CHAPTER EIGHT
She sent for them both at once, which she had never done, and Elizabeth understood before Harlow had finished the message that it meant she had determined this to be the last day upon which she could still teach, and that tomorrow she would not be able.
One learns to read such things in a sickroom; the body keeps its own ledger, and the face reads it aloud.
Anne was already in the corridor when Elizabeth came up, and they looked at one another, and neither said the thing, which was that they were being called in together for the first time and the last, and that the last was doing the greater part of the work in the sentence.
"You have been to Lewes," Anne said.
"I have been to Lewes."
"And?"
"And I shall tell you after. She has not the breath for me to tell you now."
Anne looked at her a half-second beyond what the exchange required, and something passed between them — not warmth, for neither was built for warmth at speed, but a kind of accord, two people agreeing without words to spend the next hour watching the same woman, and to catch her, should the watching turn to something that wanted catching. They went in together.
The cold room was colder; she had had them let it drop further; and she sat up against the pillows in a shawl the colour of old bone, her hands upon the counterpane gone to paper since the day before.
But the eyes came up sharp as ever, and went from Elizabeth to Anne and back, and something in her settled at the sight of the pair of them.
"Good," she said. "Both. Sit. Anne upon the left.
You know I like to watch the face that lies to me and the face that does not, and I have one of each, and I shall not squander my last good afternoon squinting between them.
" She drew a thin breath. "You have seen Harding," she said to Elizabeth — not a question; the house had no unwatched roads.
"Then you have the cost, and I need not spend breath upon it, which is well, for I had rather spend it upon the thing Harding cannot teach you.
He knows the paying. He does not know the arranging. Attend."
"There was never meant to be a Harding," she said, when they had sat.
"A single man at a wall, spending himself to nothing because the thing came faster than the plan — that is a failure.
That is what it looks like when everything else has already gone wrong.
One person paying the whole price alone is not how the Accords were meant to hold; it is how they hold when we have failed to hold them any better way.
" Her fingers moved upon the sheet, arranging things that were not there.
"The better way has a name; my people called it the second case; and I gave it fifteen years. "
Elizabeth felt Anne go still beside her, and understood that this, too, the daughter was hearing for the first time — her mother's life's labour, explained to her upon the same afternoon it was explained to the outsider, thirty years behind a screen and the reason of it delivered on the way out the door.
She did not look at Anne. To look would have been a kindness, and Anne did not want a kindness witnessed.
"The second case is time," Lady Catherine said.
"It is the spreading of the weight, so that no single soul is emptied.
A line need not be held by one great gift spent all at once; it may be held by many small ones, shared — but that wants arranging, a generation deep.
It wants the marrying of the right blood to the right blood, so that when a line thins there are twenty hands beside it, ready to take a little each in place of one hand taking all.
It wants a person who knows every Accord in three counties, and every heir, and every barren marriage and every spare son, and who will move them—" She stopped.
Her hand closed upon nothing. "Like pieces," she said.
"Yes. Say it plainly, if you are going to think it.
I spent fifteen years moving the families of the east about like pieces upon a board, and was hated for it, quietly, in a hundred drawing rooms, by people who supposed me a cold interfering old woman arranging matches for her own amusement.
I let them suppose it. It was better than the truth.
The truth would have frightened them, and a frightened county does not marry sensibly, and I required them to marry sensibly, for I was building the twenty hands — so that when it came, and I always knew it would come, no one need ever be Harding. "
"You built it," said Elizabeth, slowly. "The council. The twenty hands. The whole of it."
"I built it. It is the whole of what I did with my old age, and I did it well, and I should like it said in this room by someone who is not myself, once, plainly, for I shall not be here to say it much longer and Anne will be too angry with me to say it for years."
"You did it well," said Elizabeth — because it was true, and because she had asked, and because she could see Anne's jaw working beside her, unable to give it, and somebody had to.
"Thank you," said Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and for once there was nothing beneath it, only the words.
