Chapter 3
The bell over the modiste's door was a soft one, and Anne de Bourgh was grateful for it. She had asked for the plain carriage and donned a veil at home and took up the velvet case, and her mother was well pleased with her.
She had left the carriage to wait around the corner and come the last of the way on foot. A carriage at a dressmaker's door was a thing people remembered, a plain woman in a plain bonnet was not, and being overlooked was the one talent her mother had never thought to forbid her.
Inside the shop, a bolt of gray silk lay half-unrolled across the counter where someone had been called away from it.
Madame came through from the back, took in the veil, the plain pelisse, the absence of a maid, and arranged her face into the careful blankness such shops keep for ladies who would rather not be named.
"I'll speak with your young one," Anne said. "Sarah. The girl whose mother is poorly."
Madame's brows rose and settled. She did not ask how a veiled lady came to know the name of a junior hand, she inclined her head and went to fetch the girl.
Anne waited at the counter. The shop did good trade, by the look of it. Half-made gowns standing on forms in the back, and a girl's voice counting pins somewhere out of sight.
The whole place was humming with other people's weddings and mournings and christenings, not one of which had ever been hers. She laid one gloved finger to the edge of the gray silk and made herself leave it lying as it was, unsmoothed.
The girl came out wiping her hands on her apron, nineteen perhaps, with chapped knuckles and a curtsey that dropped a half-second too soon. The curtsey of someone warned to take care with this customer. Up close she had the scrubbed, sleepless look of a person nursing somebody at home.
Anne set the velvet case on the counter and lifted the lid. The bottle inside was small and dark and sealed. The folded card beside it bore a direction in a looping, confident hand.
"A wedding gift," she said. "For a Miss Bennet. She comes to you tomorrow at two for her last fitting. You'll have her in the book."
"Yes, my lady." The girl's eyes were on the case.
"When she comes, you give her this, and the card with it, and you say it comes from a lady who wishes her every joy, and that the card will explain the rest. No fuss made of it. Say it back."
"From a lady who wishes her every joy. The card will explain the rest. No fuss." The girl hesitated. "And if she asks what's in it, my lady?"
"A cordial. Wine, and sugar, and a little of what helps a bride sleep the night before her wedding." Anne kept her eyes on the girl and off the card. The card she had sat up many nights making, copying her aunt's hand until it ran easier off her pen than her own.
"Tell her to drink it there, in the fitting room, where it's quiet. Brides rarely sleep well. She'll thank you for it."
The girl nodded, and Anne watched her put it away, the bottle, the card, the words, and the time of two o'clock, with the close attention of a person for whom a muddled errand might mean a lost place.
She would not muddle it. Girls with a sick mother and one position between themselves and the street never did.
Anne laid the coins beside the case then, a small stack, more than the errand was worth, and meant to be more. The girl looked at them and made herself look away, as if the lady might reconsider.
"For your trouble," Anne said. "And a proper doctor for your mother. Not comfrey. Something that works."
"God bless you, my lady." The girl said it fast and low and entirely meaning it, and her hand closed over the coins.
"Two o'clock," Anne said, and drew her veil close, and went out.
The girl's blessing followed her into the street.
She let it follow and did not slow for it, blessings were cheap, and she had a great deal to see to before tomorrow, and the only thing in the world she truly wanted lay on the far side of all of this.
The room over the chandler's shop was cold when Sarah got in, and her mother was awake, which was worse than asleep, because awake meant she had been lying in pain there listening for the stair.
"You're late," her mother said from the bed. The two words cost her breath she could not spare.
"I stopped to settle something." Sarah crouched at the grate, and for the first time in a fortnight she built the fire up the way it wanted building, three lumps of coal where lately there had been one, husbanded all evening, and held the candle to the kindling until it caught and climbed.
"Three lumps." Her mother's eyes followed the flame. "Have we robbed a coach?"
"A lady gave me something. For an errand in the morning.
A bottle to put into a bride's hands, that's the whole of it.
A kind lady. A sad, quiet sort of kind." Sarah came and sat on the edge of the bed and opened her handkerchief in the new firelight so her mother could see the coins lie there and shine.
