Chapter 7 #2
Her eye fell on Elizabeth's neck, and caught there, seeing the brooch Lady Matlock had given her.
"This," Lady Catherine said, and reached out and pulled the ribbon, taking it from Elizabeth. "This does not belong to you."
She held it in her open palm and for a moment she was not in the room at all.
"It was my sister's. Anne wore it the first summer she was mistress of Pemberley.
I was there. I watched her husband pin it to her shawl at the top of the great stair, and I thought —" She stopped.
Whatever she had thought, she did not give it away.
The shutter came down again across her face.
"My sister's things have a way of ending up where they have no business to be," she said, "and I have spent a good part of my life fetching them home again.
You have a great many things you have no business having, Miss Bennet and before we are done, I mean to see every one of them back where it belongs. "
She pinned the brooch to the inside of her own bodice, where it would be safe, and the gesture was at once oddly tender and entirely final.
Then she was brisk again, and herself. "There is paper on the table, and ink, and a good pen.
You will find I have thought of everything you are likely to want.
Take your time over the letter." Looking back over her shoulder at the doorway, she spoke the last words before going out.
"Time is the one thing in this house, Miss Bennet, of which you have a very great deal. "
Elizabeth stood where she was, against the bar of the window, until her legs warned her she might falter, and then she sat on the edge of the stripped bed and put her face in her hands once, briefly, for the space of perhaps ten breaths and wept.
Then she dried her face and began, in the cold methodical way that was the only inheritance her father had ever given her worth the having, to take stock.
She would think about the door, and the lock, and the window, and the hours. She would not think about Mr. Darcy, because he was the single thought in the room with the power to take her wits from her, and she had more need of them, just now, than she had of him.
The tray came at what she judged to be midday, carried by a maid of perhaps her own age who would not meet her eyes, who set it down, and stepped back, and stood with her hands behind her while Elizabeth looked at the bread and the cup of weak tea.
Another young maid came in and placed a dress and slippers on the bed. She did not linger as the other one did.
"See to it that you deliver word to Lady Catherine that the young miss has been given food and clothing," the first maid instructed the second one.
When they were alone again, Elizabeth tried her. She would have been ashamed not to.
"You know that this is wrong," Elizabeth said, low and reasonable, the most reasonable she had been in the whole of her life.
"You know it. A woman is not kept behind two locks and a barred window by people who mean her well.
I am not ill, and I am not mad, whatever you have been told.
My name is Elizabeth Bennet. I am to be married within the week to Mr. Darcy of Pemberley, and there are people in this city who love me and are searching for me at this moment, and if you would carry them only one word, only where I am, there is no reward they would not —"
"Will there be anything else, miss?" the maid asked.
She said it gently. She said it the way one speaks to the sick, or the very old, or a child describing the monster beneath the bed, with a soft, practiced, sorrowful patience that had been issued to her along with her wages.
Miss Bennet's nerves had given way. The poor young lady said all manner of things. One was to be kind, and pay them no mind, and fetch her ladyship if the fits came on badly.
Elizabeth understood it then, all at once and entire.
There would be no help from this house, because every soul in it had been taught to hear her plain truth as raving.
She might scream the facts of her own life down the corridor and they would only nod, and pity her, and turn the keys more carefully behind them.
The cleverness of it stopped her breath. No dungeon, no chain, only a soft sorrowful patience, and a story told to a dozen servants, and a whole household so arranged that the saner and more certain she sounded, the madder she would be thought.
So she would not scream. She thanked the maid, in a voice as ordinary as she could make it, for if calm was the only coin this house would take, then she would be calm; she would be the sanest woman in England; she would hand them not one raving to carry to her ladyship.
And then she sat down at the table where the paper and the good pen had been laid ready for her, and she did not write the letter.
Elizabeth ate the bread instead and drank the weak tea and dressed herself. She would want her strength, Lady Catherine had said, for being sensible.
She intended, with every particle of herself, to be a very great deal more sensible than Lady Catherine had bargained for.