Chapter 9
On the first full day she learned the room with her hands, because it was the only ground she had and she would not lose it for want of knowing it.
She began at the window. The bar was iron and new; she set her thumb to each of the four screws and pushed until the nail bent white, and not one of them gave. She wrapped both hands round the bars and pulled, a foot braced on the wall, and it did not so much as creak.
Elizabeth let go and looked down past it into the back court three storeys below. Trodden earth, a water-butt, a dead bed where something had grown once, a wall too high to see beyond.
While she watched, a cat came along the top of the wall, picked its way the length of it, and dropped down the far side and was gone. Nothing else crossed the court the whole of the morning.
She paced the floor next, heel to toe, counting under her breath. Eleven of her feet one way, fourteen the other. She did it twice to be sure, and once more for the plain comfort of the count and made herself stop.
Her bed was stripped to the ticking, with one grey blanket, a washstand, a table and a chair. On the table lay the paper, and the stoppered ink, and a good pen set down beside them.
Laid fresh that morning, she was certain, for she had left the pen a half-inch off the square the night before, and here it was set true again by a hand that had come and gone without her hearing it.
Elizabeth did not touch it. She drew the chair round to the far side of the table instead, so that she sat with her back to the paper and her face to the door.
The locks turned at midday, the lower first, deep and slow, the upper after, quick and light, a new lock on an old door, and Lady Catherine came in.
“You have not begun,” she said, with a glance at the dry pen.
“I do not mean to begin.”
“You will find the want of occupation wearing, in time. The letter would give you something to do.” Lady Catherine sat, unhurried, and arranged her skirts.
“I have written out the substance of it for you, that you need not labour over the wording, only the hand need be your own. You have reconsidered. You were never equal to what the match would ask. You have gone away of your own will and beg not to be sought. He knows your hand.”
“He will know it for a lie in the reading of it.”
“He will know your hand. That is enough to begin the doubt, and doubt is a patient worker. It does not need to win the first day.” She rose. “I shall leave it with you. You have a great deal of time, Miss Bennet.”
“Then I shall spend it not writing your letter,” Elizabeth said, “and you may come tomorrow and find it not written, and the day after, and so on to the end of your patience, which I begin to think you have mistaken for mine.”
Something crossed the old face that was not quite anger, not yet. “You are unfit to be a member of this family,” she said, and went out, and the locks fell to and Elizabeth was alone with the dry pen and the paper and the whole long afternoon her gaoler had been so generous as to grant her.
It was not Lady Catherine who came again. It was her daughter.
Elizabeth had seen Anne de Bourgh and had thought her what the world thought her, a pale, slight, sickly creature, furniture in her mother’s rooms.
The woman who let herself in now, and turned the key behind her on the inside, and stood with her back against the door taking inventory of the room and the prisoner in it, was not furniture.
She looked at Elizabeth with frank, unhurried curiosity, the way one looks at an animal in a menagerie that has done something a placard said it would not do.
“You are not what I expected,” Anne said. “I expected a great beauty. Mother always speaks of you as though you had bewitched him, and bewitching, in her telling, wants a face. You have a tolerable face. It is not a face that explains anything.”
“I am sorry to disappoint.”
“I did not say I was disappointed.” Anne came a few steps in.
She did not sit. “I have been trying to understand it, and I find I cannot, and it has begun to keep me awake, which is inconvenient, as I sleep badly enough. So I have come to ask you plainly, since we are neither of us going anywhere.” She tilted her head. “How did you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Make him want you. He is not a man who wants things.
Not visibly, not in a way one can use. I have known him the whole of my life and I never once saw him want until he wanted you, and I should very much like to know what the trick of it was, because no one ever taught it to me, and I begin to think it is the one lesson that signified. "
It was so strange a question, and asked so nakedly, that Elizabeth’s first answer, the cold one that would have ended it, died unspoken. “There was no trick,” she said instead. “I argued with him. I thought very little of him for a great while and was at no pains to hide it.”
Anne looked at her. “And that is what won him?” She said it slowly, as one turning a coin to read the far side. “And if you had been agreeable. If you had sat where you were put and said what was wanted and made yourself easy to have in a room. What then?”
“Then I expect he would have married someone agreeable, and been moderately content, and never known the difference.” Elizabeth was surprised by the steadiness of her voice. “Why do you ask me a thing you could answer yourself?”
“Because I have been agreeable my whole life,” Anne said, “and it has bought me a barred window to stand a guest behind,” and stopped, as though she said more than she had meant to say.
For a moment, something showed through her eyes, raw and unguarded; then it was gone, shuttered, and she was the menagerie-visitor again.
“You will get no help from me,” she said, evenly, as if Elizabeth had asked for some.
“I want you to understand that. Whatever you may think you saw just now. I have a great deal more at stake in this house than you do, and I mean to have it.”
“I asked you for nothing.”
“No,” Anne agreed, at the door, the key already in her hand. “You did not. That is another of the tricks, I expect.” And she let herself out, and locked it, and was gone.
Elizabeth sat a long while after, and then she did a thing she had promised herself she would not do, and did it anyway, because the room had taken everything else and she would keep this one disobedience for herself.
She drew the chair back round to the paper.
She uncapped the ink. And she did not write one word of the letter Lady Catherine wanted; she wrote, instead, to Mr. Darcy.
The letter she would never send, that no one would ever carry, that existed for no eye but her own and would have to be hidden the moment it was done.
You will be turning the city over stone by stone, she wrote, and not finding me, and blaming yourself for it, and I cannot reach you to say it is not your fault, so I say it here, where you will never read it, which is the only place I am allowed to say anything true.
She wrote that she was well and that she had not signed and would not sign, that he was on no account to believe any word that came to him in her hand unless it ended with a thing only the two of them knew, and she set down the thing, their thing, the foolish private article of it, and smiled at the paper in the cold, and felt for the space of one sentence entirely herself again.
And she wrote down the one fact in her possession that was worth anything to anybody, and that there was no one on earth she could hand it to.
That the card had been in his Aunt Matlock’s hand, and that she had read it standing on a stool with pins in her hem and been so pleased by it that she had wanted a moment alone with the pleasure before she gave it away to the room.
Somebody had written that card who could counterfeit Lady Matlock well enough to bring her to tears with it. If she could put one sentence through the wall of that house, it would be that one; and she could not. So, she put it here instead, under a table, for nobody.
Elizabeth wrote that she was keeping count of the days the way he had once teased her for keeping count of his failings, and that she meant to recite the whole of this captivity back to him one morning on the gravel sweep at Pemberley and make him feel every hour of it.
She wrote until her fingers were stiff with cold and the light had begun to go.
Then she read it once, and folded it small, and went down on her knees at the table and felt along the underside of it until she found the rough place where the drawer-rail met the leg, and worked the little folded square up into the gap until it caught and held, out of sight of anyone who did not already know to look.
She rose, and brushed off her knees, and set the chair square, and capped the ink, and laid the good pen back a half-inch off the square so that she should know, in the morning, whether the hand that came and went in the night had found it.
It had not, the next morning. The letter was where she had left it.
It was the first small thing in that house that was wholly hers and that they did not know they did not have, and she found, rising to the grey light of the second full day, that a single secret kept was a warmer thing to wake to than she would ever have believed a folded scrap of paper could be.