Chapter 12
By the fifth day, the search had taken on the character of a man feeling along a wall in the dark for a door he is no longer certain exists.
Sable had done what a Bow Street man could do and reported, in his economical way, that he had done it. The coaching inns gave nothing, the livery stables gave nothing, the turnpike books for every road out of London gave a great deal of traffic and not one closed carriage that wanted explaining.
He had begun, now, on the harder and slower work, the letting-agents, the houses newly opened or newly staffed, the question of who in the past two months had taken a residence and filled it quietly with strangers, but this was a labour of weeks, and they did not have weeks, and he did not insult Darcy by pretending otherwise.
Colonel Fitzwilliam had walked half of London on his own account, calling in every discreet favour a soldier of his standing could call, and had narrowed the field of the possible by a great deal and the field of the actual by nothing at all. The dark had been mapped. It had not been lit.
What could be done in the daylight, Lady Matlock did. This was its own kind of warfare, and she was its general, and Darcy had come to understand in those days that the battle for Elizabeth was being fought on two fronts at once.
The hidden one, in lanes and letting-offices, for her person; and the open one, in morning-rooms and across teacups, for the thing that would matter just as much if they ever got her back, which was her name.
A young woman who vanished eight days before her wedding was a scandal that would outlive any number of recoveries; a young woman taken ill, nursed quietly by a devoted family, her wedding postponed for her health, was merely unfortunate.
The difference between the two was a story, and the story had to be told, over and over, in exactly the right voice, by exactly the right people, to exactly the right rooms and there was no one in England better placed to tell it than the Countess of Matlock, who had spent a lifetime learning which sentence, dropped where, would travel.
So she called on the women whose drawing-rooms set the temperature of the Season, and she spoke of dear Miss Bennet’s sudden illness with precisely the measured warmth of an aunt who is concerned but not alarmed, for alarm is contagious, and curiosity feeds on it, and a countess who seemed worried would have set a dozen tongues working before her carriage reached the corner.
She let it be understood that the wedding was merely deferred; that the family was united and calm; that she herself had every expectation of standing up at the ceremony before the summer was out.
She was so good at it that Darcy, watching her come away grey-faced and exhausted from an afternoon of seeming serene, understood that she was spending herself as hard in those rooms as her son and Sable spent themselves in the lanes.
Lady Matlock knew the truth, that much they had given her, because she could not have fought the open war without it, and because she was family in the way that counted.
She knew Elizabeth had been taken. She did not know how. She had not the particulars, for the particulars were few and ugly and Darcy had a horror of multiplying the people who carried them.
And so she went into the drawing-rooms armed with the great fact and ignorant of the small ones, never dreaming that the smallest of them wore her own name and her own hand, and was not in any drawer or any evidence-box or any man’s keeping at all.
The threat, when it came, came from the one quarter the cover story could neither manage nor reach. Longbourn.
It was the great structural mercy of the whole catastrophe, and Darcy was clear-eyed enough to be grateful for it even while it shamed him, that Elizabeth’s family lived two days’ hard travel away in Hertfordshire and had not been expected in town until the very eve of the wedding.
The distance was the cover’s ally. It meant a lie could be maintained in letters, which can be composed and corrected and made to hold their face, rather than in person, where Mrs. Bennet’s nerves would have brought the entire edifice down in an afternoon of weeping and proclamation.
But the distance was also the cover’s single greatest danger, for the same reason. A family held at arm’s length by letters is a family that begins, in time, to wonder why.
Jane had been writing those letters from the first night, and the writing of them was its own slow torture, for Jane could not lie to her father with any of the ease Lady Matlock brought to a drawing-room.
She loved him, and she had never deceived him in her life, and now she sat each evening and built a small false world in ink of Lizzy mending slowly, Lizzy not yet equal to writing herself, Lizzy sending her love, and sealed it, and hated it.
His answer to the third such letter came up by the afternoon post, and Jane read it standing in the hall and had to put her hand to the wall.
He wrote, her father, in the dry affectionate voice that had raised her, and under the dryness, plainly, the first stirrings of a mind that did not believe what it was being told.
He had heard, he said, that Lizzy was unwell; he had now heard it three times, in three letters, each a little more careful than the last, and he had begun to notice that a daughter who was merely unwell generally contrived to take up a pen and say so herself, and that Lizzy in particular had never in her life let an illness keep her from telling her father exactly how unjustly she was suffering under it.
He did not wish to be troublesome. He had every confidence in Jane and in the Gardiners.
But he found he should be a great deal easier if he came up to town himself, only to sit by the sickbed, only to see his girl’s face, and he proposed to do so by the end of the week, unless Jane could give him some very good reason why he should not.
It was, Jane saw at once, the most dangerous sentence anyone had yet written in the whole affair, and it had been written by the gentlest man she knew, out of nothing but love.
Unless Jane could give him some very good reason. If he came, he would see in an hour what no letter could hide, that there was no sickbed, that the house was a house in mourning for someone not yet dead, that they were all of them lying.
And if he came, her mother came; that was not in question. Mrs. Bennet could no more be left behind while her husband visited a desperately ill daughter than she could be persuaded to whisper.
