did not put her feet into her stockings or her boots.
She put the stockings into the boots, and Darcy carried them.
She drew her cloak tight at the throat for the wet, and put her arm through his, and they went.
The lane to the Hadleys’ was not long. In any other condition it would have been a thing of ten minutes.
This morning she had no measure for what ten minutes was.
She was a woman walking a lane, in cold air, on a leg that bore her, with her hair down and her cloak heavy with mere water and her arm through the arm of a man who had, an hour ago, told her he had been right about her and asked her to confirm it.
She could not, walking, have said what time it was.
She had only the lane, and the cold, and the wet at her hem, and the arm.
She had been afraid of this walk before she had set out on it.
She had been afraid since the morning Jane had sent up the note with the signature in initials, and the fear had grown through the wade and the laughter at the leg and the kiss in the water, because she had known, all the time the joy was working in her, that she had to come to Jane.
Joy did not absolve her of Jane. Healing did not absolve her of Jane.
Jane had been at the cottage three days now in the company of Mrs Hadley, and Jane had been weeping at hours when no one was with her, and Jane deserved what she was owed.
What Elizabeth meant to say at the cottage door she did not have words for. She had only the wish, and not a word that would carry it.
Then she heard her sister laugh.
She stopped. She put her hand on his sleeve, harder than she had been holding it.
“Mr Darcy.”
He stopped with her. The laughter came again from the back of the cottage, from the kitchen perhaps, or the parlour with the window open—a laugh she had not heard her sister make since well before Jane had stood at the altar with Mr Marsden, and before that since well before her father had been laid in the ground at Longbourn.
A laugh that had belonged to the Jane of her girlhood and that she had begun, over the years, to doubt she had remembered correctly.
It came across the lane on the cold air and into her ribs, and she could not, for a small while, do anything with it.
“Is that her?”
“It is.”
“How can it be her?”
“It is Jane. I know her laugh better than I know my own.”
She did not know what she had been about to do at the cottage door. She had had no clear plan past the door. The laugh undid the plan more thoroughly than any of the things she had imagined Jane might do to undo her.
Mrs Hadley opened the door before they had reached it.
She did not greet them. She took Elizabeth in—the wet, the absence of the cane, the leg under the cloak—and she did not speak for some breaths, and Elizabeth understood that Mrs Hadley meant, on the strength of what was on her step, to deal with it in the order in which it had been put before her.
“Mrs Hadley. We come unannounced.”
The woman made a face. “You come dripping. Get in, miss. And without your cane! Get in before you have a chill on top of everything else.”
She drew Elizabeth across the threshold by the elbow, with Darcy following, and shut the door against the cold lane.
The Colonel sat at the kitchen table with a cup in his hand and the table set for three.
Mr Hadley sat opposite him with a piece of bread and butter on his plate that he had not had time to lift to his mouth.
Jane stood at the dresser with a cloth over her arm, and the laugh that had come across the lane was finishing in her, in a small private way, with her shoulders not yet square to the room.
Mr Hadley shot to his feet at the sight of Darcy.
“Mr Darcy, sir—I had not—I was about to step out to the gates—the lower gate is—I shall be no more than a quarter hour —”
“Mr Hadley. Please.” Darcy lifted a hand. “The gate shall keep. All is well this morning.”
“Sit down, Hadley,” the Colonel said from his chair. “There is no man under this roof on duty this morning, my cousin least of all.”
Mr Hadley sat down.
Jane had not got up when Elizabeth had come in at the door, and had not spoken at first. A cup of tea was at her hand.
There was colour in her cheek Elizabeth had not seen on her sister since well before they had left Longbourn in November, and the laugh from the lane had not yet quite gone out of her face. She set the cup down.
“Lizzy—your leg! Where is your crutch?”
Jane got up from the table. She crossed the kitchen flagstones in three steps that had nothing of grief in them, and she did not stop at the chair Mrs Hadley had pulled out, nor short of Elizabeth to look her over, nor at any of the small distances at which she might decently have hesitated.
She came the whole way, wet cloak and all, and she put her arms round her sister’s neck without a word.
Elizabeth’s arms came round Jane in answer before her head had any part in it.
She had walked the length of the lane carrying a petition she had had no word for at any door of the morning, and she did not, in the end, have to put it into words.
Jane’s arms were around her. The petition went out of her into the place between them where, this afternoon, no word was wanted.
The Colonel was already on his feet.
“Mr Hadley and I,” he said, “have a matter to discuss respecting the eastern gate, which has been on my mind for some hours.”
Mr Hadley, on his feet again with notable readiness, said, “The eastern gate, Colonel?”
“The eastern gate, Mr Hadley.”
They went, both of them, outside, the bread and butter forgotten on the plate. Mrs Hadley moved to the dresser with the quietness of a woman who meant to be busy with the kettle for a small while, though the kettle was already on.
Elizabeth drew back from her sister’s shoulder, her hands gone of their own to Jane’s, and found, in spite of the weeping still in her, that she could speak.
“Jane, forgive me.”
“Lizzy.”
“I have been a poor sister to you since the day they read the will. I have not written you the letters I owed you. I have not asked the questions I owed you. I have not—Jane, when I came north in January I came under a name that was not my own, and I did not write to you to tell you what I was running from. I did not write because I was afraid that, if you knew, you would come to me, and I had not the courage to be come to. You have borne all of it alone, Jane—your marriage to Mr Marsden, our father, our mother, the entail, the whole of it—and I let you bear it alone, and I knew I was letting you bear it alone, and I let it stand.”
