CHAPTER 58
The Closed Rooms
Portman Square had become, by the following Thursday morning, almost too well arranged.
This was not a complaint Elizabeth would have made aloud.
It would have sounded ungrateful, and ingratitude, in a house containing one frightened young lady, one determined younger sister, one husband under more strain than he chose to show, and several men employed to notice who else was noticing, would have been very poor conduct indeed.
Still, the house had settled into a strange order.
Georgiana had slept a little better. Kitty had discovered that usefulness was not incompatible with ribbons.
Mrs. Younge had not returned to the door; Mr. Wickham had received no satisfaction elsewhere; and Hartwood’s men, whoever they were, had already become part of the square’s invisible weather.
James reported that one of them had admired the railings for nearly an hour with the air of a man deeply interested in ironwork.
There was still no word from the north.
That fact sat beneath everything. It sat under breakfast, under Georgiana’s attempt to copy a little sketch of Lord Pomington, under Kitty’s careful avoidance of questions, under Fitzwilliam’s departure for chambers after Elizabeth had promised to send for him if the house so much as sneezed suspiciously.
Waiting had entered Portman Square, but Elizabeth had not rearranged the furniture in its honour.
It was therefore with some surprise that she discovered another sort of waiting had been in the house much longer.
She was in the morning room with Mrs. Albright, reviewing a household list which had begun with candles and linen and had contrived, through some fault of domestic life, to include fish, coals, vinegar, two cracked plates, and the alarming disappearance of three good napkins.
Mrs. Albright stood with her pencil and account-book, calm as a general before a modest but irritating campaign.
“The Marwood rooms will want their spring airing this week, madam,” she said.
Elizabeth looked up.
“This week?”
Mrs. Albright’s pencil paused.
“Yes, madam.”
That was all. She did not add that this would be the rooms’ first full spring airing since Mrs. Marwood had died the previous summer; nor that the curtains had been opened only as much as preservation required, and never as much as life demanded.
Mrs. Albright had served Mrs. Marwood too long to insult grief by naming what it already knew.
Elizabeth looked down at the list. The cracked plates had become very indistinct.
“I had forgotten,” she said.
Mrs. Albright gave no answer which suggested she believed her.
“I mean,” Elizabeth amended, because Mrs. Albright’s silence had standards, “I had remembered it badly.”
“Yes, madam.”
Elizabeth set down the list.
“Have the keys been kept where they were?”
“In the blue cabinet, madam.”
“Then I will have them.”
Mrs. Albright inclined her head and went without another word.
That, too, was a kindness.
Elizabeth had not entered Mrs. Marwood’s rooms since the week after the funeral.
At first there had been too much to do. Mourning had brought letters, lawyers, trustees, accounts, callers, duties, mourning caps, black gloves, and all the small decencies by which society made grief both visible and inconvenient.
Then there had been Longbourn, and Collins, and Fitzwilliam in the rain, and Cotton Lane, and rooms to alter, and dinners, and Wickham, and marriage, and Georgiana arriving at the door wet through and frightened.
Life, Elizabeth had discovered, could be very inconsiderate of the dead.
Mrs. Albright returned with the keys on their ring: heavy, well kept, and familiar. Elizabeth took them without putting on gloves. The metal was cool in her palm.
She went upstairs alone.
Mrs. Marwood’s rooms lay at the back of the house, in the quieter reach of the second floor.
They had a good light in the afternoon, which Mrs. Marwood had preferred because morning callers were less likely to intrude upon it.
The sitting room came first, then the bedchamber beyond, with a small dressing room and closet where Mrs. Marwood had kept more shawls than any woman who professed contempt for delicate health ought reasonably to have owned.
The key turned easily.
The room had not been neglected. Neglect would have been easier to bear. Dust and disorder would have accused the household of failure and given Elizabeth something to correct. Instead, everything was preserved with perfect obedience.
The curtains were drawn back only halfway.
The holland covers had been folded over the backs of the chairs rather than removed entirely.
The grate was clean and empty. A faint scent of lavender, paper, and closed linen held the room in a composure almost too complete to enter.
Mrs. Marwood’s small writing desk stood by the window, locked.
Her chair remained where she had always kept it, angled so that she might see both the light and the door.
Elizabeth stood just inside and could not decide whether the room felt empty or occupied.
She closed the door behind her.
