Chapter Three
The Escape
Elizabeth was awake when Jane came back up, sitting against the headboard with her plait redone and her arms round her knees, in the attitude of someone who has been listening to a house for sounds and has heard enough of them to have drawn her own conclusions.
“You were with Papa a long while.”
“Yes.”
“You have been crying.”
“A little.”
Elizabeth did not ask what about, which was one of the things Jane loved best in her, that she could tell the difference between a question that wanted answering and one that only wanted to be near.
She got up instead and came and sat on the edge of Jane’s bed and took her hand, and Jane told her all of it, in order, as well as she could remember the order, the letter from their aunt and Bedfordshire and the compromise, and Elizabeth listened without once interrupting, which for Elizabeth was a considerable feat of restraint.
“He never told any of us,” Elizabeth said, when Jane had finished. “Not once.”
“I do not think he ever meant to. I think it cost him a great deal even now.”
“I am glad you are to go, Jane. I am glad and I am also-” and here her voice did something it did not often do it went quiet a moment, thinking something over.
“I am also rather wretched about it, and I know that is a very poor thing to say to you on the morning of your good fortune, but I find I cannot help it.”
“You are not wretched about my going. You are wretched that you cannot come.”
“Both,” said Elizabeth. “Both things at once. I did not know a person could hold two feelings that pulled so hard in opposite directions and not simply come apart down the middle.”
Jane put her arms round her, and they sat like that a while, and neither of them said anything further, because there was nothing further that wanted saying just yet.
Mr Bennet’s letter went out express, before Mrs Bennet had come down, and by the time she appeared at breakfast in her cap and complained of the eggs, the whole of the arrangement had already been set in motion without her having the least idea of it.
He told her, over the toast, in the mild voice he used for things he did not wish examined too closely, that her sister Philips had written unwell and low in her spirits, and that he thought Mrs Bennet ought to go to her on Friday and stay a few days, since nobody comforted Mrs Philips half so well as her own sister did.
“On Friday,” said Mrs Bennet. “But Sir Walter calls on Saturday.”
“Sir Walter will call again,” said Mr Bennet, without looking up from his newspaper, “I have no doubt of it whatever, a man so evidently taken with the neighbourhood,” and something in the way he said neighbourhood made Elizabeth look very hard at her plate, “and your sister has asked particularly for you, my dear, and I know you would never forgive yourself if any harm came to her for want of your company, when it was so easily given.”
Mrs Bennet, who could refuse her sister nothing when appealed to on the grounds of her own indispensability, allowed herself to be persuaded within the quarter hour, and spent the rest of breakfast composing, aloud, the note she would leave for Sir Walter explaining her unavoidable absence and promising, on Jane’s behalf, every future civility.
Jane ate her egg and said nothing and found she did not, this once, mind being spoken for, since the thing being promised on her behalf was never going to be delivered regardless of what her mother wrote.
The carriage was brought for Mrs Bennet on Friday morning, loaded with rather more luggage than a few days at her sister’s generally required, and she went off in high good humour, kissing Kitty and Lydia and reminding Jane twice through the window to be particularly obliging to Sir Walter if he should happen to call before her return.
She had not been gone above the hour when a second carriage turned in at the gate, considerably plainer than anything the neighbourhood was accustomed to seeing at Longbourn, and a tall woman got down from it before the steps had been properly set, in a dark travelling pelisse and a bonnet that had clearly been chosen for wear rather than fashion, and came across the gravel with a stride Jane’s mother would have called unbecoming in a lady and Jane found, on the instant, she rather admired.
“Well,” said Prudence, arriving at the door and looking Jane over from head to foot with an expression not unlike her father’s, though warmer, “you are taller than when I saw you last, and considerably less inclined to hide behind your mother’s skirts, which I take as a very promising sign.
I am your aunt Prudence, in case my brother’s letter did not make that entirely plain, and this is my husband, who will introduce himself once he has finished paying the driver, which he insists on doing personally though I have told him a hundred times it is not necessary. ”
General Blythe proved to be a large, comfortable-looking man of perhaps sixty, with a weathered face and an easy manner that put Jane at ease within the first minute of his speaking to her, thanking Mr Bennet warmly for his hospitality and remarking that he had heard a great deal about Longbourn’s fine gardens, though it was plain from the way his eyes moved over the house that gardens were not chiefly what he had come thinking about.
They stayed above an hour, which Jane spent partly in the parlour being asked sensible, unhurried questions by her aunt about what she liked to read and whether she rode and how she got on with her sisters, and partly upstairs with Elizabeth, finishing packing anything that was missed.
It was in her own room, with the trunk nearly filled and Elizabeth kneeling beside it folding things with more energy than neatness, that the morning finally caught up with both of them.
