Chapter Seven
Day three came up gray and busy and merciful, and Elizabeth, who had spent the small hours of the night before learning things she did not want to know, was grateful for the noise of it.
The fever had broken before dawn. She had felt it go—the boy’s forehead cooling under her hand between one hour and the next, the heat sliding off him like a tide going out—and she had sat very still beside the cot until she was sure of it, and then she had cried a little, privately and efficiently, and gone to wash her face.
The surgeon had come up over the upper crossing at first light, looked at the splinted leg, and said that whoever had set it had set it as well as he could have done himself.
He ate a great deal of bread and rode back the way he had come.
Jem was sitting up by mid-morning, demanding to know whether his father had crossed yet and insisting, when his eyes watered at the answer, that he was not crying.
Outside, the lane had turned into a building yard.
Men were at the broken bridge with timber and rope, and Mr. Dawes moved among them like a conductor who did not much trust his orchestra, and over it all Mr. Collins stood at his own front step composing, aloud, a letter to the bishop—in which the late catastrophe at Hunsford was, by some private feat of grammar, becoming chiefly a tribute to the steadiness of its parson under affliction.
Elizabeth carried a jug of small beer out to the men and did not trust herself to listen to more than a sentence of it.
She found Darcy at the water’s edge with his coat off and his sleeves turned back, holding the end of a beam steady while two laborers drove a peg.
It was an unfair thing for a man to do, she thought, on a morning when she had so lately and so inconveniently revised her opinion of him. He might at least have had the decency to be useless at it.
He saw her and let the laborers take the weight and came up the bank, pushing his hair out of his eyes with the back of a wrist.
“The boy?” he said.
“The fever broke in the night. The surgeon says the leg will mend straight.” She heard how plain her own voice was and was glad of it. Plain was a thing she could manage. “He has come and gone. There was nothing left for him to do.”
“Good,” Darcy said. Just that. He looked at the beam, and the men, and the gap in the bridge, and then he went back down to the water, and Elizabeth stood with her empty jug and discovered she had nothing whatever to push against, which was becoming, she was finding, his most maddening quality.
She went back to the house.
Mrs. Poole was in the passage, and the basket was on her knee, and she was taking things out of it and putting them back.
She had been doing this for three days. Elizabeth knew the inventory by heart now.
There was the caudle, the swaddling, the good sheets, and the worked cap that had been her own mother’s.
This morning there was a new fretfulness in the doing of it, and Elizabeth sat down on the bench beside her and let her come to it in her own way, because Mrs. Poole did not say a thing until she had decided to.
“It isn’t the linen,” Mrs. Poole said at last. “She has linen. The Wicketts are not poor.” She folded the cap and unfolded it.
“It’s that there’s no one over there who has seen it go hard and come right.
The girl who does for the Wicketts is younger than my Nan.
And if it turns—” She stopped. “A first child can turn.”
“Is there no woman near them at all?”
“There is Mrs. Barrow, out past the mill. She saw both the Tyler girls through, and the second one went very ill indeed, and Mrs. Barrow brought her out the other side of it.” Mrs. Poole put the cap away as though that settled the matter and settled nothing.
“But she’s the far side of the water, same as my girl, and what’s the use of a clever woman three fields off if no one has thought to send for her. ”
Elizabeth went still.
If no one has thought to send for her.
She turned it over once, quickly, the way one turns over a coin to be sure of it.
Mrs. Barrow was on the far side—but so was the surgeon’s road, and the surgeon had come down it that very morning, over the upper crossing, on a horse.
Five miles up and five miles back was a long way on foot and a short way mounted.
A rider sent now could be at Mrs. Barrow’s by afternoon and have her to Wickett’s farm before dark, and Nan would have, on the far side of an impossible river, the one thing her mother could not carry to her in a basket.
“Wait here,” Elizabeth said, and went to find Charlotte.
