Chapter 17
Lady Matlock arrived with a calling-card and a manner that announced nothing but an aunt-by-marriage paying an overdue social call on her newly arrived relations.
She was not in the least surprised, and took care to seem a little disappointed, when the footman regretted that her ladyship was resting before dinner.
“Then I shall sit with Miss de Bourgh, if she is at home,” said Lady Matlock comfortably, already drawing off her gloves, “for I have hardly had two words with the dear girl since they came up, and I am not so pressed that I cannot wait a little on the chance of Catherine’s coming down.
No, you need not announce me, I know the way to a drawing-room, I should hope, at my age. ”
And she went up before the man could shape an objection, because a countess in motion is very difficult to stop and she had counted on that too.
Anne was in the small sitting-room with a book, and she rose at the sight of Lady Matlock with a start that she covered almost well enough. “Aunt. We did not... that is, my mother is resting. She will be sorry to have missed you.”
“She will not, and neither shall I, for it is you I find I wanted,” said Lady Matlock, settling herself into the better chair with the air of a woman who meant to stay exactly as long as suited her.
“Sit, child, sit. We shall have a comfortable hour. Ring for some tea, or no, do not trouble the house; I see you have a pot there scarcely touched, and I never could abide a fresh pot made for one old woman’s whim.
I shall take a cup of yours, if it is not quite cold. ”
So they sat, the two of them, over a pot of cooling tea, and Lady Matlock made the kind of conversation she had been making for forty years, the conversation that seems to be about nothing and is, in the hands of an expert, a slow and thorough taking of inventory.
She asked after Anne’s health and watched her answer. She admired the townhouse, so well arranged, so quickly, they must have worked wonders to have it all in such order so soon, and watched Anne’s eyes while she admired it.
She spoke of the season, of who had married whom, of a scandal in a family they both knew; and under cover of the chatter she was reading the girl across from her the way she read a difficult room, noting the held breath, the cup taken up too often and drunk from too little, the way Anne’s gaze went again and again to the door as though her mother’s appearance were a thing to be longed for and dreaded in the same instant.
“And poor Miss Bennet,” Lady Matlock said, at last, lightly, as though it were merely the next thing in the chain of small talk.
“You will have heard. Such a wretched business, taken so ill, and the wedding put off, and the whole family in such distress. I have been sitting with her aunt. I came here this morning, if I am honest, half to get an hour away from grief and into a young person’s company. ” She let that sit a moment.
“You met her, I think? Before she was taken ill. Catherine brought you to call.”
“Once or twice.” Anne’s voice had gone careful. “She was very lively.”
“She is the most lively creature I have met in twenty years,” Lady Matlock said, and for a moment let the true thing show under the social one, because she wanted Anne to feel the weight of the person they were discussing.
“It is the cruelest part of it. To see a young lady so vibrant made so quiet.” She watched the word land. “You are fond of her too, I think. You have the look of someone who took to her.”
“I — yes.” It came out before Anne could govern it, and she looked, for an instant, stricken at having said it, and reached for her cup again though it was empty.
Lady Matlock set down her own cup. She did it without haste and in the quiet after she looked at Anne directly, the whole of her attention turned and steady.
The look she had spent a lifetime learning to level at a person when she wished the truth out of them, and she said very gently, in the voice one uses for a confidence between women who are fond of one another, “I sent no cordial, Anne.”
She did not say anything else. She had decided, in the carriage, that she would not, that she would lay the one true sentence down between them and add nothing to it, no accusation, no question, no softening, and let the silence do the rest.
For a question can be answered and an accusation can be denied, but a fact, set down quietly by someone who plainly knows it for a fact, leaves a guilty person nowhere at all to stand. So she set it down and waited, and kept her eyes on Anne’s face.
And Anne could not meet her gaze.
That was the whole of it, that was everything.
The girl’s eyes dropped, not in the ordinary way of a shy woman’s glance falling, but the way a thing falls that has had its support struck out from under it, and a slow tide of color came up her throat and into her face, and her hands closed on one another in her lap, and she looked at anything in the room that was not the steady kind terrible eyes of the woman across from her.