There were no ghosts. Mrs. Marwood would have disapproved of anything so disorderly. There was only the arrangement of a life which had stopped before the house had consented to alter around it.
Elizabeth crossed to the desk and rested her hand on its lid.
She remembered Mrs. Marwood sitting there in the afternoons, spectacles low upon her nose, writing notes in a hand so plain it seemed to rebuke every foolish flourish in the English language.
She remembered standing beside that chair at seven years old with a torn hem, at nine with ink on her fingers, at twelve with Latin badly prepared and a story of innocence worse prepared, at fifteen with a book Mrs. Marwood had called unsuitable and then not removed, because unsuitable books were sometimes the most informative.
The desk was not locked against her. Nothing in the room was, not now.
Inside lay the ordinary relics of a woman who had never intended to be a relic: sealing wax, spare quills, folded memoranda, two pairs of spectacles, a small knife for cutting paper, and a list in Mrs. Marwood’s hand of household repairs completed in the month before she died.
Elizabeth touched the edge of the paper.
Drain grate repaired. Blue room curtain hooks replaced. Pomington’s basket sent to be strengthened. E.’s music room fire to be laid twice weekly until warmer weather.
She read that line three times.
She had not known Mrs. Marwood had ordered it. She had thought the music-room fire had been one of Mrs. Albright’s quiet habits.
Beneath the list lay a packet tied in faded blue ribbon. Elizabeth drew it out with care.
The label, in Mrs. Marwood’s square hand, read:
E.’s first week. Small objects not to be returned to pockets.
Elizabeth sat down in Mrs. Marwood’s chair before her knees could make any private decision about it.
Inside the packet were several absurdities: a broken shell, a dried leaf, a scrap of red ribbon, three buttons of no discernible origin, and a little card box, crushed at one corner.
Elizabeth knew the box at once.
Her beetle box.
The beetle had not survived its removal from Longbourn in any state fit for polite memory, though Elizabeth had insisted for two days that it was resting.
Mrs. Marwood had permitted the fiction longer than any reasonable woman should have done, then explained burial, decay, and natural consequence with such calm precision that Elizabeth had cried from insult as much as grief.
And yet she had kept the box.
Elizabeth held it in both hands.
She had prepared herself for severity. She had not prepared herself for tenderness kept out of sight until it could no longer embarrass either of them.
A sound came from the passage.
“Lizzy?” Kitty called.
Elizabeth did not put the box away.
The door opened a little farther. Kitty stood at the threshold with Georgiana beside her.
Kitty had a pencil behind one ear and a ribbon trailing from her sleeve.
Georgiana held a sheet of drawing paper in both hands.
They had plainly come in search of ordinary permission and found themselves at the edge of something quieter.
Kitty stopped with one foot barely over the threshold.
“Oh,” she said, and lowered her voice too late. “We were only looking for you.”
Georgiana drew back a little. “We can go.”
“No.” Elizabeth looked about the room, at the covered chairs, the clean grate, the half-drawn curtains. “No, I think you may come in.”
They entered carefully. Georgiana glanced first at Elizabeth’s face, then at the room, as if seeking instruction from both. Kitty came no farther than the carpet’s edge and clasped the drawing paper with sudden solemnity.
“Georgiana has made Lord Pomington’s head too noble,” Kitty explained. “I said you would know whether that was an improvement.”
Elizabeth looked down at the little card box in her hand. “It would be a bold improvement upon nature.”
Kitty looked relieved that a small piece of conversation was still possible. Then her eyes moved to the desk, the chair, the covered furniture, and the quiet.
“Is this Mrs. Marwood’s room?”
“It was.”
Kitty’s expression shifted into the uncertain solemnity of a girl remembering an adult chiefly by the way she had made childhood stand straighter.
“I remember her at Longbourn,” she said. “Not often. She always seemed to know when Lydia had been whispering.”
“She often knew before Lydia had begun.”
Kitty nodded. “She once told Lydia that a chair was not a horse.”
“She was correct.”
“Lydia did not think so.”
“No,” Elizabeth said softly. “Lydia and Mrs. Marwood differed on many subjects.”
Georgiana’s eyes had gone to the writing desk. “It has been kept very carefully.”
“Yes. Mrs. Marwood inspired carefulness in others.”
Kitty, still looking about, said, “Was she always so very grand?”