Charlotte was in the kitchen with her sleeves up and confirmed it in four sentences, the way Charlotte confirmed everything: yes, Mrs. Barrow, the widow past the mill; yes, she was known for it; yes, she was kin to the Wicketts by marriage and would go without being asked twice; and yes, the upper crossing was the way, if anyone had the means to send a man and a horse that far on another family’s trouble.
Elizabeth stood in the kitchen doorway. There was only one person at Hunsford with the means to do it, and she would have to ask him. Not thank him for something already done. Ask. Heat climbed her neck. Her pride put up a short, ugly fight, and she walked out before it could win.
He was at the timber again. She said his name and he straightened.
“Mr. Darcy. I need to ask you for something.” The words came out steadier than she had any right to expect.
“Mrs. Poole’s daughter is near her time on the far side, and there is a woman—Mrs. Barrow, past the mill—who has seen difficult births through and would go to her.
She could be reached over the upper crossing by a rider, this afternoon.
I have no horse, and no man to send, and no—” her voice did catch, once, on the edge of it “—no means to send them. You do.”
For a moment he only looked at her, and she made herself hold still under it and not take it back.
“How far past the mill?” he asked.
She had expected the full weight of Pemberley condescending to be useful. She got a road question. It was what a man asks when he has already decided to act and means only to do it well.
“Charlotte will know the road exactly. A mile, perhaps, beyond it.”
He was already moving. He called one of the Rosings men up from the water by name—a steady older man—and gave him the shape of it in a few short sentences: the upper crossing, the widow Barrow past the mill, the Wickett farm, money for her trouble and money for the toll of anyone who helped her cross, and a fresh horse to be had at the ford.
He asked Charlotte two questions about the road and listened to all of both answers.
Within a quarter of an hour a man was mounted and gone up the lane at a trot, and the thing was simply done, as though wanting a thing and having it were the same motion, which for Mr. Darcy of Pemberley they had presumably always been.
Elizabeth brought the news to Mrs. Poole herself.
She had expected—she did not know what she had expected.
Weeping, perhaps, or a flood of thanks she would have to wave off.
But Mrs. Poole only stopped with the cap half-folded in her hands and was quiet a long moment, and then she said, “Mrs. Barrow,” as if trying the name in a new place, “—someone’s gone for Mrs. Barrow,” and her hands came to rest in the basket, and that was all.
It was nothing like enough. But it was something solid in a day made of helplessness, and Mrs. Poole held onto it with both hands.
Charlotte found her in the passage afterward, drying her hands on her apron, and stayed a moment, and said, not quite lightly, “There was a letter from Longbourn yesterday. Jane is well. She does not say so, of course. She never does.” A small pause. “I thought you would want to know she is well.”
Elizabeth said she was glad, and meant it.
Then the gladness caught on the old hurt: Jane at Longbourn, writing cheerful letters because that was what Jane did when she was miserable.
And the man now sending help to a stranger’s daughter was the same man who had taken the joy out of her sister’s life and called it sense.
She said nothing. Charlotte did not ask her to.
She went back outside, because outside there was at least something to do with her hands.
There was trouble at the bridge.
She heard it before she understood it—a change in the men’s voices, a lull and then a knot of low talk—and came down the bank to find Mr. Dawes crouched at the new-laid span with his hand flat on a brace, shaking his head.
The section they had pegged that morning would not hold.
Something in the way the far footing sat.
She did not follow all of it, but the gist was that the river had got under it in the night and all of that morning’s work would have to come up and be set again, lower and on different timber, or it would go down the first time a heavy man crossed with a heavy load—and the first heavy man across, everyone knew, was to be Jem’s father.
She waited for Darcy to step in as though money and height made a man a carpenter.
He did not.
He crouched in the mud beside Dawes and asked him what he saw, and then asked another question, and another, and when Dawes told him a thing he did not contradict it, and when Dawes wanted the new timber moved he took one end of it and moved it where Dawes pointed and not an inch elsewhere.
