Chapter Twenty-one
Mary
The rain began just after Elena joined Mary at the bench, and it was Elena who suggested that they ought not to remain where they were.
Mary had agreed without argument. She was in no condition to argue against an arrangement that moved her out of the cold and into a space where she could think better.
Moreover, Elena’s townhouse was nearby, and as she explained with her hand on Mary’s arm in gentle steadiness, Mary was in considerable distress and required guidance rather than being left alone.
Elena was a beautiful woman with dark hair and eyes that were a rich brown, full of depth. Looking at her brought a sense of familiarity that Mary couldn't place.
The townhouse was narrow on the outside and considerably more spacious within, and it had been furnished with care.
The entrance hall was lined with a dark red, high-quality Turkish rug, and there was a portrait above the side table that she did not look at closely.
The sitting room which she was guided into had a fire already built and a set of chairs lined with supple foam that made them easy to occupy.
The furnishings were not showy, but they were unique.
The entire decoration had a refinedness that required neither announcement nor attention, existing in the room as a statement of what the occupant considered sufficient.
There were books on a case near the window, not decorative books but read ones with spines cracked, several with slips of paper marking passages.
All of it revealed that the space was occupied by someone with refined taste. Mary noted this and set it aside, because there were more pressing matters to attend to.
Elena had placed her hand comfortingly over Mary’s before calling for tea. Then she sat across from Mary with the full, uninhibited presence that had always characterised her letters, and said: "Now, tell me everything."
So Mary told her all that had occurred recently in full detail.
She told Elena about how she'd ventured towards the morning room and the subsequent conversation she overheard.
She went on to say more about Mrs Bennet, their discussion in the sitting room at midnight, and everything that had accumulated across the weeks of the season into the afternoon's reckoning.
Elena listened patiently through it all.
She was entirely still but the focus on her face showed her complete devotion.
She made none of the small sounds of sympathy that most people deployed as evidence of their engagement.
She asked a few questions, all of them succinct, and when Mary finished she paused for a long moment.
"What happened to you today is a mere fact about your history," she said finally. "It is not a statement about who you are. Your traits and values are yours and nothing that was said in a hallway this morning has changed them."
Mary let out a deep exhale. Elena’s words had dug deep into her, producing a sensation of relief.
She was glad she had sought her friend out.
"I suppose the right thing is to inhabit the painful space within me in the best way I know how. I imagine the feeling will ease with time, even if that doesn’t seem to be the case at this moment. "
"That awareness is sufficient for today," Elena replied. "Knowing it will do."
They drank their tea as the fire burned steadily.
They spoke for a considerable time, and during this, Mary became aware that something had shifted, not in the facts of the situation, which remained exactly as they were, but in her capacity to hold them.
Elena's presence had the effect she had always had on paper, and more so in person: it made things bearable by making the person holding them feel less alone.
It was during this interval that the door of the sitting room opened.
"My apologies," Elena said to Mary rather than to the man in the doorway. "James has been with me for a long time. He manages the house."
James was the largest man Mary had ever seen.
His face was composed in the manner that made it clear that his appearance had always preceded him and he had never needed to supplement it with expression.
He looked at Mary with a look she could not read.
Then he turned to Elena, and something passed between them that was not speech but was close to it.
"Is everything in order?" Elena said aloud.
"Quite so, ma'am," James replied. He had a low tone that matched the look of him.
He withdrew and Elena turned back to Mary, intending to resume a conversation that had been briefly interrupted.
Mary glanced at the door through which James had gone.
"He is very imposing."
"He has other purposes than the usual ones. He is very useful to me in a variety of ways."
"What purposes?"
Elena smiled, but it did not quite reach her eyes in the way Mary had come to expect it to. "You will understand with time."
Mary set down her teacup.
She had been aware, at the edge of her attention and for the past minute or two, of an atmosphere of wrongness that had not yet crystallised into a nuanced observation.
It was the way one was aware of cold before one had identified the source of the draught.
She had spent the past hour adapting, learning to reconcile Elena’s face with the words she had read across four months of letters.
It was a composed and handsome face, dark-eyed, framed by dark hair that had gone considerably grey.
It was not an unkind face, but it was, she realised, one she could not read as clearly as she had thought.
"I ought to go," she said. "My family will be worried. I did not tell anyone where I was going, and it is getting late."
Elena set down her own cup with unhurried care. "In a moment. First I would like to tell you something."
Mary waited.
"There was a young woman," Elena began in a tone that sounded rehearsed, "who was incredibly frightened. She had made a mistake, the sort young women from good families are warned against. She’d fallen in love with a young man, you see, who in turn abandoned her at her most vulnerable.
And she was alone with that for a long time.
She was frightened and she did what any young person in such a state would do: she accepted the help that was offered to her, even when the terms of that help were not what she had believed them to be. "
Mary listened, her heart thumping rapidly in her chest. Why was Elena telling her this? The question lingered on her lips but it was difficult to summon the urge to push it out.
"She gave her child," Elena continued, "to a woman she trusted. She intended it to be temporary. A matter of months, no more, while she arranged her circumstances. But the months transformed into years. When she attempted to return, it became clear that the child had been stolen away from her."
Mary's hands were folded in her lap. She was aware of the texture of her skin, and of the slight drizzle against the window, and of Elena's voice, which had not altered its register.
"She spent years trying to find a way to connect with her child.
When she finally had a method she used it.
