The Map of What He Did Not Know #2
Mr Gardiner set down his cup. His gaze moved from Elizabeth to Jane and then around the room at all of them — his wife with her careful hands folded in her lap, his nieces arranged across the furniture of a sitting room that was too small for everyone in it, his sister gone temporarily still — and whatever he had been holding back for the past two weeks gave way.
“I had intended to wait,” he said. “To let you recover yourselves first, to give you a day or two. But you are here now, and there is no use in waiting, and you will understand the situation well enough to see that waiting changes nothing.” His gaze dropped to his hands.
“I saw my solicitor on Thursday. The house will go up for sale within the fortnight. We are… the situation has become one that does not permit delay. There is no remedy. I want you to understand that I looked for one. I have been looking for one since April.”
The room went quiet.
“But…” Mrs Bennet turned to her brother as if she had heard something wrong and was waiting for the correction. “The house? This house?”
“Yes.”
“But why? What has happened?”
Mr Gardiner glanced once at his wife and then back at his sister.
“I made an investment two years ago. A trading company — well-regarded, reliable returns. There was no reason to doubt it, and for two years, we saw excellent returns. But then, in April, a substantial investor withdrew everything. All at once, in the space of a week. It broke confidence in the firm. Others withdrew. The firm collapsed.” The next sentence came flatter. “There was nothing left to recover.”
“What… nothing? Oh, that cannot be—”
“Nothing, Fanny.”
“But surely—” She looked around the room as though there might be an alternative explanation somewhere in it. “Surely there is something. Some property, some — Edward, you are a careful man. You have always been a careful man. Surely there is something.”
“There is not, Fanny.” His voice was not without gentleness. “I am sorry. I have been trying since April to find a way around the matter. There is no different way.”
Mrs Bennet stared at him as the meaning entered her face. “In the last two weeks,” she said, very quietly. “While we were—”
“I know, sister. I did not wish to trouble you at such a time, but my creditors have run out of patience, and I have had to… economise. Selling the house should permit us to keep some share of the warehouse with which to rebuild.”
She closed her mouth. Opened it. Closed it again.
The last two weeks. Her father had died in the last two weeks.
Collins had arrived. The library had been fought over.
The neighbourhood had declined to help. The cart had been hired.
They had come south through Barnet — all of it in the same fortnight that the Gardiners had been sitting in this house, knowing that they had nothing.
“We did not know the extent of it yet when we came to Hertfordshire,” Mr Gardiner said. “We came because you needed us. We would have come regardless. But by the time we returned home —”
“You came to the funeral,” Jane said. Her voice was very quiet.
“Of course, we came,” Mrs Gardiner said. “Of course we did.”
Jane’s eye came to her uncle. “You said nothing of any of this. You said ‘whatever you could do’.”
“Yes.” Mr Gardiner lowered his gaze to his hands.
“I meant it. I mean it still.” He lifted his eyes to the room.
“What I can offer is not what I would want to offer. The house will go. We will find somewhere smaller. You are welcome wherever we are. We will make room. I cannot do more than make room.”
Mrs Gardiner turned her face away. Her shoulders rose once, very slightly, and fell. When she turned back, her eyes were bright. She did not say anything. There was nothing to say.
Then Mrs Bennet’s face crumpled. The sound that came out of her was not the sound Elizabeth was used to, not the agitated complaint she had heard all her life from a mother with nerves, but something rawer and more frightened, something that came from lower down.
“Oh!” she cried. “Oh! What shall become of us! We are ruined — we are quite ruined — oh, my poor girls, my poor dear girls, what is to become of us all? I said it — I always said it — I said for years that this would happen, and nobody listened, nobody ever listened to me, and now here we are — no house, no income, nothing — oh! What shall become of us! What shall become of my poor girls!”
She was shaking, the words coming in gulps between sobs, and Kitty seized her arm on one side as she lurched forward, and Elizabeth was already on her feet from the other side.
Between them, they got her onto the sofa where she sat and wept with her whole body, her hands pressed over her face, rocking slightly, the sound of it filling the room.
“What shall become of us?” Mrs Bennet said again, not loudly now, barely above a breath, the words wrung out of something deep and exhausted. “What shall become of my girls?”
Nobody answered her. There was no answer.
Elizabeth turned her eye to the window. Six women in one small room somewhere, no income, no prospect, the road running out ahead of them with nothing at the end of it she could see.