Darcy quite obviously had no more notion than she did of how to set a footing against a running river. What he had was the sense to know it, and to put himself under the direction of the man who did, and to carry what he was told to carry without needing, once, to be the one who knew.
Elizabeth watched him fetch and lift and defer, and thought, unwillingly, of her father.
She had grown up prizing wit above almost everything—had taken it, without ever quite deciding to, as the proof that a person was worth listening to.
Her father was the wittiest man she knew.
And her father, faced with such a crisis, would have found exactly the right dry thing to say from the doorway, and then trusted, comfortably, that someone else would know what to do with the bridge.
It was not that the wit was nothing. She loved the wit.
But the wit had never once braced a beam, or carried water up a hill, or asked a carpenter the right question, or stayed in the mud when there was nothing clever left to say and only the dull, necessary, unthanked work of being some use to the people in front of you.
She had spent a great deal of her life being amused by men who could talk.
She was not sure, now, that she had ever properly looked at one who could simply do, and stay, and not require to be praised for it.
By noon the morning’s work was up and the new timber was going down, and the men broke to eat, and Elizabeth went in and found Mrs. Poole crying.
Not the busy, basket-folding fretting of the morning.
This was quieter and far worse—the old woman sitting with her hands open in her lap doing nothing at all, the tears running down without any fight in them.
Elizabeth sat beside her and did not say any of the useless things.
She took one of the open hands and held it.
“She’ll tell them she’s not frightened,” Mrs. Poole said, when she could.
“My Nan. When the time comes and it’s hard, she’ll say she’s well, she’ll say don’t trouble, because her man frets and she won’t add to it.
” She wiped her face with her free hand.
“That’s what I can’t bear. Not the danger.
That she’ll be frightened with a room full of people and not let a soul see it, because she’s minding everybody but herself.
And no one over there knows her well enough to know she’s lying.
No one will think to take her hand and tell her she needn’t be brave about it. ”
“Mrs. Barrow will know,” Elizabeth said. “Women who have seen it go hard know what the brave ones are doing. She’ll mind your Nan whether your Nan lets her or not.”
Mrs. Poole looked at her, and her face eased—not much, but a degree—and she held on to Elizabeth’s hand and did not let go for a while, and Elizabeth let her, and minded her, and did not let go either.
In the afternoon Elizabeth went out once more.
The new span was taking shape, lower and broader and uglier than the first and, Dawes said, sound.
The men were roping the planking down. Darcy stood with Dawes at the far peg, his shirt filthy, conferring over a length of timber, and when Dawes gestured a question across the gap, it was to Darcy he gestured it, the two of them having arrived, over a morning, at the easy shorthand of men who have worked.
Elizabeth went down to them, in front of the laborers and Charlotte and the busy yard, and asked Darcy plainly whether the rider could be trusted to wait and bring word back across when Mrs. Barrow was safely to the farm, so that Mrs. Poole would know.
She did not lower her voice to ask it. She let them all see her ask the man a thing, and rely on his answer, and thank him for it in the ordinary daylight where anyone might mark it.
He said the man would wait, and bring word, and she said she was obliged to him, and it was witnessed, and she found she did not mind that it was.
She stayed a moment at the water after, watching the planking go down.
Being wrong did not feel the way she had always imagined being wrong would feel.
There was no flash of revelation in it, no clean turning of a page.
It felt, instead, like loss—like setting down a thing she had carried so long she had stopped feeling its weight, and discovering only now, with her hands empty, how much of her had been built around the holding of it.
She had been so certain. The certainty had been a kind of furniture; she had arranged a year of her opinions around it.
But she had not only watched a man turn out to be better than she had judged him.
Anyone might do that, and feel nothing in it but a sour little adjustment.
She had walked out into a yard and put a need she could not meet into the hands of the man she had refused, and let him meet it, and let it be seen.
That was hers. She had done it.
A plank went down onto the new span with a flat, solid knock, and another after it, and the men began to rope them fast against the river, and somewhere below her Darcy set his shoulder to the timber and took the weight.