Chapter Five — Mrs Harrow’s Silence #4
The phrase was so exact that Elizabeth looked at him with admiration before she could prevent it. He saw the look. A warmth passed between them, brief and dangerous.
“And what of Felix?” she asked, returning to safety.
Darcy’s expression cooled. “He is too eager to widen the explanation.”
“Exactly. He suggests everything before one may settle upon anything.”
“He may simply wish to protect Lady Ashbourne.”
“He may. And Mrs Lyndhurst may simply wish never to speculate.”
This time Darcy’s mouth did move. “You are severe.”
“I am accurate.”
“Often.”
The word, quietly offered, affected her absurdly.
The day continued in this fashion: no open crisis, no further discovery, no spoken accusation, and yet every hour carried Mrs Harrow farther from the centre of ordinary kindness.
At luncheon, a place beside her remained empty for several minutes until Mrs Gardiner took it.
In the afternoon, when a walk was proposed, Mrs Lyndhurst wondered whether Mrs Harrow might prefer rest, thus making her participation appear either bold or burdensome.
Lady Ashbourne remained civil but distant.
Felix was solicitous. Miss Trent looked frightened whenever Mrs Harrow spoke.
Colonel Avery scowled at everyone and addressed Mrs Harrow with deliberate bluntness, which may have been his version of support.
Elizabeth watched and learned. Reputation, she thought, was rarely destroyed by accusation alone. Accusation merely opened the door. Destruction entered when respectable people stepped back far enough to claim they had not pushed.
Toward evening, Elizabeth found Jane alone in the small morning room where she had comforted Mrs Harrow the previous day.
The room looked softer now in the lowering light.
Jane sat with her hands folded, her work untouched beside her.
Her face was troubled in a way she would not have shown before others.
“Jane,” Elizabeth said gently.
Jane looked up. “Lizzy.”
“You are unhappy.”
“Not for myself.”
“No. I know.”
Elizabeth sat beside her. For a little while neither spoke. Their silences had always been companionable, but this one held the weight of things seen and not yet understood.
“I cannot stop thinking of the letter,” Jane said at last.
“Nor can I.”
“It felt wrong.”
Elizabeth turned to her. “Wrong how?”
Jane frowned slightly, not in displeasure but concentration. “I do not mean only that it was cruel, or that it may be false. It felt wrong in the feeling of it.”
Elizabeth waited.
Jane looked down at her hands. “If a man were writing of a woman’s ruin, and if he truly regretted it, would he sound so cold? Even if he blamed Mrs Harrow. Even if he thought her silence had harmed Margaret. There ought to have been sorrow. Not merely accusation.”
“There was some sorrow.”
“At the beginning, perhaps. But then it changed. The words became clever.”
Elizabeth stilled.
Jane continued slowly, as if discovering the thought while speaking it. “Not grieving. Clever. As though the writer wished the reader to think ill of Mrs Harrow more than he wished to mourn Margaret Ellery. A person truly sorry for one woman would not use her so neatly to condemn another.”
Elizabeth felt the quiet force of it.
Jane, who did not pride herself upon suspicion, who never sought to dazzle a room, who was so often dismissed by careless observers as merely sweet, had seen what others had missed because she knew the sound of compassion and recognised its absence.
Darcy had seen pressure in the ink; Elizabeth had seen division in the phrasing; but Jane had perceived the moral falseness of the tone.
“You are right,” Elizabeth said.
Jane looked at her, uncertain. “Am I?”
“Yes. Entirely.”
“I know people think I am too ready to believe good. Perhaps I am. But that letter did not grieve. It used grief.”
Elizabeth reached for her hand. “My dearest Jane, that may be the clearest thing anyone has yet said.”
Jane’s eyes filled, though she did not cry. “Poor Mrs Harrow. If she failed her friend, she has suffered enough in knowing it. But the letter made her failure into something hard and ugly, as though fear must always be wickedness.”
Elizabeth thought of Celia in the orangery, saying there will be time.
She thought of Margaret Ellery gone into a dozen stories, none of them certain.
She thought of Sir Edmund’s handsome painted face and Felix’s polished usefulness and Lady Ashbourne’s guarded memory.
She thought of the altered pressure of ink, the theatrical phrases, the music book opened by Jane’s innocent hands.
“No,” Elizabeth said quietly. “Fear is not always wickedness. But there is wickedness in using another person’s fear to make them appear cruel.”
Jane looked at her. “Then the letter was made?”
“I believe so.”
“By whom?”
Elizabeth’s gaze moved toward the window. Outside, Silvermere’s lake held the evening light in broken silver. The reflection of the house trembled upon it, beautiful and unreliable.
“I do not yet know,” she said. “But I begin to understand why.”