Chapter 16
Lady Matlock got down the stairs and into her carriage without hurrying, because a countess who hurries is a countess who is remarked upon, and she had spent forty years not being remarked upon at the wrong moment.
She gave the coachman Matlock House. Then she drew the blind on the street side, and sat back in the dim and the rocking with the card in both hands in her lap, and permitted herself, for the length of Cheapside, to shake.
She did not go to her nephew. She thought of it, and put it aside within the half-mile, and was to be glad afterward that she had; for what she carried was not yet a fact but a violent supposition.
Darcy in that hour was a loaded thing, and a supposition put into his hands would go off before it could be aimed.
What she wanted first was her own writing-table, and her own letter-books, and an hour with the door shut.
She had them all by noon. Her letter-books going back nine years, the drafts she kept of anything that mattered, a bundle of her own returned notes that Georgiana had sent back one summer for a joke.
She spread them the length of the table under a branch of candles, though it was not yet dark, and laid the card in the middle of them, and made herself look at it as the thing it was.
It was so nearly right that no one working from the outside could have caught it; not by memory, not by comparison, not by a hundred baffled hours of holding one paper against another.
It could be caught only by the one person who wrote this hand from the inside, who did not remember how she made her letters but simply made them, and so knew without looking the dozen small unconscious things a forger could not know to copy.
And once she looked for those, they were everywhere. She never crossed a t left to right as this forger had. She crossed hers with a backstroke, right to left, a habit some long-dead governess had failed to beat out of her and she had carried all these years.
The forger had joined the th. She never joined a th, never had. The t always stood alone before the h with a hair’s breadth between them, and it was so in every letter on that table, in every year of them.
Lady Matlock sat back. The card lay in the circle of candlelight, beautiful and false, and she found her hands were not quite steady, and let them not be, since there was no one to see.
It is not mine. She had known that from the moment it came out of the folds of the gown at her feet. The hand only finished what her invented mother had already proved.
But there is a difference between knowing a dreadful thing and sitting alone at your own table with the proof of it under a candle, and the difference went through her now like cold water.
Someone had sat for hours with her letters spread out as she had just done, studying the way she made her M, learning to counterfeit the love she bore a girl she had chosen and had done it well enough to help send that girl into the dark.
Lady Matlock did not send the card to her nephew, and she did not go to him. What she sent was three lines in her own true hand, carried by her own man, to be put into no hand but Darcy’s.
Come to me at Matlock House at six, and bring with you the bottle you took from the modiste.
Tell no one but Richard. Do not come before six and do not go anywhere else first; on your love for her, do not.
I have one thing I must do alone and unhurried, and by six I shall have for you more than I have now, and a great deal more than condolence.
It is the last thing I shall ask you to bear blindly.
She sealed it herself and stood over the man while he took it, and told him to wait for no answer, which was as near as she could come to preventing one.
Then she sat at the head of her own long table, with the card face down beneath her hand, and only then, alone, did she let herself go the last step of the way.
For the question was not, now, was it forged. She had the proof of that folded in her hands. The question was by whom, and it was not, she found, a question at all, but only a name she had been declining to think for the better part of an hour because thinking it made it real.
Consider what the thing had required. Not merely skill with a pen, though it had required that. It had required knowing that Lady Matlock had taken Elizabeth up, that there was an affection there warm enough and public enough that a gift in her name would be trusted without a breath of question.
It had required knowing the family from the inside, its new tendernesses, the very fact of its kindnesses.
It had required knowing, too, that she herself would not be at the fitting to be thanked or contradicted, though that, she granted, was no great feat of intelligence.
Any soul in the family knew a countess did not attend a girl at her pins.
And it had required something colder and rarer than knowledge. The particular conviction, held hard enough to act on, that this marriage was a wrong to be undone by any means whatever. That a girl who had presumed to it was not a person to whom the ordinary forbearances were owed.
Lady Matlock ran the whole family through her mind, every soul in it with the wit and the motive and the want of scruple to do this thing, and the list was not long, and at the end of it there was exactly one name, and it had been there from the beginning, and she had simply not wanted it.
Only one woman in the family hated this marriage enough to break the world over it. Only one had spent the last year telling anyone who would listen that it was a pollution and a disgrace.
Only one had the cold certainty of her own rightness so complete that she could forge another woman’s love and feel herself, in doing it, the injured party.
And only that one, this was the stroke that turned suspicion into the thing past doubting, would have used Lady Matlock’s name to do it.
Who would have reached past every other hand she might have counterfeited and chosen, with the unerring instinct of an old rivalry, to commit the crime in the name of the sister-in-law she had spent thirty years resenting for being better loved.
“Catherine,” Lady Matlock said aloud, to the empty room, and the saying of it was a confirmation, the click of a key she had felt turning since the card first came up off the floor into her hand.
Her sister-in-law. The mistress of Rosings, who had come so meekly to town with her apologies and her opened townhouse, and asked so warmly after the wedding. All of it a practiced lie, the worst intentions wrapped in silk, given with contrived reconciliation.
She did not have it proven. A hand she could swear was not her own was not the same as a hand she could swear was Catherine’s.
A name reasoned to alone was not a thing one could lay before a magistrate, or even before a grieving family, and be believed.
She would need confirmation, something nearer to certainty than her own ear and her own deductions, something that would stand when she said it aloud to her husband and her nephew and watched their faces refuse to believe her.
But she knew, now, where such confirmation might be got.
She knew the house. She knew, better than anyone living, how to read the face of a de Bourgh across a teacup, and she knew that Catherine de Bourgh had a daughter who had never in her life been able to lie to anyone who looked at her directly and waited.
She would go now and she would go alone, and take nothing with her but the card in her muff and her own face, and she would say not one word of it to any living soul until she had been and gone again.