You see, she discovered her child had a keen interest in theological things, music …
So, she wrote to a parish. She asked for a correspondent with serious interests in music and devotion.
And she found the person she was looking for. "
The fire shifted in the grate. A cold sensation began to descend upon Mary despite the warmth. She was aware that this had gone beyond a visit to a friend. It included a new element on the verge of revelation and Mary sat stiffly, helplessly, as the narrative unspooled.
"The woman could see," Elena said, "even through the letters, that her daughter had become a remarkable young woman. Serious. More capable than the family she had been placed with had ever fully recognised. And now, at last, they are under the same roof."
There was a long silence. Mary's mind moved through the implication in stages, gradually arriving at a conclusion.
"You have your mother's colouring," Elena said. "You are rather prettier than she was at your age, though she was always told that she was beautiful."
Her eyes held a seriousness within them that was nothing like Mrs Bennet's chatty temperament or Jane's fairness. It was nothing like Elizabeth's intelligence. What it brought to mind startled Mary. She was reminded of the reflection she had seen in her mirror above a writing desk a while ago.
“You are my mother?”
“I am,” she said and placed a hand on Mary’s who immediately yanked it away.
"You deceived me," she murmured. H
"I was being cautious. I was not certain how you would handle the truth. I needed to know you first. I needed you to trust me."
"You faked the trust. Every letter. The theological questions and devotional interests. The questions about my family. You were not seeking a friend. You were searching for me specifically."
"Yes."
"Everyone has lied to me. I’m sure you must have all had your reasons, none in consideration of me."
"I had reasons. I hope, eventually, to explain them."
"Not yet. I should like to be alone. To think."
"Of course." She rose from her chair. "Call me Alice. That is my name."
"So I have come to know," Mary said bitterly. "Thank you for making it clear."
Alice ignored the sarcasm and left the room. Once the door closed, Mary leaned forward and dropped her head in her hands.
She felt foolish beyond measure. How had all of this played out without her having an inkling of it?
Had Alice predicted that it would rain? That would explain why the sitting room felt like it had been prepared for her arrival.
In a fit of turmoil, she had invited Alice to join her at the park, but unbeknownst to her doing so would lead to unpredictable outcomes.
A throbbing sensation emerged in her head but Mary ignored it.
She sat with this and every other piece of information she had just learned, even as her mind threatened to collapse from the weight. She did not attempt to rush her thoughts, aware that doing so was rarely useful and was almost always a response to anxiety rather than reason.
She was afraid, she knew this. She also knew that fear was not the most useful thing available to her at present, and that what she needed most was to think.
She sat for several minutes without stirring. Then she heard voices.
They came from below, muffled, in the familiar way of conversation being held in a spot directly beneath her.
She would not ordinarily have been able to hear them, except that she was accustomed, from years of family life, to picking up low tones in rooms she was not meant to be paying attention to.
She had always been good at it, the silent middle daughter, the one nobody noticed was listening.
Mary rose from her seat, nudged the door open and strained her ears.
Alice, her voice compressed to a carrying whisper, as though she had considered the possibility of being overhead and did not wish to take the risk, commented: "She has no idea.
I gave her the impression that I had written to several parishes in search of her when in truth, I only wrote to Meryton to lure her out. "
James's response was in a lower, indistinct register. “She does not seem in the right frame of mine to elicit a signature.”
"Now that she’s here, I shall ensure she signs the papers," Alice said, "Once she does so, the trust will be released. That is all we require. After that, I have no other use for her."
Mary gasped under her breath.
She understood what was occurring with complete, immediate clarity.
The clarity was painful and fixed, with no interval of doubt or confusion between Alice’s words and their meaning.
Months of correspondence, discussions about Handel, the comforting statements and the questions about her family — all of it had been a method. Not a friendship.
She needed her for something.
She stepped out into the hallway without making a sound.
There was a back stair. She had noticed it when she arrived, the kind of narrow secondary passage that most houses of this sort contained, used by the household staff and running from the upper floors to the kitchen level and the rear areas.
She nudged it open an inch. The hall was dim. The back stairs were to the right and behind her, accessible from the end of the corridor.
She moved along the corridor with a deliberateness that came easily to her as someone for whom silence had never been a difficulty.
Down the back stairs, one hand on the wall, she tested each step before it received her weight.
The kitchen level was deserted. The rear passage led past the kitchen towards the front of the house.
She reached the main hallway.
The front door was in her line of sight and the latch was a simple one. She crossed the distance in rapid steps that must have alerted the other occupants. But Mary was far beyond the point of caring. All she wanted was to leave the townhouse and be free.
Her fingers were on the handle and she was turning it when a voice behind her called her name.
It was Alice's voice.
The thumping in her chest grew louder.
She got the door a few inches open before a hand closed on her shoulder, and the door was slammed shut. She was dragged back, disappointingly aware that James now occupied the space between her and open air. She pulled against the grip but his hold did not give.
Frustrated tears dimmed her vision.
"Let me go," she said. "Let me go this instant."
He did not.
She was steered around and made to look at Alice, who was standing in the hallway with her arms crossed and a frown on her face. The expression on her face was the most frightening thing Mary had ever seen.
It was not the calm welcome of the sitting room, or the serene evenness with which she had delivered her story. It was much worse.
It was satisfaction.
"I am afraid," Alice began with a conniving smile, "that I cannot let you leave quite yet, my sweet."