Chapter Six — Paper, Ink and Politeness #4
At dinner, the subject could not be mentioned and therefore sat at the table more prominently than if it had been served in silver.
Felix was attentive, Lady Ashbourne controlled, Mrs Harrow dignified, Mrs Lyndhurst careful, Miss Trent nearly silent, Portia sharp, Colonel Avery blunt, Darcy grave, Elizabeth watchful, Jane tender, and Bingley increasingly angry.
His anger, because it was not habitual, sat uneasily upon him.
He endured Mrs Lyndhurst’s remark that “delicate reputations require delicate handling” with visible difficulty.
He watched Felix suggest that Lady Ashbourne’s nerves should not be overtaxed and seemed to wish Lady Ashbourne’s nerves less comfort and truth more opportunity.
When Mrs Lyndhurst observed that the most painful scandals were often those in which no one could be wholly certain of innocence, Bingley set down his glass with enough force to draw Darcy’s glance.
Jane looked at him once.
That glance restrained him more effectively than a speech. He took a breath, looked down, and said nothing.
After dinner, when the ladies had withdrawn and the gentlemen remained only briefly over wine, Bingley spoke to Jane in the small interval before tea. They stood near the window in the drawing room, where the dark lake reflected candlelight in scattered lines.
“I nearly spoke too strongly,” he said.
Jane’s smile was faint but warm. “Yes.”
“I am sorry.”
“You need not be sorry for disliking injustice.”
“I am not skilled at watching it politely.”
“Perhaps no one should become too skilled at that.”
He looked at her, startled and moved. “Jane—”
She glanced toward the room, where Mrs Lyndhurst was speaking to Lady Ashbourne and Elizabeth was apparently admiring a screen while missing nothing. Bingley understood and stopped himself, but the words he had not spoken remained between them.
He said instead, very quietly, “I shall not ask you for anything in a room where others are waiting to interpret your answer.”
Jane’s eyes lifted to his. For a moment, all the noise of Silvermere seemed to fall away from them.
“Thank you,” she said.
It was a small answer, but her voice trembled in it. Bingley bowed over her hand with more feeling than ceremony, and when he released it, neither looked immediately at the other. Their happiness had not yet spoken its formal name, but it had become steadier for knowing how to wait.
The second discovery came late.
The party had begun to separate for the evening when Mrs Clary appeared at the drawing-room door and requested a word with Lady Ashbourne.
This time Lady Ashbourne’s face changed before she rose.
Perhaps she had learned, as Elizabeth had, that household matters at Silvermere no longer came innocently.
A few minutes later Lady Ashbourne sent for Darcy. Then, after a hesitation Elizabeth found interesting, for Elizabeth and Mrs Gardiner also.
The small study lay off the gentleman’s corridor near the library.
It was a room used, according to Lady Ashbourne, by any guest wishing to write a note, consult a newspaper, or escape more elegant company under the respectable excuse of correspondence.
There was a desk, two chairs, shelves of dull books, a small hearth, and an ash pan which a maid had cleared that evening.
Mrs Clary stood beside the hearth, pale but composed. In her hand was a small folded paper containing several tiny scraps retrieved before the ashes were discarded.
“I beg your pardon, my lady,” she said, “but Sarah noticed them when she came to clear. They did not look like common ash, and after yesterday—”
“You did right,” Lady Ashbourne said.
Darcy took the paper with permission and opened it upon the desk.
The scraps were small: thin trimmings of old paper, curled at the edges, some browned by heat, none fully burned. Most bore nothing. One showed the faint end of a word in darkened ink. Another, slightly larger, contained part of a phrase: secured by—
Elizabeth felt the air leave the room.
Darcy looked at her. She knew he had seen the connection at the same instant.
“From the letter,” she said.
Lady Ashbourne’s hand moved to the back of a chair.
Darcy bent closer. “The same darker ink.”
Mrs Gardiner drew a quiet breath. “Then the alteration was made here?”
“Or trimmed here,” Darcy said. “But recently. The scraps were not fully burned.”
Lady Ashbourne looked toward the hearth as if it had betrayed her. “This room is used by several gentlemen.”
“And perhaps by others,” Elizabeth said. “If they wished to be thought gentlemen.”
No one smiled.
The implication was no longer avoidable.
Someone had not merely stolen an old letter from Lady Ashbourne’s desk and returned it to public view.
Someone had worked upon it within Silvermere itself—trimmed, arranged, perhaps reinforced phrases, and attempted to burn the remnants.
The scandal had not drifted from the past like a ghost of old correspondence.
It had been made, recently, deliberately, under the roof that now pretended to contain it.
Lady Ashbourne stood very still.
Darcy folded the scraps again with great care. “This changes the matter.”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said.
Outside the study, somewhere along the polished corridor, voices moved lightly toward bedchambers. Silvermere’s guests were retiring beneath the appearance of civility, carrying with them their private fears, suspicions and judgements. The house itself remained beautiful, controlled and quiet.
But Elizabeth looked at the half-burned trimmings and understood that the quiet had become evidence.
The scandal had not been revived at Silvermere.
It had been manufactured there.