"Now here is the part you will both of you hate, and the reason I called you in together, that you should hear it in the same breath and never after be able to un-hear it. " The room waited. "It failed."
Two words. She set them down like the last two stones of a wall she had given her life to building and would not live to finish.
"It came too quickly. Something moved that I did not account for, and the twenty hands I spent fifteen years assembling will not be ready in time; and so it falls, after all, to the few.
To you. To four persons and one season and an instruction.
Everything I built to prevent exactly this — and it arrives regardless, in the one shape I swore no child of mine should ever face.
" Her eyes went to Anne, and held. "In the one shape I built a whole life to spare you.
And you will face it notwithstanding. That is the jest God has made of me, and I have had some weeks now to admire the craftsmanship of it. "
Anne did not move. But Elizabeth felt the thing come off her regardless — the banked fire pressing at the grate — and understood that the daughter was holding down something the size of a house, and that if she let one edge of it go in this room it would not be grief but rage, and would be aimed at the dying woman before her, and would be just, and would be unbearable; and that she was not going to let it go.
She was sparing her mother. In this, at the very end, Anne was sparing her.
Elizabeth could have named it — she named everything — and did not name it.
"Why together," Elizabeth asked instead, to give Anne the half-second. "Why teach us in the one room."
Lady Catherine looked at her, and then at her daughter, and then at the cold air between them where the invisible pieces had stood upon their invisible board.
"Because you are the two hands I have left that I trust. One who can pay and does not yet know how much.
One who can see and cannot look away. And because a thing held by one person is Harding, and I will not have another Harding out of my own family, if breath and spite can prevent it.
Two of you. At the least. Promise me that much — whatever else you decide, whatever that box makes you do — not one.
Never one. Do not let her be alone at it—" her eyes upon Anne "—and do not let her—" her eyes upon Elizabeth "—be alone at it either.
You will both of you wish to be. You are both the sort.
That is precisely why I have set you in a room together, so that each of you may know the other was told. "
"I promise," said Elizabeth.
Anne said nothing for a long moment. Then, low, flat, the most expensive words Elizabeth had yet heard her spend: "I promise."
And Lady Catherine de Bourgh closed her eyes, and let her head go back against the pillow, and the sharpness went out of her all at once, like a candle carried into another room.
"Good," she breathed. "That is the lesson.
All the rest is only how. Go. I have spent it.
There is no more today, and I should like you both gone before you are obliged to watch me be a person who cannot teach. "
They went. In the corridor Anne stopped, one hand flat to the cold wall, and stood there breathing; and Elizabeth stood with her, having promised a dying woman not ten minutes since that she would not let this one be alone, and finding the promise already possessed of teeth.
"She built twenty hands," Anne said, to the wall.
"And it was not enough. And she knows it was not enough.
And she must die knowing that the one thing she gave her whole life to preventing is to happen regardless, to me, in front of her.
" Her voice did not break; it went flatter, which was Anne's manner of breaking.
"I have hated her thirty years for the storing.
And now I find she built a world to keep me off that wall, and it failed, and I shall end upon the wall in spite of it, and I cannot even hate her cleanly for the storing any longer, because the storing is the only reason there is anyone strong enough left to go. "
Elizabeth did not tell her it was all right.
It was not. She did not tell her it would pass.
It would not. "No," she said. "You cannot hate her cleanly.
It is the thing this family does to a person.
It makes the theft and the love the same hand, so that you can never set down the one without dropping the other.
" She put her own hand flat to the wall beside Anne's, not touching, only there.
"I shall not let you do it alone. I gave her my word. I should have given it regardless."
Anne turned her head and looked at her. "I know," she said. "That is the worst of it. I believe you."
And the two of them stood a while in the cold corridor of a dying woman's house, their hands upon the wall, not touching, not speaking, becoming — without either having agreed to it, without a single soft word passing between them — the two hands she had asked for.