Chapter 13
The last thing the search turned up before the trail went cold for good arrived, as such things have a habit of doing, on the morning it could do the least good.
It came in a note from Sable, brought round before eight. The letting-agents had given nothing, but one of his men, working the mews and stable-yards in the streets behind the modiste’s, had at last found a hostler who remembered something of the afternoon in question.
A carriage had stood waiting that day in a yard off the lane. A closed carriage, a plain one, standing the better part of an hour where no carriage had any trade to stand, the horses kept harnessed and a man at their heads the whole time.
The hostler had marked it because the idle waiting was odd and because the vehicle itself was odd.
A good carriage, well kept, well horsed, a gentleman’s carriage by every mark of it, and yet bearing no crest, no arms, no device of any kind on the door, only the faint ghost where such a thing had lately been and was not.
Darcy read it standing at the cold window of his own house in his wedding clothes, which he had put on that morning the way a man’s hands will finish a habit his mind has not given them leave to start.
A plain carriage, stripped of its crest. He turned it over and over and could make it yield nothing. It told him the abduction had been prepared by people of means, people with a good carriage to spare and the foresight to render it anonymous, which he knew already.
But a carriage with no crest was a carriage that could not be traced; that was the entire purpose of stripping it, and the purpose had been served. There was no maker’s arms to inquire after, no device to match to a family, nothing to carry to a herald or a coachbuilder and say, whose is this?
The one fact that would have unlocked it, whose carriage, from what house, was the precise fact that had been filed away to nothing by whoever had thought to take the crest off in advance.
He stood holding the note and felt the old helpless fury rise. He had been left, once again, a true thing he could not use, a fact looking like a key and cut to fit no lock he could find.
He did not know, he could not have known, and it would have broken something in him to know, that the carriage in the hostler’s memory was a carriage he himself had ridden in, years ago, at Rosings; that the ghost where the crest had been was the de Bourgh arms, ordered taken off in the autumn by a pale woman who feared a housemaid’s memory.
And that the single thread the whole vast search had finally caught hold of ran straight back to his aunt’s door and could not be followed there by any living soul.
The one woman who could have named the carriage was sitting at that hour behind a barred window a mile away, and the one who had stripped it was breaking her fast in the house where it was kept.
He folded the note into his pocket, where it would stay all that day, and turned from the window, because it was his wedding morning, and there was no longer any work in the world that could be done before the hour the wedding would not happen.
On the morning of the eighth day, which was to have been her wedding day, Elizabeth woke at first light.
She had slept, against her expectation, quite well. She had lain down the night before with the deliberate intention of sleeping, because she had known what the coming day was, and she had wished to have her wits about her.
Elizabeth rose and washed her face in the cold water of the basin.
She took down her hair, which she had been pinning up each morning with the combs she had been wearing the day she was taken and combed it through and braided it and pinned it up again, because there was a dignity in being kept, and she meant to keep it.
She stood at the window and watched the sky slowly lighten over the roofs beyond the mews. A thin drift of snow had fallen in the night and lay in narrow white lines along the slates of the opposite houses. A pair of sparrows flew down to the cobbles and hopped about and flew up again.
Elizabeth thought of Fitzwilliam. She thought of him rising at Darcy House, of him going to a window and looking out at the same morning sky and knowing that she was somewhere under it.
I am here, she said to him, in her mind. I am here, and I am not broken, and I have not signed the letter, and I shall not sign it. It is our wedding day. I shall keep it in my heart, though we cannot keep it at the altar.
Elizabeth stood at the window a long time. When the maid came in with the tray she turned and accepted it civilly and sat down and ate her bread and drank her tea, and did not weep.
She was not yet ready to weep. Elizabeth had learned, in this room, the difference between the grief that is chosen and the grief that assails.
At midday, Lady Catherine came. She sat down, as she had done every morning and she looked at Elizabeth. She seemed almost uncertain.
Elizabeth spoke first. “It is my wedding day, ma’am.”
“I am aware of it.”
