Chapter 4
Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Mrs. Gardiner's parlor was a thing Elizabeth had not known she wished to see until she was seeing it.
The great lady settled on the good sofa with her gloved hands quiet in her lap, admiring the curtains, while Mrs. Gardiner poured out as though she received the daughter of an earl every week of her life.
And the curtains were admired truly, that was what Elizabeth could not reconcile.
Lady Catherine did not praise Cheapside the way the great praise the small, as a coin handed downward.
She praised it the way one capable woman acknowledges another.
"You chose these yourself," she said. "No one chooses this well by sending a servant. "
Mrs. Gardiner, who had in fact chosen them herself, after a week of swatches, was very nearly hers from that moment.
It went on in that vein. Lady Catherine asked after the Gardiner children and listened to the answers as though she expected to be examined on them later.
Told that Mr. Gardiner was in the import trade, she did not perform the small cooling Elizabeth had braced for, the polite frost that came over fine people when warehouses were named in the same breath as a wedding.
She said instead that her own steward had lately been cheated by a Bristol man over a quantity of timber, badly enough that she had begun to wish she kept a man of business she could actually trust and asked whether Mr. Gardiner might be persuaded to look over how the thing ought to have been drawn.
Mrs. Gardiner said her husband would be glad to. Lady Catherine said she would send the papers round within the week, and looked, saying it, like a woman who meant to.
Elizabeth watched her aunt be courted, there was no better word for it, and watched her aunt enjoy it and hunted the whole while for the deception and did not find it.
Mr. Gardiner was at the warehouse, and the house was quiet, and the morning light came in mild and ordinary on a scene Elizabeth would not, a fortnight before, have believed she would live to see.
Anne had brought a gift for her and offered it in her awkward way. It was a fan, a small one, ivory sticks and a painted paper leaf, pretty without being grand.
"For the wedding," Anne said. "It is only a fan. But the church will be close with everyone breathing in it, and a bride's hands are never given anything to hold."
She did not quite meet Elizabeth's eyes as she said it, and Elizabeth, who had a soft place for shyness because she had so little of it herself, liked her the better for it.
"It is lovely," Elizabeth said, and meant it. She opened it and the painted leaf showed a garden, and two small figures walking in it. "I shall carry it and think of you."
Lady Catherine asked after the wedding again as she had the day before, wanting the answers, not the credit. Where they would stand; who was coming up from the country; whether Mrs. Bennet's nerves had survived the planning of it.
Elizabeth said her mother's nerves had survived magnificently, at the expense of everyone within hearing, and Lady Catherine said that was the only proper way for a mother's nerves to survive a wedding, and Mrs. Gardiner laughed outright into her cup.
Anne said little. She sat a little apart and watched the room, watched Mrs. Gardiner fill Elizabeth's cup before it was quite empty, watched Elizabeth lean to tuck a cushion at her aunt's back, watched the easy unthinking traffic of affection pass back and forth between them with a steadiness Elizabeth might have found strange, had she been looking for anything strange.
She was not. She was happy, and happiness is the worst possible condition for noticing anything at all.
"And the gown?" Lady Catherine said.
"Nearly done. There is a last fitting this afternoon. Aunt Gardiner is to come and rule on whether I shall be allowed to sit down in it."
"Only your aunt?" It was Anne who asked it, from her place a little apart, and she asked it so mildly. "I had supposed Lady Matlock might wish to see the gown. She has taken such an interest."
Elizabeth laughed. "Oh no. Lady Matlock at a fitting! She would think it beneath the dignity of the occasion, and beneath her own, and she would be right on both counts. A countess does not stand about a back room counting pins; that is what aunts are for, and I have the good plain useful kind."
She did not see Anne’s eyes drop to her lap, nor the small still satisfaction that crossed her face and was gone, because she was looking at Mrs. Gardiner, who had made a noise of fond protest into her cup.
"It will be only the two of us and Madame and a great many pins. Lady Matlock has done her part already, and handsomely. I shall show her the gown when I am wearing it in a church and let her be properly proud of it then."
"At Madame's, then." Lady Catherine pursed her lips.
"The best hands in London, and the slowest. Mind she does not keep you standing past your strength.
Brides are run off their feet and forbidden to say so.
" She rose, drawing her gloves smooth. "We have stayed too long.
Mrs. Gardiner, you have been kinder than I had any claim to, and I have enjoyed myself, which I did not come expecting to do either. "
At the door Anne paused, and for a moment Elizabeth thought she would speak but she only pressed Elizabeth's hand, quickly, harder than the occasion asked, and went down the steps after her mother without a word.
Elizabeth followed their carriage with her eyes and so was watching when a second one turned into the street behind it, travel-stained and piled with boxes, and pulled up at the very door the first had just quit.
The step was let down, and her sister Jane Bingley came out of it. "We could not bear to sit out the last week at Netherfield with the whole of you up here," Jane said, once Elizabeth had the front door open and the two of them had hold of one another on the step.
