Chapter Fifty-Nine
Pemberley in winter was a different house from the one Elizabeth had walked through in August with her aunt and uncle, and she was a long time learning it.
The wood she had promised Mary was bare and black and full of water, and the stream was up, and the hills behind the house had snow on them by the first week of December and kept it; and the house itself, which had seemed in summer to stand so easily on its rising ground, revealed itself in the short days to be a thing that was worked — that a hundred people kept, and mended, and watched, all winter, in a hundred small ways she had never thought about, because a great house on old ground in the cold is not a picture but a machine for holding weather and time at bay, and somebody is always attending to it.
And her husband walked the west boundary at the quarter days with Mr. Havell, and now with Mr. Havell's successor.
Wickham had come at Michaelmas, before the wedding, quietly, and been installed in the warden's cottage, and Havell had spent six weeks showing him the ground and then gone home to Kendal with a pension and a great deal of relief; and Elizabeth had not seen him, and did not intend to, and he did not intend to be seen, and the arrangement held perfectly, three miles of park between the cottage and the house, and would hold, she understood, for thirty years.
She asked Darcy once, in December, whether it was strange to him — to have that man on his ground, in his father's gift, holding a thread of his own line.
"Every day," said Darcy. "And it is the best thing I have done, and I would do it again to-morrow, and both of those are true, and I have stopped expecting them to resolve.
Some things do not resolve. You marry the whole of a person and you take the whole of a decision; there is no version where I have the good of it without the strangeness. "
"That is a very married thing to say."
"I have been married five weeks," said Darcy. "I am learning quickly. I had a good teacher in a copse in Hertfordshire, though she was not teaching me."
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The letters came north all winter.
Jane wrote from Netherfield twice a week, in her mild even hand, and her letters were full of small good things and one large one held carefully underneath them, which was their father; and Elizabeth learned to read the underneath of Jane's letters the way she had learned everything else that year, by attending to what was being kept flat.
Papa is much as he was meant no worse.
Papa was in the library today and quite himself meant a good day, and Elizabeth came to live for that sentence and to be cast down for a week when it did not appear.
Mr. Jones came again meant a bad one.
Mrs. Bennet wrote once, a triumphant letter about the wedding clothes and the county's admiration and a Mrs. Robinson who had said something, which Elizabeth read twice and put away and was, unexpectedly, glad of, because a letter like that from her mother meant that at Longbourn the front rooms were still the front rooms, and life was still going on in them, and somebody was still indignant about Mrs. Robinson, and that was its own kind of report.
And Mary wrote.
Mary wrote every week, on the Sunday, in her small exact hand, and her letters were unlike anybody's in the world, and Elizabeth kept every one.
They were, on the surface, the dullest letters ever written.
They contained the measurement — always the measurement, first, in the first line, with the day and the hour: Sunday, half past six.
Nine yards inside the wall at the north-east. No change.
And then they contained the note — the note is as it was; stronger in the mornings; very faint the night of the 3rd, when papa slept badly and Mr. Jones gave him something — and then they contained a page, or two, of what she was learning.
For Mary had begun her study, and she wrote it to Elizabeth as she went, because Elizabeth had asked her to and because, she said, writing it to somebody made her think it through properly instead of merely feeling it.
I can feel the ward on the church now, she wrote in December.
Denny has been teaching me and it took six weeks.
It is not like hearing the note. The note is a thing that is there whether I attend to it or not, like a clock; the ward is a thing I have to reach for, and put my hand on the stone, and go quiet, and then it is there, like the warmth off a wall in the sun.
It is very faint and very old and it does not want mending, and I understand now what everyone has meant for a year when they said this county is wrong, because a ward this old ought to be threadbare and this one is not, it is whole, and that is because it has never once had to work, because the thing it would have kept out has been kept elsewhere, underneath, by the other thing, the whole time.
I am learning to tell them apart with my eyes shut, she wrote in January.
The ward, and the note, and the pale ground, which has a third feeling, which is not a sound and not a warmth but an absence, a place where my hand expects something and there is nothing.
Denny says that is the important one and the one that will save my life if I ever do this, because a person holding a ward has to be able to feel the edge of the bad ground in the dark, and most who are lost are lost because they stepped wrong.
Papa likes me to read to him, she wrote, at the end of a January letter, in a different ink, plainly added later.
We have done the whole of Cowper and are on the Rambler, which he pretends to despise and will not let me skip a line of.
He does not talk about any of it. But yesterday he said, out of nothing, that he was glad I had not gone away with the rest of you, and then he said that it was a selfish thing to be glad of and that I was to go the moment there was no reason to stay, and then he said he did not mean that either, and then he asked me to go on reading.
I did not know what to write to you about that so I have written all of it.
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Elizabeth read that last one standing at the window of her own morning-room at Pemberley, with the snow on the hills, and then she went and found her husband and gave it to him to read, which she did with all of Mary's letters that touched the ground, because they had agreed at the start that there should be nothing kept flat between the two of them, ever, on any subject, whatever it cost; it was the first article of their marriage and they had both meant it and it was harder than either had expected and they kept it.
Darcy read it twice.
"She is doing in one winter," he said, "what a warding recruit does in three years, and she is doing it alone in a churchyard in the dark with no master but a cashiered lieutenant, and she is nineteen."
