Chapter 15
THE INVESTIGATOR RETURNS
In January, Elizabeth resumed the inquiry.
She had spent the autumn investigating one man and being wrong about him in both directions.
The habit had not died of it. It had only been waiting, and somewhere between the marginalia and the music room it sat up and asked for employment.
There was a second man whose case she had closed in one evening, three months ago, in a ballroom.
She had reopened it without ever announcing the inquiry, least of all to herself.
The household gave her evidence the way the county had once given her gossip: constantly, and without being asked.
She sat with Mrs. Reynolds over the menus three mornings a week. Each time, she approved dinners for a week she could never imagine eating. The menus took ten minutes. The talk took an hour, and Elizabeth had learned to steer it the way she had once steered card tables.
"The year the river took the low farms," Mrs. Reynolds said, on one such morning, "he forgave the half-year rents before the water was down. His father, rest him, would have waited to be asked. The master has never in his life waited to be asked. Asking costs people, ma'am. He knows what it costs."
Elizabeth thought of two inn rooms, written for from London.
She thought of a writing desk, and flowers in December, and her own name given slowly to forty servants so she would never have to ask for it.
She turned a menu she had not read and said, "And the old master's last illness.
Was the household large about him, at the end?
I am told his godson was almost a son to him. "
"Mr. Wickham?" Mrs. Reynolds said the name the way one names a stain that took three washings.
"Bless you, no, ma'am. He was in town the whole of that winter.
He came up for the reading of the will, and was gone again before the stone was cut.
The master sat that sickroom himself, week in and week out, three-and-twenty years old.
He read to him. The old gentleman did not always know him by then, and he read to him regardless.
" She took the menus up briskly, because her eyes needed the occupation.
"Almost a son. I am sure that is what Mr. Wickham tells people. "
I held his hand at the end. Elizabeth sat very still while the prettiest of the six lies came apart in a housekeeper's morning room.
The evidence kept arriving all that week, none of it arranged for her.
A housemaid's mother had taken ill at Michaelmas.
The apothecary came from Lambton already paid for, and no one ever said by whom.
Servants flattered masters to visitors. They did not flatter them to each other, across four-and-twenty years, in small facts with dates attached.
She was building a case from sources nobody had dressed for her. She knew exactly what that was worth, now, having once been handed a case fully dressed, with the pauses placed.
On the Thursday she went to the sitting room desk for writing paper, and found the letter.
It lay open on the blotter where he had left it, three days running now. It sat among the estate papers he no longer carried away when she entered. She wanted paper and lifted the corner of the pile. The name jumped at her from the middle of a page, in a soldier's blunt hand: Wickham.
She read it. She did not pretend afterward that she had not.
As to trustee, yes, of course, and gladly, the letter ran, above the name of a Colonel Fitzwilliam she knew only as a cousin.
Though I will say, having now seen the settlements: if her family ever learns what you have signed, your reputation for pride will not survive it.
You have settled on a lady who brought you nothing as if she had brought the earldom.
I have witnessed it all the same. On the other matter: I have the Meryton accounts you asked for.
W. owes his mess eleven pounds and three tradesmen a good deal more, and is grown careful since December, which means he is planning.
After Ramsgate I keep that man's pattern the way I keep a tide table. Say the word and I come north.
Elizabeth stood at the desk with the paper she had come for forgotten in her left hand.
Guilt arrived first, for reading it. Recognition arrived second, and stayed longer.
This was how the family spoke of Wickham among themselves, when nobody performed for her benefit.
Not a wronged man, and not a rival: a recurring expense.
A tide table. And folded inside that, almost in passing, the other thing.
The settlements. She had stood in her mother's parlor and told him the law would let him ignore every word she said.
He had gone to London with her voice in his ears and signed away, before witnesses, everything the law would have let him keep.
Her terms had carried no force, so he had given them force.
And then he had told no one, including her.
She put the letter back the way it lay. Her hands wanted very much to be doing something, so she squared the estate papers, which did not need it.
That afternoon she went into his book room for the second volume of the Selborne.
He had marked it for her. The room smelled of him, leather and ink and the cold air he carried in from his mornings.
The volume was on the desk where he had said.
Behind the desk, leaning against the wall in the corner, stood a flat wooden case, corded, the length of her arm.
A painting, evidently new-bought and never hung. The cord was tied in a careful knot. The case leaned in the one corner of the one room in Pemberley that was entirely his. Elizabeth stood with the Selborne in her hands and looked at it for longer than a wrapped picture deserved.
Down the corridor, the pianoforte started. Georgiana, and the loved pieces rather than the correct ones, which meant she wanted company.
Elizabeth went to the music room, and the case stayed in its corner, and kept what it knew.
In the evenings, the case she could not stop building closed itself a little further, witness by witness.
The chief witness would not stop testifying.
She watched him hold his book in both hands, a little away from himself.
She watched him stand when Georgiana wanted listening, his head bent, all of him given over to it.
She watched his face while his sister played the loved pieces wrong, and there was no measuring what was in it.
She had once called this man cold in front of two hundred people, and been applauded.
The thoughts came uninvited now, and they had stopped being comparisons.
There was nothing left to compare him to.
Wickham had collapsed into a column of debts.
What remained was the man, observed daily and at close range.
The best judge of character in Hertfordshire had judged him in one evening.
She had spent three months proud of the work.
She knew where this ended. She had known since the housekeeper's morning room.
She had kept investigating anyway, the way you test a sore tooth.
If he was not the man she had decided he was, then a man had watched over her all autumn, and ridden down a hill to her, and married her ruin to his name, and signed his rights away in a lawyer's chambers.
And she had paid him for the whole of it with a winter of silence.
She had been punishing a good man for saving her life.
The sentence did not get easier for redrafting, and she had redrafted it all week.
One question remained that no servant could answer and no letter would.
She had asked it once, in a cottage, and the wheels had cut it off, and she had been too proud to ask it again.
Very well. She was a married woman with her own sitting room and a velvet bell-pull. Pride could be parceled like sugar.
There was one witness she had never once examined. She dressed for dinner with her questions in order.