Chapter Two
The Library
Jane woke after six with the sense that, somewhere in her two hours of sleep, she had already decided not to let her mother choose her future for her.
Somewhere below a door was opened and shut with care that Hill used when she thought the family still slept.
A cart went by on the lane. Elizabeth had turned onto her side sometime in the night and her hair had come loose from its plait and lay across the pillow, and Jane looked at her for a while without waking her, because there did not seem any hurry in it yet, and she was not certain what she meant to do with the morning once it properly started.
She went down in her dressing gown, which she had not done since she was a child with a fever, and found the library door open a crack and a candle still burning inside it, though the window showed grey light enough that the candle was doing very little work.
Her father was in his chair with a book open on his knee that he did not appear to be reading. There was a second cup on the table by the tray, already poured, as though he had known to the minute when she would come down.
“Sit,” he said, without looking up, and she sat.
He closed the book at last and set it aside and looked at her properly, and she saw that he had not slept either, or had slept very little, for his eyes had the particular reddened look they got when he sat up too long over the port he kept telling her mother he had given up.
“I heard some of it from the passage,” he said. “Not all. Enough.”
“He said he had broken his first wife of walking.”
“I heard that part.”
“And there is talk about the second one. Lydia had it from Sarah, and Sarah had it from a cousin in service near Woburn, and I know it is servants’ gossip and I know it may be nothing at all, but Papa, I could not stop thinking of it all night, and I do not think it is nothing.”
Her father was quiet a moment, turning his cup slowly on its saucer without drinking from it.
“I have heard a little of it myself,” he said at last. “Not from servants. From a man I correspond with who has property that marches with his in Bedfordshire. He did not say murder. He said only that Ashby’s second wife had been much bruised before her fall, and that the household had been told not to speak of it, and that households generally do speak of it regardless, sooner or later.
” He looked at her. “I did not tell your mother that part. I do not know that I would have told you, if you had not come down this morning wanting the whole of it.”
Jane found she had nothing to say to that for a moment. The fire had not been lit and the room was cold, and she pulled her dressing gown closer and waited.
“You will not marry him,” her father said matter-of-factly. It was not a question, and he said it the way he said most things, dry and level, but there was something beneath it this time that she had not often heard from him.
“No.”
“Good,” he said. “Then we are agreed, and the difficulty is only your mother, which is not a small difficulty, but it is the only one, and I find I have been thinking about it a great deal since about two o’clock this morning.”
He got up then, which he did not often do before breakfast, and went to the window, and stood looking out at the garden, which was still grey and wet with the last of the night.
“I am going to tell you something now,” he said, with his back to her, “that I have never told anyone in this house, and I ask you to hear the whole of it before you say anything, because I do not know that I shall have the courage to finish it if you interrupt me partway through.”
“Papa.”
“Your mother chose me, Jane, but I did not choose her. I was not given very much say in the matter, and I have never told you or your sisters because I did not want you to carry this burden.
He told her the rest of it standing at the window, not turning round, in the flattest voice she had ever heard him use, which she understood after a little while was not indifference but the opposite of indifference, held very carefully in place.
There had been an assembly. Wine had been spilled on his coat, and he had been directed to a room to clean himself up in, and it was there your mother found him, or rather, arranged to be found with him, for she had torn her own gown beforehand and mussed her own hair, and locked the door behind them both before anyone thought to look for either of them.
Nothing had passed between them in that room but his own confusion and her very deliberate tears.
By the time the door was opened the story had already gone round the neighbourhood twice, and there had been no path open to him that a gentleman could take except the one he had taken.
“I do not tell you this to make you hate your mother,” he said.
