CHAPTER 1
The Perils of Perfect Propriety
Looking back upon it afterward, Elizabeth could never decide whether the strangest circumstance in her history was that she had been taken from Longbourn at six years old, or that she had spent so many years afterward in Mrs. Marwood’s house as to think it natural.
At six, the house in Portman Square had seemed enormous: polished banisters, high windows, upper floors that retreated into mystery, and rules multiplying behind every door she opened.
At ten, she had known every landing, linen cupboard, servants’ stair, and draughty corner better than many children know their prayers.
At fifteen, she had ceased to think of it as anything but home.
At twenty, with Mrs. Marwood dead three months and herself established there by every domestic, legal, and melancholy fact that could be managed before a young woman’s majority, she still found it difficult to connect possession with reality.
That she should own the house — or be understood to own it, while the law and trustees completed their cautious ceremonies around her — was one thing.
That she should sit in Mrs. Marwood’s chair, receive callers under Mrs. Marwood’s ceiling, direct servants who had once reported on the condition of her stockings and grammar, and sign her own name beneath matters formerly governed by the older lady’s sharper hand was another.
Portman Square had been shaped by two people who had left no child of their own: Mr. Marwood with his ledgers, funds, and breakfast-table corrections; Mrs. Marwood with her keys, rules, charities, servants, relations, and opinions. Elizabeth had inherited both.
Or rather, she had inherited them as far as a woman of twenty might inherit anything before the law had finished being cautious on her behalf.
Mrs. Marwood had left her everything that could be left: the house, the furniture, the investments, the income, the little properties, the plate, the books, the dog’s absurd wardrobe, and the right to be addressed by servants as mistress without anyone in the household smiling over it.
Until Elizabeth reached her majority, however, the larger machinery remained in trustee hands.
Mr. Hartwood must approve what law required; Mr. Beaker must watch what money attempted; leases, securities, and capital sums could not be flung into the world merely because Miss Bennet had woken one morning with an opinion.
This did not offend her. Mrs. Marwood had taught her too well to resent a guardrail merely because it was inconvenient.
What mattered was that the Bennets had no hand upon it.
Elizabeth had been prepared for grief in the abstract, having the ordinary human vanity to suppose herself tolerably equal to sorrow if it arrived in a reasonable shape. She had not been prepared for inheritance.
Mrs. Marwood had died as she had lived: with excellent sense, complete opinions, more than seventy-five years to her credit, and only one concession to weakness, which was to catch a cold in weather against which she had been warned and then refuse to make proper account of it until the household was already in prayer.
A cold, in Mrs. Marwood’s judgment, was an affliction invented chiefly for the amusement of physicians; she had persisted in that belief until, in her own case, it became awkward to defend.
By the time Elizabeth understood she might die, Mrs. Marwood had already arranged the matter with a composure at once admirable and extremely inconsiderate.
The funeral had been properly attended, which is not to say largely.
Mr. Bennet came, as the nearest male relation on Mrs. Marwood’s side, and executed his duty with that usual indolence by which he had long contrived to make even propriety look accidental.
He wore black, said what was necessary, avoided what was painful, and returned to Hertfordshire with the air of a man who had discharged a family obligation without permitting it to become an experience.
From the Marwood side there was no one. Or rather, there were names: a nephew at a distance, cousins at a greater distance, connections preserved in old letters and Christmas acknowledgments, but no relation near enough in blood, habit, or expectation to keep the connection alive by appearing in person.
Mr. Marwood’s people had long ago become an entry in the address book rather than a claim upon the house.
It had been understood, in that vague and comfortable way by which families prepare themselves for other people’s property, that Elizabeth would have something.
Once Mrs. Marwood had taken her into the house, dressed her, educated her, corrected her, displayed her, scolded her, and spoken of her to old friends with the possessive severity other women reserve for daughters, no one of sense could doubt the general direction of the will.
Mrs. Bennet had supposed there would be a remembrance.
