Chapter 7
She came back to herself in pieces.
First there was a ceiling she did not know, a canopy of faded blue, water-marked in one corner, the kind of ceiling one wakes beneath in a strange inn and lies still a moment to place.
Then the headache, which was not like other headaches. It sat behind her eyes and in the roots of her teeth, and her mouth was dry as paper, and her thoughts came up slow and silted, as though she were dredging each one out of deep water.
She lay still and searched for the last thing she remembered.
The fitting room. The warm close air, and the pins. The small dark bottle, and the kind card in Lady Matlock's hand, and her aunt saying drink it, you are pale as the gown. The sweetness and the bitterness under the sweetness. A hand closing over hers, gloved, not unkind, taking hold and waiting.
Elizabeth opened her eyes the rest of the way, and sat up too quickly, and the room pitched, and she gripped the edge of the bed and was nearly sick over the side of it onto a floor that was not her own.
When it passed, she made herself look.
It was a bedroom she had never seen. A good room once, the hangings faded but fine, the furniture solid, stripped now to the bone. No glass on the wall, no candle, no fire in the grate, though the air was cold enough to want one.
One window. She rose slowly to discover she was in her chemise and nothing more. Her embarrassment at being thus in a room she did not know at least kept her from becoming sick and she pushed herself to stand. Elizabeth meant to know where she was and who had brought her here.
She crossed to the door on legs that were shaky to find it locked. Elizabeth grasped the cold knob, and tried to turn it but it did not give. The hinges were on the far side. The door had been hung to keep a person inside.
Elizabeth stood with her hand flat against it and made herself breathe and think. Someone had removed her from the back room of the modiste. Fitzwilliam must be mad with worry, her aunt and uncle and Jane and Lady Matlock as well.
And then, from the corridor beyond the door, a voice. Not raised, the words lost but the cadence unmistakable.
She knew the house now. She knew, too, exactly whose generosity it was that always had a second person brought into it, and which person she had become.
A key turned in the lock, twice, there were two locks, and the door opened. Lady Catherine de Bourgh came in as though into her own morning room.
A maid brought a chair in behind her, set it down, and went out again with her eyes cast down. Lady Catherine sat, arranged her skirts, and regarded Elizabeth with the calm, almost kindly attention of a woman who has all the time in the world and knows it.
"You will be unwell a day or so," she said. "It cannot be helped; the dose had to be certain. There is water on the stand. I would advise you to drink it, and to keep down what is brought you, because you will want your strength for being sensible, and I very much hope you mean to be sensible."
Elizabeth did not sit. She stood with her back to the barred window, because she would be damned before she sat with this woman, and she said nothing at all.
The silence went on rather longer than Lady Catherine had allowed for. "You may ask me where you are," she said at last.
"No."
"I beg your pardon?"
"You have rehearsed this," Elizabeth said.
"I have been awake perhaps an hour. I am to ask where I am, so that you may tell me it is your house and enjoy the telling.
I am to ask what you want, so that you may produce it as though it were a reasonable request. I am to weep, and be soothed, and be reminded that I am a clever girl, which you will say as though it were an affliction.
" She saw the last one land and was pleased out of all proportion.
"You have written both parts, ma'am. I decline to perform mine. You may have the room, and the keys, and the whole of my morning, but you will not have the scene you sat up composing."
Something moved behind the pale eyes and was governed. "You are a clever girl," Lady Catherine said. "It was always your difficulty."
"There, see? You could not help it. Go on."
"You will write a letter," She said it flatly now, robbed of its staging, and Elizabeth understood that she had cost the woman something small and would pay for it later.
"To my nephew, in your own hand, which he knows, so that he cannot pretend to doubt it.
You will tell him you have reconsidered; that you were never equal to what the match would have asked of you; that you have gone away of your own will and wish, above all things, not to be sought or followed. "
"And then he marries your daughter, is that what you think? He has had years to marry her and has not. ”
"That is not your concern."
"It is the whole of your concern, so it may be a little of mine.