Her mother had sewn for her living until her chest gave out. Fine work, the sort that went to ladies who never wondered whose eyes had been spent on their hems, and she still priced a thing at a glance, the way a seamstress does.
She looked at the coins a long moment and did the sum, and Sarah watched her arrive at the same uneasy place Sarah kept arriving at and stepping back from.
"That's a great deal of money for a bottle."
"It's a grand family. They don't count it the way we do."
"What's in it?"
"A cordial. Sweet wine, the lady said, for the bride's nerves."
Her mother let the question lie. Not satisfied, Sarah thought, but tired, and warm for the first time in weeks, and worn past the point of turning away a comfort she had wanted too long.
"Tomorrow I'll send for Mr. Adair," Sarah said. "The one off the square, not the parish man."
"Adair's too dear."
"Not tonight he isn't." She drew the blanket up over her mother's chest and tucked it the way her mother had used to tuck her.
The veiled lady came back to her as she did it, the stillness of her, the way she had never once looked straight at the card she spoke of, and something small and cold turned in Sarah, the way a stone turns under a boot.
Then the fire put out a real heat, the first the room had held since her mother took bad. She did not think of the lady again. There was broth to warm, and her mother's cold hands to chafe between her own, and for once the warmth to do both by.
That night, at de Bourgh House, her mother sent for the one man who had come from Rosings with them.
Anne had her place in the drawing room. A low chair near the lamp, her workbasket at her feet, and she kept to it, drawing thread in and out of a square of linen she did not care for.
The house around them had filled, this past fortnight, with people Anne did not know. A cook, two housemaids, a second footman, all of them hired new, and none of them aware they had been engaged for such a purpose.
Her mother had thought of everything. Of wages and characters and the servants’ registry, of which tradesmen would call and which would not, of how a house lately opened might take in one quiet guest and never once be asked to account for her.
She had had the day itself for weeks. The modiste was no secret, the same one half the brides of the season used, and a girl marrying Darcy would be fitted where his money went.
It was the most thorough piece of work Anne had ever watched her mother do, and her mother had done a great many things to a great many people in her time.
The footman came in and stopped just inside the door. He was big, country-built, with hands that sat wrong in white gloves. Her mother did not ask him to sit, and he had not looked to be asked.
"You know the lane behind the dressmaker's," her mother said. It was not a question.
"I know it, my lady."
"Tomorrow, two o'clock. The gray door, the one that gives on the yard. The lady will have been given something to make her quiet so you will have no cause to be rough, and you will not be rough; I will know if you were.
She will walk if she can lean on you. You bring her out the back to the carriage, and you bring her here, to the room that has been made ready, and you say nothing, not on the road, not after, not to the other servants, not to your own people."
"Yes, my lady."
"Your mother has her cottage from me," Lady Catherine said, in precisely the voice she had used for the rest of it. "Your sister has her place in my kitchen. The boy has his apprenticeship because I pay the premium. You will keep all of that in your mind tomorrow at two o'clock."
"And if she'll not come quiet?" It was the only thing the man said that was not yes, his eyes on the carpet, his voice careful. "If the draught is slow, or she takes a fright in the lane?"
"She will be too far gone to take fright.
But if I am wrong, you are a manservant carrying his mistress home from her fitting, for she has been taken ill, and you will say so to whoever troubles to ask.
They will not trouble. No one stops a man carrying a fainting gentlewoman to her carriage; the whole world is built to hand him through the door and wish the lady better.
That is the use of doing it in daylight. "
A pause. "I will, my lady."
"Then that is all."
He bowed. He turned for the door, and kept his eyes on the door and took himself out, and the latch met its frame without a sound.
Once, Anne might have pitied him. She had spent years unable to meet her mother's eye either. But flinching had never carried her a single foot out of Rosings; it was the ones who stopped flinching and started planning who got free.
She was not on the footman's side, whatever the two of them shared. She was on the side of the door he had been so glad to reach, and she meant to walk through one of her own before the season turned.
Anne wished her mother goodnight in a steady voice and went up. Tomorrow at two o'clock the one thing standing between Anne de Bourgh and the rest of her life would drink a sweet glass of wine in a quiet back room and wake in a house she could not leave.
Anne did not let herself think of Elizabeth as a person. She had given up being able to afford that some while ago.