What Her Hands Knew
XLI
She folded Jane’s letter and held it in her lap.
Outside the library window, the sky had gone the flat white that meant snow before nightfall.
She had learned to read that sky. The first time she had seen it, she had not known what it meant, and Mrs MacLeod had told her with the brevity she reserved for self-evident matters; and she had been right each time since, and had taken, each time, a small satisfaction in having learned to read a sky that was not her own.
The fire crackled. Falstaff breathed slowly towards sleep. Snow coming, Jane’s letter in her hands, good news on every page, and the library entirely, inexplicably, too empty.
She knew when it had happened, if she was honest. Sometime between October and now, the solitude had shifted, and what had once been a room she was grateful to have to herself had become a room with an absence in it.
She had stopped pretending otherwise, at least privately.
He was upstairs. He was always upstairs, at whatever work occupied him there, and she was here, and the fire was going, and she had more happiness in her hands right now than she had held in half a year, yet she wanted him.
“Come and sit with me while it snows,” she would say. “You need not speak. You need not do anything at all. Sit in the window seat, and I will keep my back turned if you require it. Whatever your reason, I have stopped demanding to understand your reasons, only come.”
She knew, by now, that it was not wilfulness.
That had taken her some months to understand, and she was not proud of how long it had taken.
He had given her everything within his power to give.
The darkness was not a choice he had made lightly or maintained easily.
She knew that now as surely as she knew the heaviness of his arm across her in the small hours.
It cost him. She had no doubt it cost him as much as it cost her, this absence, the fact of being unable to give her the one thing that remained.
Four months — nearly five, now — and she still did not know the colour of his eyes. Although she suspected they were brown. A deep, thoughtful shade that darkened with the evening or cast gold flecks in pure sunlight.
She knew him — knew his soul, knew his mind. She wanted the rest of it as completely as she wanted what she already had of him, and this one piece remained out of reach, and she suspected it was the piece he most wanted to give her and could not.
Supper, then. She had it rather well planned.
She would spend the meal giving him the news. All the little things of her family’s life, the small pieces taken for granted when they had not existed, but which seemed so much a matter of course now that many would not stop to question their source.
And then, when the supper was cold, she would take his face in her hands and tell him what she had not yet told him plainly.
That she knew what he was. Not a silly man.
Not a light one. A man who had done extraordinary things very quietly for the people she loved best, who would not permit himself to be thanked for any of it, who came to her every night and gave her everything the dark allowed, and bore the rest of it she could not say how.
She meant, at some length, to make him hear her acknowledge it.
She was rather looking forward to his protest.
Falstaff’s legs moved in his sleep, the headland running under his paws somewhere in his dreaming.
She regarded him with great affection, then the flat white sky, then the upper shelves, which she had been meaning to explore for weeks.
Everything within reach, she had read or catalogued.
The upper shelves were older, dustier, their spines harder to make out from below, and she had spent enough mornings looking up at them to have developed a thorough curiosity that could no longer be deferred.
She went to find Angus.
Angus brought the ladder without comment, and she directed him to set it against the far shelves where the oldest spines were thickest with dust. He held the base while she climbed, and she ran her finger along the top shelf, pulling out a volume here and there to read the title, standing on the fourth rung with her chin tipped back.
A collection of sermons. A Latin grammar. Something in French she could not make out. A history of the Low Countries that had lost its spine entirely.
She asked him to move the ladder. He did, holding the base while she climbed again.
A third of the way along the shelf, the spines grew more varied, the colours less uniformly dull, and she began to find things she had not seen before.
A volume of John Knox. Thomas Hobbes. A natural history of Scotland.
She pulled out something small and red with gilded lettering, read the spine, and her interest stirred for the first time on the ladder.
The Old English Baron.
She had heard of it, she thought. Something her father had said once, or the title glimpsed in a catalogue.
Clara Reeve. She turned it over in her hands.
Gothic fiction, to judge by the frontispiece — a young man in peasant dress standing before a crumbling castle, an expression of noble suffering arranged upon his face.
