Chapter Twenty-Seven
Elizabeth
The letter reached Longbourn on an ordinary Tuesday in November, carried up from the receiving office in Meryton along with the usual assortment of household correspondence, and Elizabeth, recognising Jane’s hand on the outer fold, took it straight out into the lanes rather than opening it in the house, having learned, over these past months, that her sister’s letters wanted proper attention rather than the distracted half-reading a busy household generally permitted.
She read it standing at the stile that marked the edge of the home meadow, the November air sharp and clean after a week of rain, and found, by the third page, that she had to stop and read the whole of it a second time, certain she must have misunderstood some part of it on the first attempt.
Jane was married.
Not engaged, not hoping, not weighing a proposal in the careful, deliberate way Elizabeth might have expected of her sister, but married, properly and completely, in a chapel in Lisbon, to a Major Richard Fitzwilliam, of whom Elizabeth had heard only the occasional passing mention in previous letters, generally in connection with some disagreement about a poem neither of them, apparently, had ever managed to properly resolve.
Elizabeth stood at the stile a long while, the letter’s pages held loose in her cold fingers, and felt several large things at once, none of them cancelling out any of the others.
Joy, first and plainest, a genuine, overflowing gladness for a sister who had, by every account the letter gave, found something real and lasting in a country none of them had ever expected her to see.
And beneath the joy, something sharper, a fury she recognised, examining it honestly, as directed not at Jane nor at her new husband but at the whole shape of the world that had required Jane to cross an ocean and endure a war before she was permitted to find a marriage built on anything so simple as being properly seen.
She thought of Sir Walter Ashby, whom she had not thought of in some months, his rings and his careful, terrible remarks about his first wife’s walking, and felt the old anger at him flare fresh, though he was, by now, a distant and largely forgotten figure in the neighbourhood’s memory, his interest in the Bennet family having cooled considerably once word got round that Miss Bennet had gone to stay indefinitely with an aunt in town.
And beneath both the joy and the fury, quieter, harder to properly name, a recognition that had been building in her, she understood now, for some months, arriving finally, standing at this stile with her sister’s letter in her hands, into something she could no longer avoid looking at directly.
This household, this whole arrangement of duties and expectations that had once been Jane’s and was now, entirely, her own, had changed her too, these past months, in ways she had not properly marked until this moment.
?∞?
She walked on, past the stile, along the lane that led toward the Norris farm, because the roof there still wanted proper attention, three months now since she had first written to the estate’s agent about it, and she had grown tired of waiting for a reply that showed no sign of arriving.
She had gone last week, in fact, in her walking boots and her oldest pelisse, and had stood in old Mr Norris’s kitchen listening to his complaints about the water coming through onto his good chair, and had promised, with rather more confidence than she properly felt, that the matter would be attended to before the winter set in properly.
Jane would have gone the very first week the leak was mentioned, Elizabeth thought, walking the familiar lane with her sister’s letter still held close against her side.
Jane had always gone at once, without waiting to be asked twice, because Jane had understood, from an age Elizabeth could not now precisely fix, that these small neglects compounded themselves if left too long, that a roof unattended in autumn became a proper crisis by the depths of winter, and that somebody in this family had to understand that, since their mother certainly never would.
Elizabeth understood it now too. She had learned it, these past months, in the plain unglamorous way one learns anything that matters, by doing it herself, alone, with nobody to show her the way beyond the memory of watching Jane do it first, years before, when Elizabeth herself had been too young and too careless to properly appreciate what she was watching.
She thought, walking on, of Mary, sixteen now and still largely occupied with her books and her music, useful in her own quiet way but not yet asked to be useful in this particular way, and found herself turning over, for the first time with any real seriousness, the notion of asking Mary to come with her on her next visit to the tenant cottages.
Not as a kindness to Mary, precisely, though it might prove to be one.
As a plain practical matter, the same instinct that had made Jane teach Elizabeth, years before, now asking to be passed on again, because someone would have to learn this, eventually, and Elizabeth did not intend to carry the whole of Longbourn’s small daily business alone for the rest of her unmarried life, however capably she had, these past months, discovered she could manage it.
?∞?
She wrote back to Jane that same evening, sitting at the small desk in the room they had once shared, now entirely her own, and found the letter came easily, four full pages by the time she had finished, full of everything she felt about the news, the joy and the fury both given proper space, and a long, detailed account of the Norris roof and her own plans for Mary’s education in the matter, which she suspected would amuse Jane rather more than any purely sentimental paragraph might have managed.
She signed it, at the very end, your infuriating, perfectly happy sister, and sealed it, and sat a while in the quiet room before she went down to supper, thinking of Jane in a chapel in Lisbon, and of herself standing at a stile in the November cold, and of the particular, unexpected shape a life took when it was finally, honestly examined, rather than simply endured.
She thought, folding the letter away at last, of her mother, and of how the news would land there, and found she was in no great hurry to deliver it.
Mrs. Bennet had wept and raged and taken to her bed twice over in the months since Jane's leaving, and Elizabeth did not think her mother's nerves had earned the reward of hearing, secondhand and filtered through Elizabeth's own careful telling, a piece of happiness that was entirely Jane's to give away herself, in her own time, in her own words.
Let her come home and tell it properly, Elizabeth thought.
Let Mama have the whole shock of it at once, rather than the comfortable, secondhand version I might be tempted to soften for her.
She resolved, folding the letter into her writing desk rather than leaving it where a curious eye might find it, to say nothing at all until Jane herself was standing in the room to say it.