“I thought perhaps you would leave me in peace today, of all days.”
“I considered it. I considered that today you might be at last prepared to sign, and I did not wish to leave you alone with the letter at such an hour, lest the signing of it be attended by any unnecessary distress.”
Elizabeth looked at her a long moment. She had watched this woman every day for seven days, had studied her, as she had promised herself she would.
Lady Catherine genuinely believed herself to be acting from proper motives, that her cruelty was that of a woman who did not think herself cruel.
“I shall not sign the letter today,” Elizabeth said, quietly.
“Miss Bennet—”
“I shall not sign it today, ma’am, of all days. I have taken my resolution. I shall not sign this letter if you keep me here until midsummer. I have considered every possible future, and I have chosen the one in which I do not sign.”
Lady Catherine’s face did not change, but her hand, resting lightly on the letter, closed slowly around the edge of it. “If you are so confident of this, Miss Bennet, why trouble to tell me?”
“Because you came today thinking I might be at last prepared, and you should know I am not, and you should not waste any more of your mornings on the expectation. I ask you to leave me alone today. I grant you the rest of the week, if you must have it. I only ask for today.”
“You ask.”
“I do.”
“Very well. I shall not come tomorrow. I shall come again on Friday.” She rose, and did not take the letter.
“You will sign it before the end, Miss Bennet. You do not believe it yet. I am older than you, and I know how a thing proceeds. I am content to wait. I leave the letter with you. I wish you to have it before you every hour between now and Friday.”
“Take it away.”
“It stays.” She went to the door, and there she paused, and turned back. “I am sorry for you, Miss Bennet. I am sorry your day is to be spent in this manner. It was not a thing any of us had to do. It is a thing you could still, even now, end.”
“Leave me.”
Lady Catherine went out and locked the door.
Elizabeth stood at the table, looking at the folded letter. Then she took it up in both hands and carried it to the small grate where the fire was burning, and did not burn it.
She could not. If she did, Lady Catherine would only write another, and the act would have given the woman the satisfaction of knowing the letter had power enough over her to be worth destroying.
Elizabeth would give Lady Catherine no satisfaction, today of all days. She put it back on the table.
She sat down in the chair and put her face in her hands. She wept as she had not wept since she was a child, with great gasping breaths that came up out of her chest against her will.
The morning she had been meant to have, and the walk Darcy had been meant to make, and the two of them together at the altar in the fullness of it. Elizabeth had chosen the hour of weeping, and now she spent it, all of it, to the bottom.
When she had finished, she washed her face again in the cold water, and took her place at the window with her hand on the sill, and began to talk to the man who had not come round the corner that morning all the things she would have said to him as she came up the aisle on her father’s arm.
I loved you when I pretended I did not, and I loved you when I could no longer pretend. I would have come to you today. I shall come to you still.
The grey sky brightened slowly. The sparrows came back to the cobbles. When the maid brought the midday tray she did not turn, and let the woman set it down and take the old one and go without a word.
She would eat, presently. Elizabeth would not let this room, or this woman, or this day, break her. She had sworn it to him, and she meant to keep her word.
Elizabeth did not go back to the window again. She sat down at the table instead and drew the paper toward her and she moved the folded letter of surrender to the far end of the table, where it might look at the wall instead of at her, and uncapped the ink.
Fitzwilliam,
By the arrangement of the world as it stood a fortnight ago, I should be in a carriage by now with my father sitting opposite, informing me that it is not too late to change my mind.
That is his jest. It would have made me laugh this morning of all mornings, and I find I am obliged to laugh at it here instead, alone, which is not the same and will have to do.
I am writing on your aunt’s paper with your aunt’s excellent pen, which she provided me for quite another purpose and which answers this one beautifully.
I have wept already. I did it deliberately and at an hour of my own choosing and I gave it the whole of that hour, and I do not mean to do it again today, so you are not to read this and picture me sodden. I have discovered that grief will keep an appointment if one makes it firmly enough.
Now I mean to be married.