Chapter 20
So it was the older generation were left to do the cold work, the Earl, and the Countess, who had come on behind the rescue in her own carriage and arrived as Elizabeth’s was pulling away.
The Colonel, who had sent his two men off with the hired servants to take names and addresses and stood by the drawing-room door with his arms folded and his face shut.
They had it to themselves, the family did. That was deliberate.
Whatever was said in the next half-hour was going to be said within the blood and not beyond it, because the entire object of those days’ labour, the lie, the drawing-rooms, Lady Matlock’s grey exhaustion, had been to keep this thing out of the world, and they were not going to undo all of it now by settling accounts in front of servants and constables.
The reckoning would be a family reckoning. It was, the Earl thought, looking at his sister, almost the cruelest part of what she had done.
She had made them all complicit in the covering of it, so that justice and mercy alike had to be administered in a closed room by the people she had wronged.
Lady Catherine had seated herself. She sat in the best chair of her own drawing-room with her hands folded and her back not touching the back of it as was her habit, and she watched her brother cross to the hearth and turn.
She waited for him to begin with the composure of a woman receiving a morning call she found slightly tedious. It was the composure that undid the last of the Earl’s restraint.
“Do you know,” he said, and his voice was shaking, which his wife had heard perhaps twice in forty years, “I have spent the drive over, and the climb up your stairs, and the whole of the time since, trying to find the thing I might say to you that would reach you. Some sentence that would make you understand what you have done. And I have given it up, Catherine, on the threshold of your own drawing-room, because I have looked at your face and seen that there is no such sentence, and there never was. I have been a fool to keep believing there might be. You drugged a girl. You had her carried off and shut up behind a bar. You forged your own sister-in-law’s hand and her love to do it.
You let that boy, who you have known since he was an hour old, walk the streets of this city for days half out of his mind.
And then, Catherine, this is the thing I cannot get past, the thing he told me himself on the way here, in a voice I hope never to hear from a man again.
On the very day he should have married her, the day your work had arranged that he should spend in mourning instead, you put on your grey and you went to his house and drank his tea and sat with that broken boy and counselled him, gently, that Providence had intervened, and that he might use the pause to reconsider the match.
You advised him to give her up, in his own drawing-room, while you held her behind a bar a mile away.
And you are sitting there now as though I had come to complain of a draught. ”
“I did what no one else in this family had the courage to do,” said Lady Catherine.
“He was throwing himself away. On a girl with no family, no fortune, no name. A girl who argued with him, in company, and was admired for it. I saw what was coming. I saw Pemberley in the hands of a Bennet and the whole of what we are diluted to nothing inside a generation, and I was the only one who loved the family enough to act while acting could still avail. You call it a crime. I call it the last duty anyone in this family has done its name in thirty years. I am not ashamed of it. I am sorry it failed. Those are different things, and I will not let you bully me into confusing them.”
The Earl looked at her a long moment. “No,” he said, more quietly. “You are not ashamed. I see that. I had thought that I would find some shame in you, and I find I have to do this without it, which is harder, and which I will do anyway.”
He set his hands behind his back.
“Here is how it will be, Catherine, and you will not negotiate it, because you have nothing to negotiate with. You will leave London tonight. You will go to the house in the north, the one at Inverness, the far one, the one you have always said you would not be buried alive in, and you will live there, quietly, on an allowance I will fix and not a penny above it, and you will not come south again, not for a season, not for a wedding, not for a funeral, not for mine. You will write to no one in this family, and you will receive no one. As far as the world is told, you have retired into the country for your health.”
His mouth twisted on the word. “We are all of us, it seems, very ill this season.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Then I lay the bottle and the card and the girl’s sworn account before a magistrate tomorrow morning, and you are tried for abduction, and you hang, or you are transported, and the name you committed this crime to protect is dragged through every paper in England in the doing of it.
That is the whole of your choice. Exile, in silence, with the name preserved, or ruin, public and total, with you at the center of it. I think even you can do that sum.”
It was here that Lady Matlock came forward. She had not spoken at all. She had stood a little apart, by the window, watching her sister-in-law’s face with an attention that had nothing of triumph in it and a great deal of something harder to name.
Now she crossed to the table that stood between the chairs, and from her muff she took the handkerchief, and unfolded it, and laid down upon the table, without a word, which was the whole of its force, the small dark bottle, and beside it the folded card.
Lady Catherine looked at them. And for the first time that afternoon, not at the Earl’s anger, not at the threat of the rope, not at the failure of her command upon the stairs, something moved in her face that was not composure.
Because the card was the one thing in the room she could not meet with her doctrine. She could call the abduction a duty. She could call the failure a misfortune.
But the card lay on the table in her sister-in-law’s hand, the counterfeited love, the warm invented words about a mother and a wedding and there was no version of duty that covered it.
No high family purpose that made it anything other than what it plainly was, which was small, and sly, and personal, and beneath her, and she knew it.