If her mother came, then within a day the news would be all over town in the very way Lady Matlock was killing herself to prevent, because Mrs. Bennet could not hold a secret any more than she could hold back the tide, and would not have understood, even if it were explained to her, why she must.
Jane took the letter to the back parlour, where Darcy and her aunt and uncle were sitting, and read it aloud, and watched the same understanding settle over each of their faces in turn.
It was Mrs. Gardiner who spoke first, because she knew her brother-in-law best. “He has stopped believing us,” she said. “Not all at once, and not unkindly. But he has stopped. That letter is a man giving us one last chance to tell him the truth before he comes and finds it.”
“Then we must keep him in Hertfordshire,” Darcy said, “and we must do it without giving him the truth, and we must do it in a way that does not, itself, tell him there is a truth to be kept.” He heard how it sounded.
“I am asking Jane to deceive her father more cleverly than she has ever deceived anyone, on no notice, in a single letter, with everything resting on it. I know what I am asking.”
“You are asking me to keep my father safe and ignorant in the same sentence,” Jane said, “and to keep Lizzy’s name safe by keeping him away from her when she has more need of her family about her than she has ever had in her life.”
She was very pale, but her voice did not shake; Jane’s gentleness had always been mistaken, by people who did not know her, for weakness.
“I will write it. I can think of the reason, Lizzy is mending but the doctor counsels absolute quiet, no excitement, no visitors, that the smallest agitation sets her back, and that she has particularly asked, in her weak way, that her father not see her brought so low, and would so much rather he came for the wedding, when she is herself again, and well, and can meet him on her feet.”
Her mouth twisted. “It is monstrous. It uses his love for her against him, and it uses her name in a thing she never said. I shall be ashamed of it the rest of my life. And it will work, because it is exactly the kind of thing she would say, and he knows it, and that is the cruelest part, that the lie fits her so well he will believe it because it sounds like love.”
She wrote it that night. It was the best letter any of them composed in the whole of the affair, and the one Jane could least bear to have written, and it bought them, they could only guess, perhaps a few days more.
In the barred room across the city, the pressure that day took a form Elizabeth had not been braced for, because she had braced for cruelty, and what came instead was patience.
Lady Catherine made her usual midday visit and found the paper as dry as she had left it, and did not scold, and did not threaten, and did not so much as frown.
She sat and said, with every appearance of kindness, that Elizabeth was not to distress herself about the letter; that there was no hurry in the world; that she might take a week, or a fortnight, or a month, for it made no difference at all to Lady Catherine, who had a great deal of time and a great deal of patience and nowhere in particular she needed to be.
“Take all the time you require,” she said, rising. “I find I have come almost to enjoy our little visits. It would be a pity to rush a thing that is doing so nicely on its own.”
And she went out, and the locks fell to, and Elizabeth sat with the words and felt the floor of her own strategy give way beneath her.
For she had built everything on patience. She had told herself, that first terrible afternoon, that a thing made slowly might be unmade, that her business was to keep her wits and her temper and wait, that time was the one ally the room had left her.
She saw now, with the cold completeness of a sum worked out at last, that she had read it exactly backward.
Lady Catherine did not need her to sign.
Lady Catherine needed only the calendar.
Every day Elizabeth held out, sane, and steady, and admirably unbroken, was a day nearer the wedding that would not happen; and the wedding that did not happen was the thing that ruined her whether she ever set pen to paper or not.
Lady Catherine had not to break Elizabeth at all. She had only to outlast the date, and the date was coming, and there was nothing on the far side of it that Elizabeth’s courage could reach back and save.
It was the worst hour she had passed in that house, worse than the waking, worse than the barred window, because it took the one thing she had been quietly proud of, her steadiness, her refusal to bend, and showed it to her working in her enemy’s hand as faithfully as the locks and the window.
Her courage was being made to keep her. The longer she lasted, the more completely she lost.
She did not weep. She sat with it until she had taken its full measure, because she had learned that a danger looked at squarely was always smaller than the same danger glimpsed and fled from, and when she had looked at it long enough, she found there was, after all, one thing in it she could still hold.
They might outlast the date. They could not outlast it forever; a house kept thin and a secret kept by few would, in time, show through, and she had only to be there, whole and watching, on the day it did.
And there was Darcy, who was turning the city over, she knew it the way she knew her own name, and who would not stop, not for the date, not for a month of dates, not while there was a single stone in London he had not lifted.
Lady Catherine was counting on the calendar. She had left out of her arithmetic the one figure that did not appear in any almanac, that the man Elizabeth was to have married did not know how to give a thing up.
She drew the chair round, and uncapped the ink, and did not write Lady Catherine’s letter. She added a line to her own, the hidden one, the one under the desk, telling Darcy what she had worked out about the calendar.
That she had decided not to be afraid of it, and that he was to hurry, please, not because she was breaking, but because she would so much rather be found than wait to be released.
And she had never in her life been good at the waiting kind of courage and saw no reason to become good at it now.
Then she hid it again and set the pen its half-inch off the square, and sat down to wait in the only way she had ever been able to, as though waiting were a thing she was doing to them, and not a thing being done to her.