Chapter 6 #2
She took them through. The little back room stood as Mrs. Gardiner had ordered it left; the gown finished on its form by the window, Elizabeth's dress, her shoes, the chair, the stand, the cup of water.
Darcy stood in the doorway and did not go in at once.
He looked at the low door in the corner, and crossed to it, and opened it on the yard, and stood a moment in the cold draught measuring with his eye the distance to the gate.
Then he came back and took up the water cup and set it down, and looked at the gown a long time, and touched nothing else.
“Who carried the lady her cordial?” he said.
“The girl. Sarah.” Madame twisted the muslin. “A good girl, monsieur, a steady hand, three years with me. Her mother is ill and she does not miss a day, I would have sworn to her before the King.”
“Send for her.”
Sarah came in wiping her hands on her apron from habit, though they were clean, and stopped when she saw the tall stranger and went white.
She had the sleepless look of a girl nursing somebody at home, and her eyes went from Darcy to Madame and back, and her hands would not be still.
“No one blames you,” Darcy said, and made himself gentle, because a frightened girl forgets, and he could not afford her to forget.
“You will not be turned away for any answer you give me, you have my word on it. I want only what you saw. The cordial you gave Miss Bennet today, when did it first come into your hands?”
“Yesterday, sir.” Her voice was small. “In the afternoon. A lady brought it.”
Mr. Gardiner's coat rustled where he stood by the door. Darcy did not move at all. “A lady. Tell me of her.”
“She come to the counter, no carriage at the door, sir, and no maid with her, which I did think on after, a lady so fine and no maid, and she had a veil down, a thick one, so I never saw her face, not once, the whole time. She knew my name.” The girl swallowed.
“She knew Mother was poorly. She asked for me by name, sir, Sarah, the girl whose mother is poorly, and I could not have told you then nor now how a veiled lady come to know it.”
“What did she give you?”
“A little case, velvet, and in it the bottle, dark glass, stoppered and sealed with a red seal, and the card folded by it. And she told me what I was to say, that it come from a lady who wished her every joy, and the card would explain the rest, and no fuss to be made, and Miss Bennet was to drink it down there in the quiet of the room before the jolting of the carriage undid the good of it. She had me say it back to her twice over till I had it right.”
Sarah’s face crumpled. “And she gave me money, sir. A great deal of it. More than ever the errand was worth, for my trouble, she said, and a proper doctor for Mother, a real one and not the parish man. And I, God forgive me, sir, I thought her the kindest creature in London. A sad, quiet, kind sort of lady. I never thought a wrong thing of it. Why would I? It was a wedding gift.”
It was the worst of it, and Darcy heard it for what it was. The girl had stood at her own counter and taken the whole thing into her hands.
The veil, the missing maid, the sender who had left no name to be repeated, the over-payment, the careful drilled words, and felt nothing but gratitude, because she had been chosen precisely for a heart too burdened to suspect a kindness.
He did not say so. There would have been a cruelty in it past bearing, and no use in the cruelty.
“The card,” he said. “She held it in her own hands not a quarter of an hour before she was taken out of this room. Where is it?”
And there began the second search of that evening, which came to nothing at all. Madame had not seen it; she had been out of the room for the water.
Sarah had not seen it after she set the tray down and went back to her pins.
They took the little room apart between them, and at the last Darcy went over the floor of it himself on his knees with Mr. Gardiner holding the candle low, under the chair and the stand and the skirting and along the black gap beneath the press; and there was the cup of water, and the chair, and the gown standing finished on its form by the window, and there was no card in that room anywhere.
He got up off his knees and stood a while looking at the place. A thing had come into this room in a girl’s two hands and gone out of it again, and every other object the afternoon had touched was sitting exactly where the afternoon had left it.
Either they had thought that card worth the four seconds it would have cost a man to stoop for it, which meant there was something written in it that could be read against them; or it was lying within twenty feet of him at that moment and he could not find it, which he liked no better and could do no more about.
“This lady,” Darcy said, still at the window, his voice level. “Her height. Her age. Anything the veil did not cover. Her hands, her voice, the way she stood.”
Sarah shut her eyes to try. “Not tall, sir. Not young, I think, but not old neither, her voice was a lady’s voice, soft, and tired under the soft, like someone who does not sleep. She never once looked straight at the card, kept her eyes off it, like.”
The girl opened her eyes. “That’s all I have, sir. I have tried and tried to make her face come and it will not, on account of the veil. I shall carry it the longest day I live that I cannot.”
“You have given me more than you know,” Darcy said, which was true, and not a comfort, and he saw it was not, and let her go all the same. There was nothing left in her, and frightening more out of her would only spoil what little there was.
Madame he kept a moment longer and put the three questions that remained, whether the veiled lady had been seen to come or go by any other soul, whether anyone had asked after the day’s appointments, whether the two o’clock fitting stood written anywhere a stranger might have read it.
To each Madame swore she knew nothing, no, no, with a vehemence that was its own kind of evidence; for a woman lying to save herself does not weep so freely over the parts that damn her own carelessness.
It was full dark when they left, Darcy carrying the bottle buttoned inside his coat and the missing card in his mind.
The yard gate gave onto a lane, and the lane ran out onto three streets and a coaching mews and the whole churning anonymity of the city, and had swallowed a carriage, the way it swallowed a hundred a day.
There was nothing more to be found by lantern-light, and they did not pretend there was.
They had left money with Madame, and a story to go with it, a young lady’s faint, a family’s wish for quiet, and Madame, frightened and grateful and careful to ask no question she did not want answered, had taken the one as readily as the other.
So they built it that night, over a cold and largely untouched dinner, the lie that would have to stand for as long as the silence did. Miss Bennet had been taken ill at her fitting, a sudden collapse, a low fever, the physician unwilling to answer for her if she were moved or troubled.
Absolute quiet. No callers. The wedding put off, only put off, a fortnight, a month, as long as the illness ran.
There were letters that would have to be written, and faces that would have to be kept, and a hundred small daily lies to be told to servants and tradesmen and friends, each of them another brick in the wall they were raising around her absence.
Someone asked, low, about Georgiana. Darcy said he had sent her home to Darcy House before he came, with an easy story of Elizabeth being unwell and the evening spoiled and that what he would tell her once the days of being unwell began to mount, he did not yet know.
He said it flatly, as one more item on the list, and Mrs. Gardiner understood that he had set it down so plainly only because he could not yet afford to pick it up.
It was long past midnight when the last of it was settled into words, and the men's voices had worn down to the low careful pitch of people conspiring to save someone.
Darcy had gone at last, not because he believed he could sleep, but because there was a sister at Darcy House who would have to be faced, and a search to be set going that could be run only from his own desk and under his own name.
He had stopped at the door and looked back at them, and said that he would come in the morning, and every morning after, until she was found.
And then he had gone out into the cold to begin being whatever this was going to require him to be. The house emptied of talk, and did not fill with sleep.
Mrs. Gardiner went up at last and stopped in the doorway of the room they had readied for Elizabeth. The brushes laid out, the wedding clothes hung waiting under their holland, a novel face-down on the table where she had broken off reading that morning, certain she would come back to it.
She stood in the doorway a long while, an aunt who had given a frightened girl one small kindness, a minute to herself, and had it turned against them both.
Then she closed the door softly, so as not to wake a house in which no one was sleeping, and went to her bed, and lay in it open-eyed, and waited for a morning she already knew would bring nothing but the long day's work of pretending.