The Third Case (The Longbourn Accord #2)

CHAPTER ONE

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a house in possession of a great Accord must be in want of an heir to spend it on; though the want, at Pemberley, was felt by everybody in the house except the two people who might have been expected to feel it, and had been raised, in seven years, exactly once.

The rider came up the last of the rise a little after ten, and Elizabeth knew the livery before she could have said she knew anything, in the way one knows a particular knock or a particular silence — not by looking, but by the small cold turn it gave the morning.

She had been standing at the long window above the wood, where she stood most mornings now, and she watched the man come on at a pace that spared neither himself nor the horse, and understood that whatever he carried had been judged, by somebody at the other end of it, to be worth a horse.

"It is your aunt," she said.

Darcy did not look up from the quarter's returns. "My aunt writes on the first of the quarter. It is the ninth."

"Then it is your aunt writing on the ninth, which is a very different thing, and a great deal more interesting.

" She did not turn from the glass. The old gift, which seven years of marriage had taught her to keep on a shorter rein than her wit, went out to the rider of its own accord and came back with the one plain fact worth having: the man was tired in the particular manner of a man who has been told that his errand matters, and who believes it.

There is a way a body sits a horse when it has been frightened on another person's behalf.

She had seen it twice before in her life, and had not liked either occasion.

"He has ridden through the night. One does not use a horse so to say that the asparagus has failed. "

At this Darcy put down the returns, which was itself a kind of answer, for he was not a man who abandoned a column of figures without cause, and had spent the better part of his life declining, on principle, to appear alarmed in front of other people.

That he crossed the room to the window, and stood at her shoulder, and let his face do as it liked — that he had learned, slowly, and at her hands, and it was not yet a habit so much as a thing he could be persuaded to when the persuading was worth it.

His face, when it did as it liked, went still.

"That is Harlow," he said.

"You know the man by his shoulders, at a quarter mile."

"I know that she does not send Harlow." He was quiet a moment, and the quiet had a weight to it she did not care for. "Harlow sits in the room when my aunt writes the letters that are not written down."

It was the first Elizabeth had heard, in seven years, that there existed at Rosings a species of letter that was not written down; and she filed the fact where she filed such things, and said nothing, and came to understand only much later that a very great deal of that morning had been like that — small doors, in walls she had believed to be solid, that a person had merely to be shown once and could never afterward un-see.

Below them the wood moved. It moved all at once, and in one direction, leaning westward on a windless morning the way it had leaned every morning of the seven years she had lived above it — the way no other wood in the county leaned, and which visitors remarked upon, and were told was the lie of the land, and believed, because it is easier to believe a thing about the land than a thing about the people who keep it.

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Harlow was fed, and the horse walked, before the letter came into her hands; for Elizabeth had learned that a house is not left standing at an hour's notice by wishing it so, and that a horse ridden into such a state is a life, of a kind, and that lives came first, whatever was in the paper.

Only then did she break the seal, which was her aunt's own, and read the four lines it enclosed, in a hand that age had rendered no warmer and no less certain of itself:

Nephew. The thing I told you would come in the third case has begun to come, some years earlier than I had arranged for, and I find I am to be so inconvenient as to die in the middle of preventing it.

You will come to Kent. You will bring your wife, since I am given to understand that arranging anything without her is now beyond you.

You will not bring the child. — C. de B.

She read it twice, and set it down along its own crease with the particular care one gives a thing that is going to be wanted again.

"She has misjudged one point," she said.

"Only one? You improve on acquaintance."

"She believes the remark about my arranging everything will vex me.

" Elizabeth found that her hand was not quite steady, and was interested to observe it, at a distance, as though the hand belonged to somebody of a more nervous disposition than herself.

"It is the first civil thing she has written me in ten years. We shall go to Kent."

Darcy did not answer at once. Below the window the wood held its westward lean, and the ordinary machinery of a great morning went on beneath them — a gardener, a barrow, the small kingdom of a house that did not yet know it was about to be struck like a tent.

"You do not know what the third case is," he said.

"No. I have observed, these seven years, that there is a good deal about your family I do not know, and that all of it is filed under the same silence, and that the silence has a shape one can feel the edges of in the dark — and that the shape is a set of letters no one will describe to me, kept in a house I have visited twice.

" She turned from the glass at last. "I have been very patient.

I should like that entered somewhere in the record. "

"It is entered."

"Then you will tell me in the carriage, where you cannot rise and walk to a window when the conversation turns unwelcome.

I have thought a good deal about the advantages of a carriage.

" She had already crossed to the bell, and rung it, and begun, in the private back rooms of her mind, the long arithmetic of leaving — for the wishing was a man's luxury and the leaving was a woman's labor, and she had understood which of the two was hers within a year of marrying him.

"You may begin with the part that costs you nothing. What is the first case?"

He watched her ring the bell. He watched her become, inside a single minute and without any apparent effort, the person who would have them in Kent by Thursday; and he thought, not for the first time in seven years, that he had married the one woman of his acquaintance who could be handed a frightening thing and would answer it by ringing for Mrs. Reynolds — and that he had never been able to decide whether this was the great good fortune of his life, or the thing that would one day get her killed, and had at last given over trying to decide, on the grounds that the two possibilities did not, on examination, exclude one another.

"The first case," he said, "is that the eastern counties hold. The letters are never wanted. They pass to my heir unopened, as they passed to me, and to my father before me — a man handing on the key to a door that has not been opened in living memory, and telling his son to keep it dry."

"And the second?"

"That they fail slowly, over a generation, with time to spare.

The letters are opened in council, at leisure, by whoever holds them then, with the whole of the old blood consulted, and the thing is done as it should be done, by many hands and none of them hurried.

" He had taken up her aunt's letter again, though he plainly had it by heart, and turned it in his fingers as a man turns a thing he would rather look at than answer.

"My aunt has given fifteen years to arranging for the second case.

Marrying line to line across three counties.

Building, out of a great many reluctant families, the council that would one day open them.

She has done nothing else with her old age, and been thought a cold and interfering woman for it, and let herself be thought so, which I did not understand at the time and understand now. "

He set the letter down.

"No one in the family will use the word," he said, "so I shall. She has been magnificent."

The word cost him something to say; Elizabeth watched it cost him, and did not remark upon it, and loved him rather particularly for the fact that it was difficult.

"And the third case," she said.

"The third case is that they fail quickly.

" He did not look at the wood, or the letter, but at her, in the way he had looked at her once on a hill years ago, when he had offered her an empty church and left her entirely free to refuse it.

"That there is no time, and no council, and no hundred hands.

That the letters come to one person, alone, who must do in a single season what my aunt meant to do across twenty years — and that there is an instruction written across the front of the packet, in the hand of the man who laid the first Accord, which I have seen once in my life.

I was nine. My father showed it me, and hoped, I think, that I would never come to understand it. "

She did not ask. She had learned, at some expense, when a silence was doing work that a question would only interrupt.

"It says," Darcy told her, "Spare no one. Least of all the holder."

And he did not explain it; and she did not require him to; and below the window the wood went on leaning westward, toward home, away from the thing in the east that neither of them had yet learned to name — while in the drive a tired man walked a tired horse in slow circles over the gravel, waiting to be told whether he was to turn round and carry an answer back through the dark to a woman who was, though nobody in that house yet knew it, already dying.