"Charles produced three excellent reasons, and I pretended to be persuaded by every one. We have come to be underfoot until the wedding, and I mean to be very much underfoot indeed."
Mr. Bingley came up the steps behind her, pink with cold and pleasure, apologizing to no one in particular for the quantity of the cases and trunks and contriving to drop two of them in the doorway while he did it.
"I told her a week was nothing," he said, gathering them up, "and she wept at me until I called for the horses, and now we are come a week early and I am the villain of the piece. I find I do not in the least mind."
The narrow hall filled all at once with the arrival. Mrs. Gardiner hurried out to exclaim over them, then the cases were handed in across the threshold, and the cold bright morning was let in along with the travelers.
Jane caught Elizabeth's face in both cold hands and only looked at her, the way she did when words came out too small, so that for a quarter of an hour there was no room in the house for anything but gladness.
Later with the boxes carried up and Jane and Mr. Bingley sent off to wash the road from their faces, Mrs. Gardiner sank onto the sofa Lady Catherine had left, as though her legs had been waiting all morning for leave to do it.
"Well," she said. "I dressed this morning to meet a dragon.
I have spent an hour with a sensible woman who knows muslin, and now I have nowhere to put the armor. "
"I keep waiting for the catch in it," Elizabeth said.
"I told Fitzwilliam I would not believe it until she had proved it.
And here she is, admiring your curtains and bringing me a fan and being gentle with you, and the suspicion has started to feel like meanness.
I do not want to be a woman who cannot let a person be sorry. "
Mrs. Gardiner ran her thumb around the rim of her empty cup.
"It is very fast," she said. "I will own that much.
People who have despised you do not commonly wake up mended in a fortnight.
" Then she set the cup down, and the practical warmth came back into her face, because she could no more keep hold of a suspicion without evidence than she could keep hold of smoke.
"But I cannot find the thing that is wrong with it, and I have looked.
You are to be married within the week, and if I have my way the worst this family ever does to you will be a tale you tell against your own stubbornness at Christmas. "
"It is the daughter I cannot read," Elizabeth said.
"The mother apologizes, and I believe her in spite of myself.
But Anne watches me as though I hold some great secret, and at the door she gripped my hand the way one does saying goodbye at a coach, not the way one does expecting to dine together on Thursday.
" She heard how it sounded and shook her head at her own foolishness.
"And then I think that she has spent her whole life as that woman's shadow, and of course she does not know how to make a friend, and of course she holds on too hard. I should, in her place."
"You would," Mrs. Gardiner agreed. "You did, as a child that first summer your mother sent you up to us, you would not let go of Jane's sleeve for three days together, for fear we should turn out not to be keeping you."
"You are very good at being right," Elizabeth said. "It is your least bearable quality."
"It is my only truly valuable one; I keep the bearable qualities for people who already agree with me.
" Mrs. Gardiner rose, and kissed the top of Elizabeth's head in passing, the way she had when Elizabeth was small and visiting and homesick for Longbourn.
"Be happy. You have earned the right of being foolishly, ordinarily happy, and I will not have you spend it on suspicion. "
And so the morning closed in the best humor the house had held in days with Mrs. Gardiner going up to hunt out her good shawl, and Elizabeth left a moment alone in the quiet parlor with the little fan open in her lap, two painted figures walking in a painted garden, and no reason in the world she could see not to be happy.
Across town, Anne knelt at her own grate with the drawer's contents in her lap and burned them a sheet at a time.
She had tried a fistful once, early on, and learned better. A handful only smothered the flame and charred at the edges and left the center whole, a page of another woman's name surviving in the ash for a housemaid to puzzle over.
So she fed them singly now, and watched each take, the flame finding the corner, climbing the practiced rows, turning into a curl of black that came apart when she breathed on it.
There were far more sheets than a week would account for. The oldest had gone soft and yellow at the folds. She and her mother had begun this plot at Rosings, the two of them bent over a letter by candlelight, her mother wanting Elizabeth Bennet gone, and Anne wanting what that would leave behind.
Darcy had been promised to her in the cradle and with the Bennet girl removed he would be turned back toward Rosings, toward his cousin, and Anne would be carried out of her mother's house on his arm to Pemberley, into rooms so far from this one that her mother would have to be invited and could be refused.
She had practiced the hand until it was faultless because everything she meant to have depended on it. No one had set her to this against her will. She had run to meet it.
In the mews below her window, she could hear them making the plain carriage ready. It was the same one she had ridden to the dressmaker's, stripped of its crest these months past and never given it back.
In but a few hours it would do the single piece of work the whole autumn had been spent preparing it for. Anne fed the next sheet to the flame and was careful not to let her hand shake.
The last sheet went up. The real card, the good one, the only one that signified, was already where it needed to be, waiting on two o'clock.
Anne stayed kneeling at the cooling grate a while longer, and then she rose, and washed the ash from her hands at the basin, and went down to sit with her mother and wait for the afternoon to come.