Chapter 15
Lady Matlock came to Gracechurch Street the day after the wedding day, because she had learned, across a long life, that the day after is worse than the day itself.
The day itself is terrible to hold. It is the morning after, when the dreaded hour has come and gone and changed nothing, that the strength a person has been hoarding gives way.
Lady Matlock had buried a daughter, many years before, in the first winter of the girl’s life, and she had learned then the cruelty of the second morning, and she had never forgotten it.
It was this knowledge, more than any other, that put her into her carriage and brought her east to a merchant’s house in a street she would not, a month before, have known how to find.
She came without sending ahead, because a visit announced is a visit a grieving woman can refuse, and she did not mean to give Mrs. Gardiner the chance.
She came plainly dressed, with no servant but her coachman, and she asked the maid who opened the door not to announce her, and went up unattended, and found Mrs. Gardiner in the small upstairs sitting-room with her hands idle in her lap and her face turned to a window.
“No,” Lady Matlock said, as Mrs. Gardiner began the automatic motion of rising, of composing herself, of becoming a hostess.
“No, my dear. Not with me. I have not come to be received. I have come to sit with you, and you are to do nothing at all on my account, not rise, not ring, not find me anything to drink, not be well. I had a notion you might have run out of people you could be unwell in front of, and I have come to be one.”
She sat in the chair beside Mrs. Gardiner’s rather than the one across from it, and did not fill the silence, and after a little while Mrs. Gardiner’s rigid composure, which had survived so many days of being needed, came quietly apart in the presence of a woman who required nothing of it.
Mrs. Gardiner did not weep loudly. She wept the way the long-exhausted weep, almost without moving, the tears coming as though some vessel had simply been filled past its edge, and Lady Matlock took her hand and held it and let her.
It was a long while before either of them spoke, and when Mrs. Gardiner did, it was in the wandering, unguarded way of a person too tired to govern the direction of her thoughts.
“I keep going back to the fitting,” she said.
“That afternoon. I have gone over it so many times I have nearly worn it through. It was such an ordinary afternoon, you understand. That is the cruelty of it. She was so happy, and so well, and so very nearly a bride, and I sat there in that warm little room being pleased with the whole world, and I let her be taken not ten feet from me, and I have not yet found a way to live with that, and I do not expect I ever shall.”
“You could not have known,” Lady Matlock said, gently, the thing everyone had surely said to her a hundred times, and which helped not at all.
“No. So everyone tells me.” A ghost of something that was not quite a smile. “And do you know, the thing I keep thinking on is the smallest thing of all. The cordial.”
She turned her wet handkerchief in her hands.
“There was a card with it, and she opened it and read it and her eyes filled, I saw them fill, and I asked her who it was from, and she said presently, in that way she has when she is saving a pleasure up. She meant to tell me when she came down off the stool. And she never came down off the stool.”
She folded the handkerchief and unfolded it. “Somebody meant that girl a kindness in her last easy hour, and I have wanted a year of Sundays to find the woman and thank her for it, and there is no finding her, because Lizzy took the name away with her, and the card went wherever Lizzy went.”
She pressed the handkerchief to her eyes, and Lady Matlock let the silence be, and did not say the thing she was thinking, which was that she did not care for the sound of that cordial at all; that a gift arriving from nowhere at such an hour, from a woman nobody could name, was a thing she would want looked into.
But she was certain Darcy would have thought the same and seen to it.
It was the maid who turned the afternoon, coming up with a question about the parcel that had been standing in the hall since ten.
Madame had sent the gown home that morning. She had at last done the only decent thing left to her and had it wrapped in clean muslin and had it carried round to Gracechurch Street with a note of six lines that apologised for all of the trouble.
“I cannot,” Mrs. Gardiner said, when Lady Matlock asked her, quite gently, what she wished done with it.
“I have walked past it four times today. I know what is under the muslin. I cannot be the one to open it, and I cannot have it standing in my hall, and there is no third thing to be done, so it stands there.”
“Then I shall open it,” said Lady Matlock, “because I am not yet her aunt, and old women are useful for precisely this, and you are to stay where you are sitting.”
And she went down herself and had it brought up, and laid it along the table under the window, and turned back the muslin with her own two hands, the way one turns back a sheet.
The silk came up out of its wrapping cool and pale and entirely finished, every seam taken in and let out again to the shape of a living girl who was not inside it. Lady Matlock stood over it a moment and let herself feel the whole of what it was.
Then she took up the train to spread it straight, and something small and cream-coloured slipped from the folds of the bridal silk and landed, face upward, at her feet.
She knew the hand before she bent to retrieve it. She knew, too, that she had never written a word of it.
She read it standing at the window in the light, and read it a second time, because the first reading was only her own name coming up off the paper at her, and the second was the one that did the work.
It wished the dear girl every joy. It bade her take a little for her nerves, the way Lady Matlock’s own mother had once made her do before her wedding. It was signed, your Aunt Margaret.
She had given Elizabeth the brooch. That was hers. She remembered the warmth of the girl’s hand closing over it. She had sent nothing to any fitting.
No bottle, no draught, no kind note about nerves. And she had never in her life told Elizabeth Bennet the story of her own mother and her own wedding, for the excellent reason that there was no such story.
Her mother had been eleven months dead before her wedding.
There had been no one to make her take anything, and she had stood up to be married white and frightened and entirely unfortified, and she had never told that to a soul in sixty years because there was no fond little anecdote in it to tell.
There was only a girl of nineteen going up an aisle wanting her mother.
Whoever had written this had done a great deal more than forge her hand. They had invented, in her name, a tenderness she had never in her life been shown, and had put it into the hands of a girl who would drink down anything that came to her with that name on it.
And if it had not come from her hand, then someone had used her name.
Someone had reached into the most intimate channel of the family’s new affection, the brooch, the welcome, the aunt-by-marriage taking the country girl warmly in, and had counterfeited it, precisely, lovingly, in a forged card in a hand near enough to her own to deceive the people who knew her.
They had used that counterfeit to put something into Elizabeth’s hand that had made her, within the quarter hour, go white and strange and beg to be left alone.
Someone who knew the family well enough to know that a gift from Lady Matlock would be trusted absolutely, drunk down without a question, wept over with gratitude. Someone inside the circle of that trust, or near enough to it to wear its voice.
Behind her, in her chair, Mrs. Gardiner was still innocently grieving a kindness that had been a weapon, and must on no account be allowed to see what she had seen. And so Lady Matlock put the treacherous card into her muff, and turned round with her face entirely arranged.
“I shall have the gown taken up out of your way, my dear,” she said, in the same low register she had used all afternoon, “and then I shall leave you to sleep, for you have not slept. I shall come again the day after tomorrow.” And Mrs. Gardiner, who had not looked up, thanked her for her kindness.