“You used my name,” Lady Matlock said at last. It was very quiet.
“Of everything you did, Catherine, that is the one I will carry. You knew the girl trusted me. You knew she would drink anything that came with my love on it. So you took my love, and you forged it, and you used it as the blade. You have done a great many proud cruelties in your life and called them duty, and I have held my tongue through most of them because you are my husband’s sister, and the family asked it of me.
But you reached into the one warm thing I had given that child and you turned it into the instrument of her ruin, and that was not duty, and we both know it, and I will never call it anything but what it was. ”
She did not raise her voice through any of it. “There is one thing more you have of hers, and you will give it to me now.”
Lady Catherine did not pretend to misunderstand.
After a moment she reached to the chain at her own waist, where a small thing hung, and unclasped it, and held it out, her sister Lady Anne Darcy’s brooch, the dark stone catching the lamplight as it had caught the carriage-lamp the night a happier Elizabeth had first shown it to Darcy.
“It is a Darcy jewel,” she said. “It was never the Bennet girl’s to wear. My sister wore it at Pemberley when she was its mistress, and it had no business at the throat of a woman who—”
“It had every business there,” said Lady Matlock, and took it out of her hand, “because Anne Darcy would have loved that girl on sight, which is the one thing you and I can say with certainty, since Anne Darcy loved everything you have ever hated. It goes back to Elizabeth. She will wear it when she marries your nephew, which she will do, very soon, and in great happiness, and you will be six hundred miles away and will not be told the date.”
She closed the brooch in her hand.
The recovery of it seemed to cost Lady Catherine more than the bottle had, more even than the card, this last token of the sister she had outlived and could not, even now, stop trying to keep, and Lady Matlock saw that it did, and was not sorry.
There remained Anne.
She had come into the room at some point during her uncle’s sentence and stood just inside the door, and no one had sent her out, and she had not tried to go.
Anne stood now waiting to hear what was to be done with her, and the Earl turned to her, and his face, which had been iron for her mother, did not soften so much as change, became uncertain, which on that decisive man was its own kind of remarkable.
For her case was not her mother’s, and they all knew it, and none of them knew quite what to make of it. She had done the things her mother asked, had run to do them.
And she had also, at the last, undone it, had spent in one moment the whole of the safety she had spent her own soul to build, and handed Elizabeth back to the world.
It was the Earl who said the thing none of them had yet said and he said it looking at his niece.
"You did this to have him."
Anne was not shy, she answered him as if she had been waiting to tell her part of the crime.
“I did this to have Pemberley, which is not the same thing, and is worse. I have never in my life wanted my cousin. I have loved him, but never romantically. I wanted a house far from Rosings with a door I was permitted to shut. He was the only road to it that anyone ever showed me, and I told myself for two years that if I could not be loved I might at least be at peace in a home of my own.”
She said it without any appeal in it, and without dropping her eyes, which was new. "You may put that in the account. It is the true one, and I would rather you had it from me than worked it out afterward."
It was the Colonel who spoke then, from his place by the door, the first thing he had said in the room.
“She goes north with her mother,” he said.
“Not as a punishment. As the only place there is. She cannot stay in town; she cannot be left at Rosings, which I am taking in hand now, on the family’s account, until it can be settled what becomes of it.
And she will not be turned out into the world alone with nothing, whatever she has done, because we are not her mother and we do not do things that way. ”
He looked at Anne, not unkindly. “You will go to Inverness. You will have your own portion of the allowance, paid to you and not through her, so that you are not at her mercy for your bread the way you have been your whole life. And when she dies, and she will die first, cousin, they always do, you will be of an age to do as you like with what is left of your life, which is more than you have ever been permitted before. It is not much. It is not a reward; you have not earned one. But it is a door that is not locked, and you opened one of those today for someone else when you had every reason not to, so I find I am willing to leave one open for you.”
Anne looked at him, and then at her uncle, and then, last, and longest, and with something in her face that none of them could read, at her mother, who had not once looked at her since the stairs and did not look at her now.
She inclined her head, very slightly, and accepted the whole of it. She had learned, at eight-and-twenty, on a staircase, the one freedom no allowance could buy her, which was that she need not ever again be afraid of that voice in the hall.
Lady Catherine sat through all of it in the best chair of the drawing-room she would leave that night and never see again, and accepted the terms, when the Earl required her to say the words aloud, in a level voice and without a tremor.
Not because she was sorry, for she was not, and would die in the north in just that state, and they all understood that they were not watching her repent, but watching her calculate.
She had wanted to save the family from a Bennet. She had succeeded only in sending herself into exile and her daughter after her and putting Anne Darcy’s brooch back at the very throat she had taken it from.
It was the most complete defeat the Earl had ever watched anyone sustain, and he found, going down his sister's stairs for the last time, that he could not feel the triumph he had climbed them expecting, but only a great and final weariness.
And for the girl going north and not the woman, the faint unwelcome stirring of a pity he would have to decide, on some later and easier day, what to do with.