Chapter 11
After that first visit Anne came again, and then she came as a matter of course, and within three days her coming had acquired the settled, unremarked regularity of a thing that has always happened.
Which was, Elizabeth thought, precisely how habits installed themselves in people who would have denied to the death that they had formed one.
She came in the dead middle of the afternoon, the slack hour when the house had finished its morning and not yet begun to think of its evening, and she brought her embroidery. This was new. She had come empty-handed the first time, with nothing to do but look.
Now she came armed with a hoop and a basket of silks, and set herself in the chair her mother used, and bent over her work, and stitched, badly, Elizabeth noted, with the joyless competence of a woman who had been made to learn a thing she had no love for, and between the stitches she watched.
The embroidery was a pretext, and they both knew it, and neither of them said so.
It gave Anne a reason to be in the room that was not I cannot keep away, and it gave her somewhere to put her eyes when the watching became too naked even for her, and it filled the silences, of which there were many, with the small respectable sound of a needle going through linen.
Elizabeth understood the use of it. She had her own version.
She kept her hands busy with the hem of her sleeve, which she had unpicked and was slowly, pointlessly re-sewing, because a woman with something to do with her hands is a woman who need not fill every silence with talk.
Elizabeth had decided that in this strange daily siege the one who talked least gave away least.
For it was a siege, whatever the embroidery pretended.
Elizabeth never once forgot it, not for a stitch, not for a sentence.
She sat in a barred room and was visited each afternoon by one of the two people in England responsible for her being in it, and she received these visits the way a besieged garrison receives a parley; civilly, watchfully, giving up no ground, certain that whatever the other party wanted, it was not her good.
That Anne was interesting did not make Anne safe. That the hours were less unbearable for the company did not make the company a kindness.
Elizabeth held both of these facts steady in her mind while she talked, the way she had learned to hold the count of her own breathing, because the day she let the pleasantness of an afternoon persuade her she was among friends was the day the house would have begun, quietly, to win.
It was the books that undid the careful distance, a little, against the will of both of them.
It began with nothing. Elizabeth, to fill a silence she had for once grown tired of guarding, said that she would give a great deal for something to read, that the worst of the room was not the cold nor the bar at the window but the absolute famine of print, that she had not gone four days without a book since she was old enough to hold one and had not known until now how much of her own company she kept by means of other people’s sentences.
Anne’s needle stopped.
“You read a great deal,” she said. It was not a question. There was something careful in the way she said it.
“I read whatever I can reach. My father’s library was not large, but it was unguarded, which is better. He never once told me a book was beyond me. I read a great many things I did not understand, and it did me no harm I have ever been able to find.”
“Unguarded,” Anne repeated, and there was the careful word again, held at arm’s length. “I was permitted books. A great many books. Sermons. Conduct. A history, if it taught the right lesson. Poetry, if it was the improving kind, which is to say the kind no one would read who was not made to.”
She drew the needle through and did not seem to see it.
“There was a locked case in the library at Rosings. I asked once, when I was twelve, what was in it. My mother said it held the books that were not suitable, and that when I was old enough to be trusted with them, I would not want them, and that this was the whole purpose of growing up.” A pause.
“I am eight-and-twenty. The case is still locked. I have drawn the obvious conclusion as to what she thinks of my growing up.”
It was said dryly, almost as a joke, and it was the saddest thing Elizabeth had heard in that house, and the danger of it was that her whole heart moved toward the woman who had said it before her judgment could catch the heart by the collar and haul it back.
She is your gaoler, she told herself. Her unhappiness is real, and it is also not your charge, and a clever captor need not even intend a thing for it to serve her.
And all of that was true and even so Elizabeth heard herself say, more gently than she had said anything since the door first locked, “What would you read? If the case were open and your mother in another county and no one in the world to tell you a word of it was beyond you. What would you take down first?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and it seemed to frighten her.
“I should not know where to begin. That is — ” she stopped.
“That is what she took. Not the books. The knowing what I would reach for. I could not tell you my own taste if my life hung on it, because I was never let to have one, and you cannot acquire at eight-and-twenty the thing that is only got by being left alone with a shelf at twelve.”
The silence after that was a different silence than the guarded ones.
Elizabeth let it be. She had sense enough not to fill it, not to press the advantage, for it was an advantage, and she hated that part of her mind went on coldly noting it as one even while the rest of her ached, and after a while Anne bent back to the hated embroidery, and stitched, and said nothing more, and the afternoon wore down to the hour of her going.
Anne went up to her own room afterward dissatisfied and could not have said with what.
She had got nothing she came for. She never did and was no longer sure there was a thing to get, or that there ever had been.
Anne sat at her own window, unbarred, because she was a daughter and not a prisoner, though the difference had begun to seem to her a matter of degree and not of kind, and was angrier than the afternoon could account for, and more restless.
Her mother found her there before dinner. Lady Catherine did not knock; the house was hers and so were its people, and a closed door was an oversight rather than a request.
“You have been sitting with her,” she said. It was not a reproof; it had been Lady Catherine’s own suggestion, early on. Go and look at her, Anne, take the measure of her, I should like to know from someone other than a servant how she does.
Anne had obeyed it as she obeyed everything, and only now, with her mother in the doorway awaiting her report, did she understand that she had stopped doing it for her mother and had not noticed the moment it changed.
“How does she seem?” Lady Catherine asked. “Her spirits? Is she holding to this refusal, or is the room doing its work? I had thought by now she would have begun to bend. Lonely walls teach most people a wonderful humility.”
And Anne, who had sat that afternoon with a woman more unbent than anyone she had ever met, a woman the walls had taught nothing but the precise inventory of her own cage, a woman who that very hour had reached across the whole width of the thing dividing them to ask what would you read as though Anne’s wants mattered.
Anne opened her mouth to report this, because reporting was what she did, and heard herself say, instead, in a voice quite steady, “She is wavering. She puts a brave face on it for pride, but the solitude is wearing on her. I should not be surprised if a few more days brings her to it.”
It was a lie. It was a complete and deliberate lie, the first she had ever told her mother in eight-and-twenty years of perfect, exhausted obedience, and it came out of her mouth smooth and whole, as though some part of her had been quietly manufacturing it in the dark for days against the moment it would be wanted.
Lady Catherine’s face eased into satisfaction. “Good,” she said. “Patience, then. We have a great deal of it and she has none of the things that make patience bearable.” And she went down to her dinner contented.
Anne sat on at the unbarred window in the falling dark, and did not go down, and could not for the life of her have told anyone why she had lied, only that she would lie again tomorrow, and that something in the house had shifted onto a footing from which she did not think it could be shifted back.