“Lizzy— “
“You must let me finish, Jane. I have rehearsed it too long this morning not to be allowed to put it to you. Will you come back to me? Will you come back to Northmere, or come back to Aunt Gardiner’s with my coming after you within the week, or come back in some manner I have not the sense, this afternoon, to think of?
I do not require to be answered today. I require only to ask it.
I have walked the lane to ask it. Will you come back? ”
“Lizzy. Sit down, dear.”
“I shall not sit down. I understand why you went away, but I beg of you—”
“You are wet through, dearest, and there is a chair at the hearth, and Mrs Hadley has by this minute laid a cloth across it on which you may sit without ruining anything that has not already been ruined this morning. Sit down.”
“I shall not sit down until I am answered. Please, Jane.”
“Then I shall answer you standing. I shall come back. I have not, for some days, known where back was, Lizzy, but it is plain to me now that back is in the same county as you, and you are at Northmere.”
“Oh, Jane!” She fell on her sister’s neck. “Bless you.”
“And now, Lizzy, you shall hear me. You have rehearsed yours along the lane. I have rehearsed mine across three days at this kitchen table, and Mrs Hadley has, in the most unobtrusive manner imaginable, heard the rehearsals and pretended not to hear them.”
Mrs Hadley, at the hearth, did not turn round.
Jane held her sister at the shoulders.
“I married Mr Marsden, Lizzy, for the easy thing. I had been at Longbourn after our father’s death with our mother in the state you must recall, with our sisters needing every reassurance that you gave and I did not.
I could not do what you were doing, so I thought to leave.
There was a position to be had as a governess at Stevenage, of which I had not told you.
I had not told you because I had been afraid that, if you knew I had been offered it, you would in your good sense advise me to take it; and the position would have kept me in the county, and within reach of you, and within reach of our mother, and within reach of the entail and all that lay around it.
Mr Marsden’s offer would carry me out of the county and the entail and the mother together.
I took Mr Marsden’s offer. I knew, when I took it, that I had not taken it for any of the reasons one tells one’s sister one has taken such an offer.
I told you reasons that were not the truth, and you did not press me, and we left it there. I knew that, too.”
“Jane—”
“You shall let me finish, Lizzy. You have set the precedent.”
“Yes.”
“I ran, dearest. I ran from Longbourn and I left the whole of it on your back, and I knew it when I did it, and I have known it every day of the year and a half since. Mr Marsden was the price for the running, and the price was the right price for the thing I had done. I have not, this winter, been able to mourn him as a widow ought, because I have not been able to mourn a man who was the wage of my running. And I have not been able to come to you about it, because there was nothing in me with which to ask you to forgive a thing of that order. So I came to Northmere under Mr Darcy’s protection, and I sat at your bedside, and I did not say any of it.
And I should not be saying it now, Lizzy, except that you have walked the lane on a leg that should not even be able to bear your weight yet to ask me to come back, which is a great deal more than I have ever walked for you. ”
“Jane.”
“Forgive me, Lizzy.”
“There is nothing of you to forgive that you have not already forgiven of me ten times over by sitting where you sat at this table when we came in at the door. I think neither of us is in a position to reproach, Jane. There is only the coming back, and the way of coming back.”
Jane pulled her into her arms as she had once done when they were small. Elizabeth wept, briefly, into Jane’s shoulder, but she soon found that the tears were no more, and laughter, beautiful laughter, had taken over. Then Jane drew back and held her sister at the shoulders.
“I am to be very happy for you, am I not, Lizzy?”
Elizabeth dashed a few tears from her cheeks. “You are.”
“I had supposed so for some weeks. I had not supposed I could so quickly find pleasure in the notion..”
“Do you, Jane? You are not wounded that I accepted him?”
Jane stepped back and smiled a little sadly.
“I had fancied… but I deceived myself, Lizzy, and I knew even as I let myself be fooled that it was hopeless. He has had a heart for you since the moment he pulled you out of that frozen lake. He is one of the best men I have ever known, Lizzy, and the only one I can think of who could be worthy of my brave sister.”
“Brave! I am a coward, Jane.”
Jane set her hands on Elizabeth’s cheeks. “No, you are the bravest, dearest, strongest person I know. And Mr Darcy… Oh, Lizzy, I cannot fault him for his love for you, but what of the law? I think he is as bold as you, but I cannot help fearing for you both. What is to be done?”
Elizabeth smiled. “I do not know. All I can say with any confidence is that this valley… Jane, it heals. It makes right what is wrong. Not all things—perhaps not all things we consider wrong truly are—but I have to believe that what is true and real will come right.”
“Then I shall try to hold faith, too.” Jane put her hand to Elizabeth’s wet hair where it had stuck to her temple, and she straightened it with the small efficient motion she had used at Longbourn when their mother was coming in at the door, and the laugh from the lane had come back into her face.
“But look at you! Dripping the mere onto Mrs Hadley’s flagstones, with no cane, on Mr Darcy’s arm, with your hair down and a piece of pondweed of some sort caught at your collar. Lizzy, you have pondweed.”
“I have not.”
“You have, dearest. You have a green strand of something at your throat that has come a long way with you. Has Mr Darcy seen you in this condition?”
“Mr Darcy has seen me, Jane, in conditions a great deal less complimentary than this one.”
“Has he?”
“He has.”
“And he still proposes to have you, with pondweed and all, in spite of the conditions?”
“He does.”
“Then he is, as I had always suspected, a sensible man.”
She was laughing then, with the laugh from the lane, and Elizabeth was laughing with her, the weeping not yet quite gone out of the laughter; and Mrs Hadley at the hearth, with the kettle she had no want of, smiled into the kettle without turning her head.