Mr. Bennet had supposed there might be a comfortable provision.
Elizabeth herself had supposed enough to keep the house, perhaps, and enough to prevent dependence.
None of them had supposed the whole truth.
The will, when read, had been perfectly clear to the men whose business it was to understand such things, and sufficiently clear to everyone else to produce all the necessary injuries.
Mrs. Marwood had left Elizabeth everything.
That was the phrase which survived the reading and travelled quickest into family understanding.
Everything.
It had the beautiful cruelty of being unmistakable without being informative.
Mr. Bennet understood that his daughter was handsomely provided for. Mrs. Bennet understood that she had been overlooked in favour of a child she had once allowed to be taken away, and that this was unfair in several directions at once. Neither of them understood the definition of everything.
They knew of the house, because Portman Square could not be hidden.
They knew there was money, because trustees and men of business do not gather round trifles.
But Mrs. Marwood had spent a lifetime being cagey about figures, and death had not made her less discreet.
The will named instruments, settlements, securities, leaseholds, personalty, effects, residue, and trusts with all the elegant concealment of legal precision.
It told the truth in language that prevented most listeners from measuring it.
Elizabeth understood more than they did, and less than Mr. Hartwood and Mr. Beaker wished her to understand before she had eaten breakfast. The first days after the funeral had been full of papers: summaries, abstracts, ledgers, explanations, cautions, and those grave little pauses by which professional men prepare a young woman for astonishment without appearing vulgar enough to name a sum too soon.
By degrees, the shape emerged. Mrs. Marwood had not merely left her a house.
She had left her a life.
To Longbourn she had left civility: mourning rings, small remembrances, articles selected with such sharp personal knowledge that no one could quite complain they had been forgotten.
To Elizabeth she had left substance. It was, Elizabeth thought, a final act of Mrs. Marwood’s character.
Affection had been made legal. Preference had been made impossible to misunderstand.
The house had been wrong ever since.
Not disordered. Mrs. Marwood would sooner have died twice than leave disorder behind her, and had in fact died only once while leaving every key, paper, servant, cupboard, lease, bill, and investment in a state likely to affront neither God nor solicitor.
The linen was counted and folded. The plate remained where it belonged.
The accounts had not run away. Even the flowers in the back drawing-room came in with a decency that suggested they had been instructed not to become emotional.
Yet the whole place, in being perfectly itself, had somehow ceased to be intelligible.
The morning-room in which Elizabeth sat that autumn day was handsome, well proportioned, and too full of Mrs. Marwood.
Her work-table remained near the hearth because no one had dared move it.
Her old green screen stood between the draught and the chair she had preferred in winter.
The little japanned box that held sealing-wax still occupied the right-hand corner of the desk, though Elizabeth had sealing-wax enough of her own and no rational use for that box except that moving it felt like rudeness to the dead.
Across the passage, the little business room still kept Mr. Marwood’s old shelves and a high desk too severe for comfort; even empty, it seemed to expect figures to behave.
Beyond it, a breakfast parlour was rarely used since Mrs. Marwood’s last illness; above, two bedrooms were closed under Holland covers because Elizabeth had not yet decided whether reclaiming them would be practical, heartless, or merely necessary.
It was a large house for one young woman, one companion, one tyrannical dog, Mrs. Albright’s keys, and a staff trained to move as if silence were a family virtue.
Outside, London had settled into the uncertain grey of autumn.
The square was wet from a shower that had passed without cleansing anything.
Soot clung to the railings; the plane trees had thinned into ragged gold and brown; carriage wheels hissed through damp grit; and a maid crossing with a basket held her shawl tight under her chin against a wind too sharp for the hour and too damp for comfort.
A lady in a dark pelisse was nearly run down by a brewer’s dray and preserved herself by the civility of a scream.
The world, Elizabeth thought, was very determined to go on.
She could not resent it for that.
She was only tired of watching it do so from behind glass.