“I keep thinking of things I ought to have said to you years ago,” Elizabeth said, not looking up from the folding, “and finding I have no time left to say any of them properly, which seems very unjust of the morning.”
“Say them now. We have a little time yet.”
“I do not know that I can, all at once, like that. It is not the sort of thing that comes out neatly when you ask it to.” Elizabeth sat back on her heels.
“You have been managing this house since I was twelve years old, Jane. The accounts and the tenants and Mama, most of all Mama, and I have helped you with it these last five years and only this morning it occurred to me that the whole of it was yours long before it was ever mine, and that nobody has ever once thanked you or myself for doing so.”
“You are thanking me now.”
“I am trying to. It is coming out very badly.”
“It is not coming out badly at all,” said Jane, and found her own eyes had filled, which she had not expected, having thought herself quite cried out after the library.
"I did not even think of how much work you will have.
Running Longbourn on your own will be no easy feat, and here I have been thinking rather selfishly, when I ought to have been thinking only of you. "
"I shall manage. It is easier to work together, I know, but I am sure I will be fine.
I may ask Mary to help me, if I truly find I need it.
Worry not, Jane. We will manage." Elizabeth took her hand.
“Only promise me you will write properly. Not the sort of letter one sends because a letter is owed. The real sort, that tells me what you are actually thinking, even when what you are thinking is frightening, or foolish, or not at all the thing a well brought up young woman ought to be thinking.”
“I promise.”
“And promise me you will not be too grateful to Aunt Prudence to tell her when something is wrong. You have a very bad habit of being grateful at people until you have quite talked yourself out of your own feelings on a matter, and I have watched you do it to Mama for years, and I do not want you doing it to a woman three counties away where I cannot see it happening and put a stop to it.”
Jane laughed, unsteadily, and promised that too, and they finished the packing between them with rather more haste than care, because Aunt Prudence had put her head round the door once already to say, gently, that the light would not last forever and the road to London was a long one.
Mary came to the top of the stairs as the trunk was being carried down, in her plain grey dress with her hair scraped back the way she always wore it, and held out a small book without any preamble.
“It is Cowper,” she said. “You will not want it, I daresay, you were never much for poetry, but I should like to think of you having it with you regardless.”
“Thank you, Mary.”
“I have marked one passage,” Mary went on, in the flat, careful voice she used every day, “on the subject of a woman’s own conscience, and whether it is a smaller thing than her family’s convenience, or a larger one.
I do not say I know the answer. I only thought you might find it worth the reading, some evening when you are far from here and wondering whether you did right. ”
Jane took the book and pressed Mary’s hand, which was as much acknowledgment as Mary generally permitted anyone, and Mary withdrew at once to her own room, as though the gesture had used up whatever store of feeling she had allowed herself for one morning.
Kitty and Lydia hung over the banister above, Lydia loudly declaring the whole business the most exciting thing that had happened at Longbourn in her lifetime and demanding to know whether there would be soldiers in London, since General Blythe was a soldier, and did all his acquaintance wear regimentals.
Kitty said less and watched the trunk go down with an expression Jane could not quite read, half excitement half worry.
Her father came out to the carriage himself, which he did for almost nothing, and stood by the door a moment with his hand on the frame of it before he handed her up.
“Write to me,” he said. “Not the newsy sort of letter your mother will expect, full of what you had for dinner. A true letter my dear.”
“I have already promised Elizabeth. I will, Papa.”
“Then you may keep the same promise twice over, it will cost you nothing extra.” He looked at her a long moment, and there was something working in his face that she had rarely seen there, something that was trying very hard to stay behind his usual dryness and not quite managing it.
“I am sorry it has taken me nineteen years and a man like him to make me do this properly. I should have done it a great deal sooner, for a great many reasons, and I did not, and I do not have a good answer for why not, except that it is easier to sit in a library with a book than to look squarely at the things one has let go on too long.”
“You are looking at it now.”
“I am trying to,” he said, echoing Elizabeth without knowing it, and helped her up into the carriage, and stepped back.
Elizabeth stood beside him on the gravel, and did not cry until the carriage had actually begun to move, and even then, Jane saw her hand come up quickly to her face and be lowered again, as though she had decided partway through that she would rather Jane’s last sight of her be composed than otherwise.
The carriage turned out of the gate and the house went from view by degrees, the roof first, then the upper windows, then the hedge closing over the rest of it, and Jane sat between her aunt and uncle with her mother’s absence and her father’s confession and Mary’s small marked book all sitting together in her lap, and did not look back again knowing that when or if she ever returned things would never be the same again.
Aunt Prudence while watching her with the same steady attention she had used since the moment of her arrival, reached over without a word and took her hand, and did not let go of it for a good while after.