CHAPTER FOUR
Elizabeth had met Anne de Bourgh twice, and upon both occasions she had been a shape behind a screen: a pale hand upon a chair-arm, a voice one was obliged to lean toward, a young woman whom three counties agreed to call delicate in the way one agrees about the weather, without once troubling to look out the window.
So that when Harlow showed her into the morning room and the screen stood folded against the wall, and there was a woman at the cold hearth with her back to the door, Elizabeth did the thing she had spent seven years teaching herself not to do, and let the gift off its rein.
She did not decide to. It simply went — out across the room toward the figure at the hearth, reaching, as it reached toward anyone, for the shape of the pressure a person holds down. And it came back wrong.
There is a way a room feels when a fire is banked behind a shut grate; one does not see it, but the skin knows it before the eye finds it, the air doing quiet work, heat pressing at a door that holds.
That was the sensation, and it did not belong to a hearth, for the hearth was cold.
It belonged to the woman standing before it, doing nothing, her hands loose at her sides — full, was the only word Elizabeth's startled gift would offer her, full to the seams and held shut, a lifetime of it banked and never once let breathe — and the gift recoiled off the size of the thing as a hand comes off a stove, so that Elizabeth took an involuntary step backward, and set her heel down loud upon the boards.
The woman turned.
"Ah," said Anne de Bourgh. "You felt that.
" Her voice was nothing like the voice from behind the screen; it was dry as a struck match.
"My cousin's wife. The famous reader." She looked Elizabeth over without haste, and Elizabeth had the wholly unfamiliar experience of being the one who had been walked into and catalogued. "Tell me what you got."
"A fire behind a shut grate," said Elizabeth, before she had determined to be honest.
Something crossed the other woman's face — not pleasure, but recognition, the flat bitter recognition of a person hearing a true thing said aloud for the first time in a life furnished entirely with kind ones.
"Thirty years," Anne said, "and you are the first person to walk into a room and name it inside a minute.
My mother managed it, of course. My mother has always known precisely what I am.
She merely determined that I ought not to. "
They did not sit. Neither of them proposed it.
Anne kept to the cold hearth and Elizabeth kept near the door, and the width of the morning room lay between them like a thing that must be crossed by somebody and would not be crossed by her; for Elizabeth had walked into a hundred rooms and read a hundred people and been, invariably, the sharpest instrument present, and she was standing now some yards from a woman who was reading her back, and did not perfectly enjoy what that told her about the balance of the room.
"You are angry," said Elizabeth.
"How penetrating. Was it the screen that betrayed me, or the thirty years?"
"I should have led with the screen."
The corner of Anne's mouth moved. It was not a smile; it was the place a smile would go, were one ever permitted.
"I am not angry with you," she said. "You I have known four minutes, and you have already been of more use than every physician who ever bled me for a delicacy I do not possess.
I am angry in the manner of a river that has been dammed for thirty years and is informed, one morning, that the wall is to come out, and that it may now run.
I have all of it. Every drop I was ever to spend, saved on purpose, kept — and I am to be handed it now, at two-and-thirty, in the same week I am handed the reason for the keeping. You will not know what that is like."
"No," said Elizabeth.
"No. You do not." Anne spread her pale hands and considered them as though they had lately been introduced to her.
"You have spent your life being told. Told you were too poor a match, too clever, too sharp of tongue — I have read your history; my mother keeps files — and every one of those tellings was a door left open for you to walk through or to slam.
You were permitted to be angry in time to make some use of the anger.
I was given a screen. I was spared. No one ever told me what I was, because the knowing might have troubled me, and a troubled instrument is the harder to keep upon the shelf until it is wanted. "
The morning room was very quiet. Somewhere down a corridor a clock Elizabeth could not see counted off the seconds that Lady Catherine was spending upstairs.
"That is what the screen was," Elizabeth said, slowly, assembling it as she spoke, and not liking the shape it took. "Not to protect you."
"To store me." Anne said it without heat now, which was worse than heat.
"I am the reserve. I have been the reserve since I was a child — held back from the very case my mother spent fifteen years building, kept unspent against the day it should all come due too quickly to be done properly.
Kept, in point of fact, against this present week, which my mother has known was coming since before I could read, and let me believe a weakness of the chest." She tipped her head.
"She was not wrong to. That is the part no one warns you of.
Held back, I am worth more this season than any three of you.
It was good husbandry. I was good husbandry, and I cannot even hate her cleanly for it, for the hating keeps running up against the fact that the husbandry worked. "
Elizabeth found she had nothing to say to that — she, who always had something to say — and discovered, in the having of nothing, the first real measure of what had been done to the woman before her.
"You will teach me the cost," she said at last. "That is what you are telling me. My aunt teaches me the shape and cannot teach me the cost, because she never paid it; and you can, because you have been the cost, sitting behind furniture, for thirty years."
"I can teach you the cost." Anne moved at last, crossing to the window, where the grey morning light came at her sideways and showed her plainly for the first time — not delicate at all, but contained, a woman built like a held breath.
"And I will. Not out of the goodness of my heart; I have not had the opportunity to develop one, and shall have to see about it now there is room.
I will teach you because you are the only person to enter this house in a decade who has not lied to me, and I find, to my considerable inconvenience, that I had rather be told a hard thing by you than a soft one by anybody living.
" She did not turn from the glass. "Do not make it into a friendship.
I have not the practice, and you have not the time. "
"I had not intended to," said Elizabeth.
"You had. A little."
She had. A little. And she found, standing in the cold morning room of a dying woman's house, that she minded very much being read so exactly by somebody else — and that the minding was, on the whole, the most hopeful thing that had happened to her since the rider came up the rise.