Anne did not deny it. She did not ask what cordial or I do not understand you or any of the dozen things an innocent woman says in the first half-second, easily, without thinking, because the body produces them before the mind is even engaged.
She said nothing at all, and her silence was a full confession, and avoiding the eyes of her aunt was the signature on it.
Lady Matlock felt the last of her hope go, for she had carried, under the certainty, one small treacherous wish to be wrong, the wish of a woman who did not want it to be her own family after all, and felt it go quietly, and was surprised by the steadiness with which she bore it.
Lady Matlock had her confirmation. It had cost her one sentence and a silence, and it was complete, and it would never stand up in any court or be of the slightest use as evidence, and she did not care, because she had not come for evidence. She had come to be sure.
For a moment she very nearly reached across and took the girl’s knotted hands. There was a part of her, the part that had buried a daughter, that knew an unhappy child when one sat shaking in front of her.
She saw in Anne not the architect of a monstrous thing but a creature who had been made into an instrument of it, and pitied her, and wanted to say so.
She did not. It was not the hour for it, and the pity, however real, would have to wait behind the colder business of the next days. She only let the silence hold a moment longer, long enough that Anne should know, past any doubt, that she had been understood and then she gathered herself to go.
“I have stayed too long,” Lady Matlock said, rising, in precisely the easy social voice she had come in with, as though the last two minutes had not occurred, for she had no wish to leave the girl in a state the returning mother might read, and a countess’s composure, resumed, can paper over a great deal.
“Give your mother my card and my regrets that I missed her. Tell her I shall hope to see her very soon indeed.” She drew on her gloves. At the door she paused, and looked back once at Anne, who had risen too and stood white and wretched by her chair.
And what Lady Matlock said then she said almost kindly, which was somehow the worst thing she could have said. “Take care of yourself, child. You do not look at all well. I think you have been carrying something a great deal too heavy for you, and for a great deal too long.”
And she went out, and down, and gave the footman a pleasant parting, and was handed into her carriage, and did not let so much as a tremor into her face until the door had shut and the horses had taken her round the corner and out of sight of every window of that house.
She drove straight to Matlock House and went straight to her husband’s study, where the Earl was at his correspondence, and shut the door behind her, which she did not commonly do.
“Henry,” she said. “Put down your pen.”
He looked up and put it down at once. Years of marriage had taught him the registers of her voice, and this was one he had heard only a handful of times, and never over anything small.
She came to the desk, and from her muff she took the folded card, and laid it on the leather in front of him, as one lays down evidence.
“That card is written in my hand,” she said. “But it is not my hand. It was given to Elizabeth Bennet at her fitting, with a cordial, in my name and with my love, neither of which I sent. She drank it, and within the quarter hour she was carried out of that shop and has not been seen since.”
She drew a breath. “I have just come from sitting with Anne. I told her I had sent no cordial. I did not ask her a single question. She could not look at me, Henry. She could not say one word. I have my answer, and so have you, though I am aware it is not the sort of answer that one can take to a magistrate.”
The Earl looked at the card on his desk for a long time.
He was not a quick man, his wife had married him in part for the particular slowness that meant a thing once settled in him stayed settled, and she let him take his time, and watched the understanding go through him, and the disbelief, and the thing under the disbelief, a sick recognition.
He knew his sister, and some part of him had perhaps always known she was capable of precisely this and had simply prayed never to be shown it.
“My sister,” he said at last. It was not a question either.
“Your sister. And that poor wretched girl doing her bidding, who I do not think has slept a night through since it was done.”
He was silent again, longer this time, his hand resting beside the card without touching it. When he spoke, it was in the flattened, careful voice of a man holding a great anger still because he knew that to let it move now would be to waste it.
“We will need Darcy,” he said. “And we will need Richard. Tonight, or as near to it as can be managed. But carefully, Margaret, very carefully, for if Darcy hears this with his blood up he will be at Catherine’s door within the hour.
If Catherine takes fright, there is no telling what she does with Miss Bennet. We must know the whole of it before we move, and we must move all at once when we move.”
He looked up at his wife. “You have done a remarkable thing today. Now we must do the hard part, which is to do nothing for a few hours more.”