" Elizabeth came one step off the window.
"Shall I tell you why it will not answer?
Not the letter, I will come to the letter.
Your plan, ma'am. You believe that a man who loses one woman will turn and take the nearest one, as though we were plates at a table, and he had merely to reach. But that is not what Fitzwilliam will do. You have not thought this through past the middle. You have not thought about what he becomes when I am gone, and I promise you, ma'am, whatever he becomes, it does not sit down at Rosings and ask for your daughter’s hand.”
Lady Catherine's irritation showed in her voice. "You are very confident of a man's constancy."
"I am very confident of his memory." Elizabeth found her voice had steadied entirely, which surprised her.
"And that is only the plan. The letter is stupider still.
You want a thing in my hand that he knows.
But he does not only know my hand, ma'am, he knows my mind.
He has been reading my words for a year and quarrelling with half of them.
You may make me write ‘I was never equal to it’ but you cannot forge a person, only their letters. "
And there she stopped for but a moment. The great lady before her was fairly bristling with anger, her face as red as a beet.
"There was a card, ma'am. It came with the bottle. It was in Lady Matlock's hand. Somebody made that. Somebody sat down with her letters and copied the love of a woman who has been nothing but good to me and put it in my hands to make me drink that cordial.”
Lady Catherine stood and turned to leave.
"That is a forgery," Elizabeth said, stopping her just short of the door.
"This room is imprisonment, and imprisonment is a hanging matter, but the card is a forgery, and it is written down, and it exists somewhere still.
You have built the whole of this on a piece of paper that can be laid beside a real one.
I would not sleep easily on that if I were you.
I would think about that particular piece of paper a great deal, in the small hours, and about who in this house can be trusted to have burnt every draft of it. "
It was the only moment of the interview in which Lady Catherine's face was not entirely her own. Elizabeth read it as fear for herself, and filed it away as such, and was wrong, and would not learn how wrong for a great many days.
"You have a great deal to say," Lady Catherine said, "for a woman in a locked room."
"I have a great deal to say because I have learned your plan, and because I find I am angrier than I have ever been in my life.
You called me to your home. You stood and you apologised to me by name, for particular wrongs, without one word of excuse in it.
Do you know what that cost me, ma'am? I went away in the carriage arguing with my soon-to-be husband on your behalf.
Telling him that people can change, that we ought to let you prove it, that I would rather risk being wrong about your kindness than be certain of your unkindness for the rest of my life. "
Her voice did not rise, but something in it had gone hard.
"You were building this room while I said that.
The bar was in the window. And you took my hand and asked after my gown.
I can forgive being hated. But you counterfeited being sorry, and you did it well, and you did it knowing that I would be generous.
You did not merely take me out of a shop, ma'am. You reached into me and used the best part of me.”
She stopped. "That is the thing I shall not forgive. Not the drug. Not the door. That."
The room was quite silent then. Somewhere below, a servant crossed a floor.
"You told me once that I would pollute the shades of Pemberley," Elizabeth continued.
"A woman who has drugged another woman in a public shop and carried her out a back door and hung a bar across a bedroom window has no shades left to be polluted, and I begin to think Pemberley has had its escape, ma'am, and that it was not from me. "
Lady Catherine held up her hand as if to stop the tide of Elizabeth’s accusations. She did it without haste, and she was not shaking, and when she spoke her voice was as level as it had been in her drawing room.
"You are quite right," she said. "About several things. I daresay you are right about the letter, and I am nearly certain you are right about my nephew, which I have had occasion to consider at three in the morning more than once." She smoothed her glove. “But you are still here."
She let that stand a moment, and Elizabeth felt it go into her like a knife, because it was unanswerable.
"You have had no breakfast, and a great shock, and you are very brave on an empty stomach.
Bravery is the cheapest thing in the world before the first week is out.
" She said it as a matter of long observation.
"I have a great deal of patience, Miss Bennet.
I have waited for my nephew to come to his senses; I can wait a fortnight more for yours.
You will find that a room is a better debater than either of us. "