CHAPTER SIX
There is a species of morning that comes the day after one has learned an enormous thing, in which the enormous thing has gone nowhere at all and yet the toast still wants buttering; and Elizabeth passed such a morning in the small parlour at Rosings, over a rack of cooling toast and a pot of tea that had been made, she deduced, by a servant who was frightened of her, it being the strongest tea she had ever been offered in an English house — brewed, plainly, by a maid who had reasoned that the alarming reader from the north would wish it fortifying.
The maid had not been wrong. Elizabeth drank two cups of it, and then set about the thing she had come into the parlour to do, which was to stop waiting for a dying woman to give her a truth she had already declined to give, and go and find it herself.
She wrote to Mary first.
She did not, she discovered, know how to write to Mary, and there was a small sharp humiliation in the discovering.
She had four sisters and could have written to any of the others in her sleep — a page of warmth to Jane, a page of nonsense to Kitty, a page to Lydia that Lydia would not read — but Mary and she had passed twenty years as the two clever ones of the family who had never once found it worth their while to be clever at one another.
So she sat with the pen and could not find her own sister's direction in her mouth, and then gave over the attempt at performance and simply told her the truth, that being, it appeared, the one thing she could reliably do.
Mary, she wrote. I want the practical part, and no ceremony.
The east is failing, quickly, in the manner our father's people would have named the third case, and I am in Kent being handed a great deal of ceremony and no instruction whatever.
You have never in your life offered me ceremony.
Tell me what it is truly like. Tell me what it costs in the body.
Tell me the thing the men who write the manuals leave out, because they have never once knelt in the frost at the wrong end of it.
She read it back. It was the most respect she had put upon a page to her sister in her life, and it had taken a national emergency to draw it out of her, and she added a line saying as much, because it was true, and because Mary would want the whole of the truth and not the flattering half of it; and then she sealed it, before she could improve it into something worse.
The matter of Harding was harder, Harding being a name in a story her husband had told her once, years since, in the dark — a captain at a place called Selsey, who had taught a green lieutenant what a wall costs and then spent the whole of his own gift closing one.
If the man lived, he was the single person in England who had closed a fast breach with his own hands and survived to be disagreeable about it, and Elizabeth wanted him, the way one wants the only person in a room who has actually done the thing that everyone else is theorising.
"You are hunting Harding," said Anne, from the doorway.
Elizabeth did not startle, and wished it entered in the record that she did not, though the tea was owed some of the credit. Anne stood upright and dry-eyed, a woman built like a held breath, and, it appeared, a woman who read correspondence over thresholds.
"I am hunting a great many things," said Elizabeth. "You will have to be particular."
"Thomas Harding. Late of the Sussex line.
My mother keeps a file." Of course she did.
"He lives; he has retired to a cottage near Lewes, granted him for services he declines to name; and he is, by every account, the rudest man in the south of England, which in your case I imagine reads as a character. "
"It reads as a holiday."
The corner of Anne's mouth performed its near-smile.
"I shall have the direction copied for you.
I warn you he does not answer letters; he burns them.
There is a note in the file — my mother wrote to him four times upon the subject of the east and had back, upon the fourth, a single line. Stop writing. Come or do not."
"You will like him enormously," Anne added. "It will be insufferable."
There is this to be said of a house in which someone is dying: it does not cease to be a house.
The kitchen still burnt the morning's first batch of whatever it was; the undergardener and the second housemaid were still conducting a courtship that everybody but themselves believed to be a secret; and the butler, a magnificent old ruin by the name of Perrott, still governed the whole silent machine of the place upon the single organising principle that Lady Catherine must under no circumstances be told a thing that would displease her — a principle he plainly intended to maintain straight through the funeral and out the far side of it.
Elizabeth watched Perrott intercept a footman bearing the wrong wine and redirect him with nothing but his eyebrows, and reflected that here was a man who had spent forty years keeping the truth off his mistress's table, and had no notion that he was the entire matter of the coming season, done up in one waistcoat.
Anne caught her watching him. "He has been sparing her since before I was born," she said, low, reading Elizabeth's face as Elizabeth was accustomed to reading everyone else's, and to which she did not think she would grow reconciled.
"The good wine. The bad news. My father's debts.
My own existence, upon most days. When she goes, he will have nothing left to protect, and no notion how to stop protecting it.
I have been unable to determine whether to be kind to him about it, or to let him discover it for himself. "
"Which way do you lean?"
"Kind," said Anne, as though naming a mild ailment. "It is new. I am given to understand I ought to try things."
Elizabeth laughed. It surprised them both — it came up out of nowhere, real, and cracked clean through three days of cold rooms — and Anne looked at her with an expression that was not quite alarm and not quite pleasure, the face of a woman who has heard a sound she was not certain the house could still make.
"Do not," said Anne.
"I had not meant to make a habit of it."
"You had. A little."
"I had, a little," Elizabeth allowed. "God help the pair of us."
She got the letter to Mary onto the afternoon post with her own hands, not trusting a house so practised in the interception of things to send a thing she actually wished sent; and she got a rider off to Lewes — not with a letter, letters being burnt, but with a man and a message and instructions to stand in the cottage doorway until Captain Thomas Harding either came out or threw something.
And then she stood a moment in the drive, in the thin March light, and permitted herself precisely one ordinary breath, the first in three days without a dying woman's counted rhythm beneath it; the air cold and clean and smelling of wet gravel and somebody's distant bonfire, a blackbird being absurd in a hedge, and behind her the great machine grinding on, burning the toast and hiding the wine and sparing everyone everything.
She was not deceived by it. She knew what it was: the flat reach of water before the ground drops out from beneath the river, and she had read enough now to feel the pull of it, a long way off, east, patient.
But the pull was not there yet; and so she stood in the drive and drank the one clean breath the way she had drunk the frightened maid's fortifying tea, to the bottom, on the growing suspicion that she was going to want the memory of it — and then she went back inside, to the cold room, and the counted breaths, and the box with the rusted line across the top that admitted no exception for the wife.