In Her Keeping
X
Charlotte found her there, in the passage outside the library — had only arrived, as Charlotte had always arrived at the right moment, though the right moment now was considerably worse than any they had previously shared.
“He had agreed to a fortnight.” Charlotte’s voice was low, her eyes on the floor.
“I had spoken to him over two hours about it. He was not—” she stopped.
“He was less without feeling on the matter than you might suppose. He will still grant it, Lizzy. He requires a concession. A demonstration by this evening — something that will serve as recognition of his authority in his own house. If he has it, you will have your fourteen days. If he does not—”
She did not finish.
“Two weeks for my dignity,” Elizabeth said.
Her jaw ached. “I cannot, Charlotte. He took the Johnson on his first night here, and you know Papa bought that specifically to read with me. He moved the desk in my father’s study before Papa was two days buried.
He may be my father’s heir. He is not going to have my father’s mind as well. ”
Charlotte’s hand went to her arm and stayed there. “I know,” she said.
“Ask him again. Tonight. Please.”
“I will ask him. I was going to ask him.”
Elizabeth pressed Charlotte’s hand, once, and went to find Jane.
Jane was in their old room, folding linens into the second of the trunks. She did not look up when Elizabeth came in.
“Lizzy. Give him the books.”
Her brow raised. “Give them? No.”
“Give him the inscribed ones. Give him the Lady-Catherine flattery. Keep Papa’s margins. Let Collins have the covers. You may fight him over the rest in a year when we are not five women being driven from a house.”
“I have been sorting for three evenings, Jane. I have Papa’s inscriptions in a list. The law is on my side.”
“The law,” Jane said, “will not put a roof over Kitty and Lydia in two weeks.”
“The roof is already not ours.”
Jane set the linen down. When she turned, her face was not gentle either. “Lizzy. I am asking you. For Mama, for Mary, for Kitty, for Lydia. Please. Give him what he wants.”
Elizabeth’s fists balled, and she could feel the hot track of a tear running down her cheek. “I cannot.”
“You can.”
“I cannot give him my father!”
The thing that had been holding in Elizabeth’s chest since the library gave, finally, and she put her hands over her face. Jane crossed the room, put her arms around her, and held her while she cried.
“I know,” Jane said. “I know. I know.”
After a while, Elizabeth got her breath. “I am not going to yield, Jane.”
“I believe I knew that already.”
“I am sorry, Jane.”
“I know that, too.”
She did not yield at dinner. Collins kept his eye on her across the table, awaiting a concession that had not been scheduled. When the concession did not arrive, he retired to the study that had been her father’s and closed the door.
She wept that night in the room she shared with Jane, with her face pressed into the pillow and Jane’s hand on her back. Neither of them spoke. There was nothing useful either of them could have said.
She wrote to Dawkins on the morning of the next day.
She sat at the desk in what had been her father’s study — the desk already angled differently, the lamp in the wrong place, the inkstand Collins’s now — and wrote the shortest letter of her life.
Her father had ordered a copy of the Rasselas.
She was writing to inform Mr Dawkins that he need not send it.
Her father had died on the evening he wrote.
The bill for any trouble already incurred might be sent to her at her uncle Gardiner’s, in Gracechurch Street.
She signed it, sealed it, gave it to Hill to be taken to the post with the other letters, and sat at the desk for several minutes afterward without moving, because there had been something final about writing it that she had not been prepared for — more final than the funeral had been, more final than Collins going through the library the first morning.
She was in the library by eight that same morning, sorting.
The shelf had grown longer. A second shelf was taking shape beside it — her father’s correspondence, his two small cabinets of pamphlets, the annotated Blackstone he had kept by his armchair.
She took each volume down, confirmed the inscription or the marginal hand, entered it on the list. Her hands would not quite hold still.
There was no one in the room to see them.
Collins observed from the doorway through the morning and did not interfere. He was assembling his own account, which was not a list but a grievance, and each volume she removed from the shelf lengthened it.
By the third morning, the matter could no longer be contained.
He came down to breakfast with an opinion on propriety, which he delivered over the eggs as though it were addressed to the room rather than to Elizabeth — something about the conduct becoming young women of good family, something about the duty owed to the master of a house one occupied as a guest, something about the improper example a conspicuous want of submission offered to the younger sisters who were observing it.
Elizabeth did not answer. Her hand closed on her cup until she could feel the edges of the china.
She drank her tea. She went back to the library and continued to sort.
Kitty was crying somewhere in the house. Mary was not. Mary had not said more than a dozen sentences since the funeral.
He was waiting for her in the drawing room that evening with Charlotte beside him and his hat already in his hand.
He had given the matter considerable thought, he said.
He had prayed upon it. He had been obliged, with great regret, to arrive at a decision.
