57. LVII #2
It was like looking into a glass. Not exactly, but the colouring, the shape of her eyes, and the general cast of her face was one that Elizabeth had seen every day of her life in her own mirror.
So, this was the woman she had sent her husband to marry.
She was looking at her own replacement, and her replacement was a lovelier, easier, better-dowered image of herself.
“Ah, Honoria.” The earl's voice warmed with real fondness. “My daughter, Lady Honoria Vane. Honoria, this is Miss Bennet, who has done me the honour of calling on some very sad business — a matter to do with Spain, a relation of hers in difficulty there. I have been of what small use I could.”
“How do you do, Miss Bennet?” The girl's smile was warm and immediate and without the smallest guile.
She came the rest of the way down and gave Elizabeth her hand as though genuinely glad to meet her.
That was, very likely, the worst insult of all, that she was nice, that there was nothing in her to hate.
“Spain! Oh, how dreadful, I am so very sorry. It is a wretched business, everything to do with that country just now.”
“You are very kind,” Elizabeth managed, just as the clock struck half-past eleven.
“Oh, my dear, forgive me.” The earl was already half turning, already glancing back towards his study.
“I nearly lost track of the hour, and I must beg you to excuse me; I am expecting a caller shortly and have one or two things to see to before he comes. Miss Bennet, I wish you very well, truly I do, and I shall write that letter today, you have my word on it. Honoria, my love, will you see Miss Bennet to the door?” He bowed and was gone, leaving Elizabeth alone in the great hall with the girl who was to have her husband.
She wanted to be gone. She wanted it with a physical violence, wanted to be out of this house and into the street and away before something in her erupted and leaked out the last of her composure.
But she could not run, could not do anything but let herself be walked to the door by Lady Honoria Vane, who took her arm in the friendliest way and talked as they went like they were old friends.
“You must not mind Papa's manner,” Honoria was saying. “He seems very grand and busy but he does take these things to heart, truly, more than he shows. If he said he will write, he will write, and his letters are always read by somebody important, whatever he tells you. I do hope your relation comes home safe. Were you…” She paused to scrutinise Elizabeth’s face.
“Were you there in Spain yourself, Miss Bennet? Papa said business to do with that country, and you have rather the look of someone who has travelled recently.”
Elizabeth had not meant to say it. She had kept her own person out of the whole interview because she could not afford for any assumptions to be made, but the girl asked it so kindly, so directly, and Elizabeth found that she could not, in the face of that open kindness, spin an outright lie.
“I… I was. Yes. I was even with my uncle when he was taken. I came home within the fortnight.”
Honoria's face changed — a sharpening of interest, a closer look, her head tilting a little as she studied Elizabeth's tear-puffed eyes and her sun-darkened skin and whatever the cosmetics had not quite hidden.
“Within the fortnight? Then it has not long let you go. Oh, forgive me, I do not mean to be rude! It only looks as though the country used you rather hard, Miss Bennet. I only remark it because I knew someone else who came back from there greatly altered. Very greatly. One would hardly have known him for the same man.”
Him.
Elizabeth's whole body went still around the word, and it took every bit of willpower she could summon not to close her eyes, not to run in tears, not to cover her face and fracture right there on the step.
“I hope,” she said instead, with what did remain to her of her voice, “that your friend has found his return to England a welcome relief, after everything.”
Honoria did not say much to that. Her brow dimpled a little, and then she smiled again and let it go, and drew Elizabeth the last few steps to the door.
“Well, I shall keep you no longer. You have had a trying morning, and I am chattering. Robert, call for a carriage for Miss Bennet, if you please.”
Elizabeth dipped a curtsey. It was the least she could do, for it was certainly no fault of Lady Honoria Vane’s that she was to have all Elizabeth’s happiness before the month was out. “Thank you again.”
Honoria curtseyed in reply. “Goodbye, Miss Bennet. I shall think of your uncle, truly I shall, and hope for good news of him.”
“You are very kind,” Elizabeth said, for the third time, and turned to go down the steps into the blessed autumn air, where in a moment she might be alone and need not hold her face together any longer.
She was on the second step when she heard the maid's voice behind her in the hall, some question she caught only the end of. She would have thought nothing of it but for Honoria's answer, careless and happy and utterly heedless that Elizabeth might overhear or care what was said.
“— yes, quite soon now, he said he would come just before noon. We spoke of driving out in the Park while the weather holds. Bring me down the good hat, the one with the green ribbon. He says I look well in green, and see that my parasol is aired. He said something so particular in his note that I mean to make an afternoon of it. It will be a long drive, I think.”
He said he would come this afternoon.
Elizabeth did not hear whether there was more. She was already down the steps and across the pavement and into the carriage the footman held, faster than dignity allowed, faster than she had moved in weeks, because she could not — she could not — be on that doorstep one moment longer.