Steps #2
“My father died in May. Five weeks ago tomorrow. He choked on his dinner. Not even a proper illness that would have permitted his wife and daughters some warning.” She looked away with a sniff. “He always did like to try Mama’s nerves.”
“Miss Bennet… egad, I had not heard. I am so sorry.”
“The entail activated the same week. Mr Collins took possession of Longbourn within a fortnight. We — the neighbourhood could not accommodate us. We came to London. We had no time to write. We only came.”
“And the house?”
“My uncle was ruined this spring — an investment that failed without warning. By the time we reached him, there was nothing left, and the house is to be sold on Thursday.” Her voice thinned. “They do not yet know where they will go. I think my uncle was viewing a flat in Pentonville today.”
He was quiet. He was working through it — the death, the entail, the Gardiners’ collapse, all of it arriving in the same two months, one blow after another with no space between them to recover.
“And you?”
She could not answer at once. Whatever he had seen on her face before, he was seeing more of it now.
“Miss Bennet, where will you go?” His voice was not what it had been.
It was lower, unsteadier — asking a question he was not sure he was entitled to ask, and asking it anyway.
“What will you do? Pray, say you are not to become a governess. That is a miserable life for a woman as clever and lively as yourself.”
She did not think it was going to come now.
She had been doing well. She had been doing very well for several minutes.
But when she opened her mouth to answer him, the word would not come out, and when she tried again, it came out worse, and her hand went back to her mouth because the nausea was there again and because her face was not obeying her.
She looked hard at the street. She did not cry. She had promised herself she would not cry on the steps of her uncle’s house a second time, and she held to it, but the holding was a physical thing now, a labour, and Colonel Fitzwilliam was beside her and could see every inch of the labour.
“Miss Bennet? What is it?”
It was not what she had meant to begin with. “My uncle did his best,” she said. Her voice came out thin. “He did his best for us. This was the best he could produce.”
“You are not saying… No, pray tell me you are not to marry some stranger!”
“He had a business contact,” she said, after a moment, “a man who moves in rather better circles than my uncle does, who knew of two gentlemen looking for wives. It was third-hand, perhaps fourth. He asked what could be learned of them. There was nothing against them that anyone would say directly. He was fortunate to get a hearing at all. He knew it. He took what was offered, for Jane and for me.”
Fitzwilliam kept his eye on the step between them a long time. “Their names,” he asked. “The men.”
“Sir Horace Blackwood,” she said. “And Mr Thomas Sibley.”
His face altered — controlled, quickly suppressed, but not quickly enough. His colour had changed.
Elizabeth straightened. “Do you know harm of them?”
“There is always gossip,” he said. The words came out carefully, one at a time. “In my experience, most of it amounts to very little.”
“But?” she asked.
“I cannot say anything with certainty, Miss Bennet.”
She turned to him directly. He met her eyes, did not turn away, did not say anything else. She had her answer.
“Both of you?”
“Both of us. Yesterday afternoon. Jane is to marry Blackwood. I am to marry Sibley.”
He was silent. “And the matter is entirely fixed? There is no possibility of—”
“The settlement is signed.” She heard the words come out, and they sounded final because they were. “It provides for my mother. Something for my younger sisters. My uncle has been very good. He did everything he could.”
Fitzwilliam turned to her with the dread of a man working at a problem with no solution — the helpless calculation reserved for one who had kept arriving at the same locked door. She recognised it. She had been doing it herself for two weeks.
“Forgive me,” she said, pulling herself back.
“You are carrying your own grief. I am very sorry about your cousin, Colonel. Truly. I did not know him as long as some, but I know he was much admired by his friends, and surely by his family. I was very sorry to hear of it. He did not deserve such an end. Your family did not deserve it at all.”
His jaw tightened once. He did not answer at once.
“Thank you,” he said. “He was —” He stopped.
“Thank you. That is — kindly said. Kinder than most of what I have had to listen to these two months, from people who knew him better, which is not saying a great deal, and who mean considerably less.” Something crossed his face and was put away. “Yours, I am glad to have heard.”
“How is Miss Darcy?”
“Holding on. As well as can be expected.” The phrase came out worn smooth with use. “She is with my mother.”
Elizabeth sniffed and looked away. There was nothing more to be said on the subjects of marriages or deaths that they had not both already canvassed.
“You are a long way from your regiment,” she said, for something to say.
He turned back to the street. “Would that I had some means myself to —” He did not finish it. “But the settlement is signed,” he said again, very quietly, almost to himself.
“It is. It was the only thing that could be done.”
He was quiet. “I am on my way to Grosvenor Square. My father is there. We are finishing the last of my cousin’s effects.
Closing the house.” He stood, put his hat back on, turned to her one more time.
It was the look proper to a man leaving something behind that he could not take with him. “I had better get on with it.”
“Of course,” Elizabeth said.
He tipped his hat. “Good day, Miss Bennet.”
“Good day, Colonel.”
Her gaze followed him as he walked away down Gracechurch Street, his pace unhurried and his back very straight.
She put her hands in her lap, and her eyes fell to the ground, fixed on nothing.
She did not allow herself to think about what Fitzwilliam had not said — about the names, about the colour leaving his face, about there is always gossip spoken so carefully.
There was nothing to be done about it. Thinking about it would not help anyone.
She had promised herself she would not fall apart on the steps of her uncle’s house a second time.
She fell apart on the steps of her uncle’s house a second time.