The family would be given five days. For, of course, they could not travel on a Sunday, and he would not have them here by the following Monday.
“Mr Collins—” Jane began.
“I am not a hard man,” Collins said, “but I cannot indefinitely extend the courtesies of a house whose inhabitants decline to recognise the authority of its owner. The example is corrupting to the younger girls. It is corrupting to my own wife. I owe it to the household, and to the memory of your late father — a memory for which I continue to grieve — to require conduct becoming of ladies in their present condition.”
The memory of your late father. Elizabeth’s nails were in her palms. She did not meet his eye. Her eye went to Charlotte, who had hers on the floor.
“Five days is more than sufficient,” Collins added, “for women of good family to arrange themselves. I am certain the neighbourhood will rally.”
The neighbourhood did not rally.
Uncle Philips came himself the morning after, and explained with great sorrow and careful circumlocution that their house was not large enough — his mother had arrived the week before in delicate health, and the rooms were spoken for.
He was sure the Lucases might make room.
Jane sent a note to Lucas Lodge that afternoon.
Sir William’s reply came warmer in tone than its contents deserved.
Lucas Lodge had never been a large house, and there was not a spare room to be found in it; and they must beg Jane’s indulgence on one further point — given Mr Collins’s position as master of Longbourn and Charlotte’s as his wife, they could not, in all propriety, appear to take sides in a family disagreement.
They were certain the Bennets would understand.
Elizabeth read this letter at the breakfast table while Collins ate his eggs at the far end and Charlotte poured the tea in silence.
Mrs Bennet did not wish to leave all her friends in Meryton. She produced eleven more names over the following two days — Mrs Goulding, who was in Bath; Mrs Long, who had her nieces; and nine others, each of whom found a reason. They were so sorry. They hoped the family would be settled very soon.
Nothing came to rest. Collins’s five days moved like a tide coming in.
On the third day, Elizabeth sat with Jane at the small table in what had been their father’s study.
She kept her eyes on Jane and on the paper between them — their accounts, such as they were, the small sums of money their father had set aside, the quarterly allowances, the arithmetic of five women with no house, with inadequate income, with nowhere in the county willing to take them in.
“Uncle Gardiner offered,” Jane said. “At the funeral. He said whatever they could do.”
“He did not know then what we would need.” Elizabeth’s eye went to the paper.
Whatever they could do had meant, in that churchyard, a loan perhaps, or a recommendation, or a room for one of them for a few weeks.
It had not meant five women arriving on the doorstep with their trunks and no fixed prospect of leaving.
“We have no time to write and explain it. By the time a letter reached him and he had replied, Collins would already have us in the hedgerows.”
“We would be going without warning.”
“We would.” She folded the paper and put it in her pocket. “He will not turn us away. He cannot, and he would not, and we have nowhere else to go.”
They left on the fifth day.
The packing fell to Elizabeth and Jane because Mrs Bennet could not stop weeping long enough to be useful.
Kitty followed her mother’s lead. Mary stood in the middle of her room with her hands at her sides, staring at her shelves as though she had never seen them before.
Lydia packed her own trunk without being asked, efficiently and without speaking, and dragged it towards the stairs herself.
The decisions were merciless. This is ours.
This is not. This is too heavy. This cannot be left.
The books went into two trunks, and Elizabeth locked them and put the keys in her pocket before Collins could see how many she had claimed.
A set of her mother’s china that had been her grandmother’s went into a crate wrapped in old linen, and then had to be removed again when Collins learned of it.
Her father’s pen — the good one, the one he had used every day for as long as she could remember — went into her coat pocket alongside the trunk keys.
Collins stood in the doorway of the entrance hall as they brought the bags out, watching with an expression of benevolent oversight, as though witnessing their departure were a service he was performing for them.
Charlotte stood at his shoulder with her hands folded, her eyes on the middle distance.
Elizabeth did not turn to her. She did not trust herself to mind her tongue.
The cart was hired from the village because there was no money for a carriage and no one in the neighbourhood who was inclined to lend one, not today, not with so little notice, so very sorry.
The bags went on the cart. The six of them climbed up after, because there was nowhere else to sit, and the cart set off down the lane and turned south towards London.
Mrs Bennet wept through Barnet. She wept through Hatfield and Welwyn and the long flat road south.
Kitty’s hand was in hers. Lydia sat at the back of the cart watching Hertfordshire recede with an expression Elizabeth could not name.
Mary kept her hands in her lap and her eyes straight ahead.
Jane held Elizabeth’s arm in both her own.
The fields went past. The sky went past. Longbourn went further and further behind them and did not come back.
Elizabeth had two trunk keys and a pen in her pocket, five women in her keeping, and nothing else she could name that was certain. The road to London was very long. At the end of it was her uncle’s house, and she did not know what happened after that.