Her father would have called that expression ridiculous.
He would have said this with the book already open.
“I think I have what I need,” she told Angus.
She came down the ladder with the book tucked under her arm and went back to her chair. Falstaff had not moved. The snow had begun, very faintly, at the window. She opened to the first page.
An hour later, she had her feet tucked under her and had entirely forgotten about the snow.
The novel was, on its surface, every bit as ridiculous as the frontispiece had promised.
The young Edmund was burdened with a great deal of noble suffering, the haunted wing of the castle rattled on cue, and a suit of armour produced mysterious sounds at the most dramatically convenient moments in a way that Reeve apparently intended seriously and which Elizabeth found almost impossible to receive in that spirit.
She had laughed aloud twice, alone in the library, which she had not done over a book in longer than she could account for.
Her father would have been insufferable about this novel.
He would have read the armour scenes aloud at breakfast with tremendous solemnity. She would have had to leave the room.
But underneath the armour and the portentous dreams and the ancestral portrait that was, as a plot device, doing rather a great deal of heavy lifting, there was something else entirely.
Edmund himself, she found, she could not dismiss.
He was not who the world took him for. He bore it with a patience she recognised — not the patience born of indifference to the cost, but of someone who had weighed the cost and chosen it anyway.
He was better than his circumstances, and the people around him could see it but could not account for it, so they looked past it and went about their business.
He went on. He did what was required. He waited.
She turned a page without knowing she had turned it.
Emma, the daughter of the household, saw Edmund clearly before the portrait, before the haunted wing, before any of the revelation had begun.
She had only to attend to him to see what was there, and needed no further explanation.
Elizabeth closed the book briefly on her thumb.
That was either the most romantic thing she had read in some years or the most aggravating, and she could not decide which.
She opened it again.
The mystery of Edmund’s birth drove towards its resolution, and something quickened in her chest that had nothing to do with the gothic machinery — the kind of urgency that came only when a novel had been built honestly, and the answer was already half-known.
Someone had taken his birthright. Someone had arranged with great care that he should not know who he was.
Someone had constructed a concealment that had stood for twenty years, and now it was coming apart piece by piece.
Edmund bore it with the patience she had been receiving across a supper table for four months.
She lowered the book.
The snow was heavier at the window. The fire had burned down without her tending to it, but her mind turned on another point, entirely. A man concealed…
She had held his face in her hands in the dark and traced the shape of it in the small hours and known, with a certainty her hands had brought before her mind had been ready for it, that the face was a face she had seen before.
Seen. Across some room. At her side. In another life.
The conclusion her hands had been pressing towards was no longer a conclusion she could honestly refuse, and the only argument left to her against it was the picture she had carried since Hertfordshire of a Mr Darcy who could not, by any natural measure of the man, have done what George Carlisle had done.
A man did not build what had been built here for trivial reasons. A man did not go to this trouble, at this cost, unless the alternative was considerably worse.
She looked down at the book.
She held the title in her mind, searching her memory of her father’s shelves at Longbourn, the disorder she had known since childhood and could still walk shelf by shelf if she chose.
She could not place it there. She was nearly certain she had never seen this title before, and yet it had the feeling of something known, something half-remembered, the feeling of a book that had been sitting somewhere in the back of her mind for years waiting to be found.
She ought to send it to her sisters. Kitty would read it for the haunted wing, and Jane would read it for Edmund, and Mary would probably disapprove of the whole enterprise and say so at length.
She turned back to the beginning. Past the frontispiece. Past the title page. To the flyleaf.
The first inscription was older, the ink browned, the copperplate of a hand writing something it meant to last.
To my dear Anne, on the occasion of her sixteenth year. With her father’s love, and his hope that wherever she carries this book, she will know herself beloved.
Below it, in a younger hand, the ink lighter, the letters rounded with the careful flourish of a young hand.
Beside the name a small flower, drawn in three strokes — a stem, two leaves, a five-petalled bloom no larger than a thumbnail, the kind drawn without thinking by a young woman who wished a thing to be hers.
Anne Fitzwilliam.