"Twenty in March."
"Twenty in March." He gave the letter back. "Lizzy. I am going to say a thing and I want you to hear the whole of it before you answer, because it is not the thing it will sound like at the start.
"I think she is going to be able to do it."
Elizabeth sat down.
"I did not think so in the autumn," said Darcy.
"In the autumn I thought it was a brave notion of a girl who had found a use for herself at last, and that when it came to it the blood would not answer, because the blood is the part everyone has always been sure of.
I have been reading her letters all winter and I no longer think that.
I think she was right in the library in November and everyone was too frightened to follow her: that the oath does not want blood so much as it wants undertaking, and that undertaking is her whole gift, and that she is the second door, and that it was standing open the whole time and nobody looked at it because it was shaped like Mary. "
"Then—"
"Then when your father dies," said Darcy, "she will be able to take it up.
Which means it will be a real choice, and not a tragedy that happens to her.
She will stand in that churchyard as a woman who can do the thing, and decide whether to spend her life on it, and there will be no one able to tell her she cannot and no one able to tell her she must, and it will be the loneliest choice anybody in this family has ever made, and it will be entirely hers.
"And I have thought about it a great deal, and I do not know what I hope she chooses, and I have decided that not knowing is the correct state to be in, and that any man who was sure what she ought to do would be exactly the kind of man who has wrecked something every time he appears in this story. "
Elizabeth was quiet for a while.
"She will choose to do it," she said.
"You cannot know that."
"I have known her for twenty years and I have watched her since October and I know exactly what she is now, which I did not for the first nineteen.
" Elizabeth looked out at the snow. "She will do it.
Not out of grief, and not out of duty, and not because anybody asks her — she has arranged her whole winter precisely so that it will not be any of those.
She will do it because she has spent her entire life being the person nobody needed, and she has found the one thing in the world that only she can do, and she will not be able to walk away from being necessary.
It is the deepest thing in her. It is deeper than fear.
"And the terrible part," said Elizabeth, "is that that is not a bad reason. It is not a noble reason and it is not a reason anybody would put in a sermon, but it is a true one, and it is hers, and it is better than being spared."
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Word came in February that Lady Catherine de Bourgh had begun.
It came sideways, through Charlotte, who wrote to Elizabeth now with a frankness that their new connection had unlocked — for Elizabeth was her Ladyship's niece by marriage, and there was a savage comedy in that which both women enjoyed and neither mentioned to Mr. Collins.
Lady Catherine had, Charlotte wrote, opened a correspondence with three families in the eastern counties; had had a surveyor at Rosings for a fortnight; had ordered old papers up from a muniment room and had a man from the Society reading them; and had said, at dinner, apropos of nothing, that she supposed she should have to do the whole of it herself, as she had always had to do everything herself, and that it would take fifteen years and she did not expect to be thanked.
She has not mentioned you, wrote Charlotte, since November, not once, which from her is a form of respect I would not expect you to recognize if I did not tell you.
She has, however, twice mentioned "the sister who listens," and asked Mr. Collins whether she is spoken for, and Mr. Collins did not know, and I did not enlighten her.
I do not know what her Ladyship intends by it and I thought you had better have it.
Elizabeth read that part aloud to Darcy.
"She wants Mary," said Elizabeth.
"She wants a person who can hear whether an oath takes," said Darcy, "and there are perhaps four in England, and one of them is your sister, and Lady Catherine has spent thirty years being the only person who understood this and is about to discover that a girl of twenty in a Hertfordshire churchyard has understood it better, alone, in a winter.
" He almost smiled. "I would give a great deal to be present when those two women are in a room together, and I am fairly certain I never shall be, because your sister will decline the invitation, and my aunt will respect her the more for it, and they will circle each other by letter for twenty years and neither will ever quite say what she means. "
"They would like each other."
"They would detest each other," said Darcy, "in the particular way of two people who are the only two of their kind, and it would be the nearest thing to friendship either of them ever had, and it would kill them both to admit it.
Write to Mary and tell her my aunt is asking after her.
She will want it for the record, and she will know exactly what it means, and she will file it at page four hundred and eleven with the rest."
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The winter turned, the way winters do, without announcing it.
There was a day at the end of February when the water came off the hills all at once and the stream at the bottom of the wood ran brown and loud for a week; and then a still cold spell; and then, in the second week of March, a morning when Elizabeth woke and knew, before she was properly awake, that the year had changed under her in the night, that there was a different light on the ceiling and a bird doing something in the bare wood that it had not been doing in January.
Mary's letter that week said: Sunday, half past six.
Nine yards inside the wall. No change in the ground.
But the note is louder, Lizzy, and it has been getting louder for a fortnight, and it is not because papa is better, because papa is not better, he is worse; and I have thought about it and I am afraid I know what it is.
It is spring. The ground is waking, the way it wakes every year, the whole living county coming up green — and the thing underneath is waking with it, because that is what it does, and it has done it four hundred times, and every other year there was a man of the blood on this ground in the fullness of his strength to hold it down as it woke.
And this year there is a man of two-and-fifty in a bed who cannot hold up a newspaper.
I do not want to frighten you three hundred miles away where you can do nothing. But you asked me at the start never to keep anything flat, and I am not going to begin now.
Come, if you can. Not because it will help. Because I think it is going to be soon.