“She was nineteen, much as you are now, and she was frightened of ending up with nothing, which was not an unreasonable fear for a woman of her situation to have, and she did what she believed she must to prevent it. I understand that a great deal better now than I did at four and twenty. I am only telling you that a marriage got by that road does not mend afterward. I thought it would. I thought I should grow to be easy in it, the way a coat grows easy with wearing, and instead I found I had simply grown used to the discomfort, which is not the same thing at all, whatever it may look like from outside.” He turned round at last. “I have watched you and your sister run this house for years now, the accounts and the tenants and all the rest of it, because your mother would not, and I let you, because it was easier than doing it myself, and I have never once properly thanked either of you for it, and I find this morning I cannot bear to add one more thing to what I already owe you. I will not watch you compromised into a life you did not choose. Not while I am alive to prevent it.”
Jane found she was crying, quietly, without having quite decided to, and her father crossed the room and put his hand briefly on her shoulder, which was as much as he generally allowed himself, and then went back to his chair as though the moment had cost him something he needed to recover from.
“So,” he said, in something nearer his ordinary voice.
“We are agreed you will not marry him. The question is what is to become of you instead, since I do not imagine your mother will receive a refusal with any great equanimity, and I do not think this house will be a comfortable place for you to remain in while she works through her feelings about it.”
“I do not know, Papa.”
“I have had a letter,” he said, “from my sister.”
Jane looked up. She had an Aunt Blythe, whom she had met perhaps three times in her life, a tall dry woman with their father’s eyes who had come to Longbourn once when Jane was small and had frightened Mrs Bennet a little, though Mrs Bennet would never have admitted to being frightened of anybody.
“Prudence married a soldier when she was one and twenty, against a good deal of family opinion, and has never once regretted it in five and twenty years of saying so to anybody who asks. He is a General now. Blythe. You will not have heard of him particularly, but he is thought well of. They have no children. I have had a letter from her not ten days since, asking, in the roundabout way she asks things, whether one of my girls might not like to come and stay with them a while in London, since they are in town before some new posting or other and find the house rather large and quiet for the two of them.” He looked at her steadily.
“I did not answer it, because I did not know then which of you might want to go, or whether any of you would. I think I know now.”
“You want me to go to London.”
“I want you,” said her father, “to be somewhere your mother is not, for a while, and somewhere Sir Walter Ashby is not, and somewhere you might have the chance to discover what you actually wish for yourself, having never in nineteen years been given very much occasion to find out. Prudence will not press you into anything. She never presses anybody into anything. It is rather her chief virtue and her chief fault at once.” He almost smiled.
“You would like her, I think. She is the only member of my family I have ever been entirely unafraid of.”
Jane sat with the cold cup in her hands and thought of Sir Walter’s rings, the way his eyes wandered over her body.
The way he bragged about breaking his previous wife, said over the wine as though it were nothing at all, and thought of Bedfordshire, flat and well drained, and a carriage she would be made to keep whether she wished it or not.
“How would it be managed?” she said. “Mama will never consent to it, not with Saturday already promised to him.”
“Your mother,” said Mr Bennet, “is going to Meryton on Friday to visit her sister Philips, who has been very unwell this month and has been asking for her company, or will be asking for it directly I have written to suggest she ought to.” He said this with no change of expression, and Jane understood that her father, who had not left his library for anything less than a dinner invitation in a decade, had already begun, sometime in the small hours of that morning, to arrange the thing entire.
“You have thought of everything.”
“I have thought of a good deal of it,” he said.
“I have not thought of everything, because I do not know your aunt’s household, and I do not know what it will ask of you that this one has not, and I will not pretend to you that I can see how any of this comes out in the end, because I cannot.
I am an old man who reads a great deal and understands very little of what is actually to come.
I only know what I could not bear to watch happen, and I have arranged what small thing I am able to arrange to prevent it, and the rest of it, Jane, I am afraid, you will have to find out for yourself, the way everybody generally does. ”
He picked his book back up then, which she understood was as near as he would come to telling her the conversation was finished, though his hand rested on the closed cover rather longer than reading required.
She went to him and kissed the top of his head, which she had not done since she was a great deal younger, and he made a small sound that might have been embarrassment and did not look up, and she left him there with his book and his cold tea and went back upstairs to wake Elizabeth before the rest of the house was properly stirring.