CHAPTER NINE
Mary wrote back faster than the post could well allow, which meant she had answered upon the day the letter reached her and paid a rider out of her own thin purse to carry it; and that one circumstance told Elizabeth more than the letter did before she had broken the seal, for Mary did not spend money she had not got upon speed, unless.
She carried it up to the window seat in the small parlour, away from the house's practised ears, and broke the seal, and her sister's hand came off the page at her — small, upright, without a flourish anywhere, the hand of a woman who had long since concluded that ornament was a species of lie.
Lizzy, it began. You asked for the practical part and no ceremony. Good. I have never had any, and it is a relief to be asked for the one thing I actually own.
Here is what it costs in the body, since you asked, and since the men who write the manuals have never once put it plainly.
It does not cost pain. It costs the thing you keep pain for.
You will not feel it going. That is the danger, and the whole of the danger, and if anyone has told you otherwise they have not done it, and you should cease to attend to them.
Elizabeth stopped a moment. For that was Harding — near enough word for word, a captain in a cottage near Lewes and her plain sister at a churchyard wall in Hertfordshire, two people who had never met and never would, arriving at the identical sentence because it was simply true, the way a stone is true, and everyone who has knelt in the frost knows it and no one who has not will believe it. She read on.
Now the part you did not ask for, which is why I paid the rider.
You know our wall is mending. I wrote you a year since that it was, and it is — the pale grass drawing back off the graves a yard a season, the wrong-coloured ground greening over.
Denny and I hold it between us now, morning and evening, and it comes right a little more each month, and I have let myself be glad of it. I am no longer glad of it.
Three weeks past I put my hand to the churchyard wall at the corner by the yew, as I do every morning, and the note was steady and mending and mine — and beneath it, far down, running the wrong way, there was a pull.
East. Not in our ground. Through it. As though our wall had come right not because we mended it, but because something a long way off had begun to draw the weight toward itself, the way water leaves a high field when you cut a channel in a low one.
Do you understand me, Lizzy. I need you to understand me, for I do not think I am wrong, and I very much wish to be.
Our wall is not healing. It is draining.
The east is pulling so hard that it siphons strength out of every line joined to it, and ours is joined to it, because they are all of them joined to it — it is one wall, it has always been one wall, and we call it many only because a person cannot hold the whole of England in one hand and wants the comfort of a name for her own small piece of it.
Elizabeth's own hand had gone cold around the paper.
Denny felt it before I did, the letter continued, though he would not say so, for he never says the frightening thing first; he waits to see whether you will say it, so that you need not be alone in it.
You will not remember Denny. You met him twice at the wedding and once at our father's funeral, and upon each occasion he stood a little behind me, being useful and saying nothing, which is the whole of his character and the reason I married him.
He has a small gift — the smallest in his family; his mother never ceased to lament it.
He feels worked magic as another man feels a draught beneath a door: a coldness, a wrongness, a place where the air is drawn through a gap that ought not to be there.
It made him useless for every profession but the one he has.
He felt the pull east through the soles of his boots a fortnight before my hand found it at the wall, and he said nothing, and walked the ground three nights running to be certain, and told me only when I had told him first.
That is who holds the western end of this thing with me: a man who feels the draught before anyone, and says nothing until you are ready.
I would trust him with the whole of it. I may be obliged to.
Come home by way of Meryton if your road permits, or send for us if it does not.
Whatever is in your box in Kent, it is the same thing that is in my ground in Hertfordshire, and I had rather we were not each of us holding half of it three days apart and calling it two problems. — M.
P.S. You wrote that it should not have taken this. You are right. But it did take this, and here we both are, being useful to one another at last, and I find I am not too proud to take a national emergency in exchange for a sister. I will take the trade. Do not make it into a sentiment.
Elizabeth sat a long while in the window with the letter open upon her knee.
Outside, the March light moved across the Rosings lawn, indifferent; behind her the house ground on; and three days east a county she had never seen was a low field, and the water was leaving it, and her sister had just told her plainly what that meant and what it would want, because she was the one person in Elizabeth's life who had never once tried to spare her anything.
And there was the thing beneath the thing.
For Mary, by telling her the truth flat — by declining, in the whole of her plain life, to protect Elizabeth from a single hard fact — had handed her the exact truth that must, in the end, be paid for with a person.
Somebody would have to go to the low field and give what Harding gave and what Mary gave every morning at the yew.
And now that Elizabeth knew it to be one wall, now that her sister had made her see the water leaving, she could not un-know it, and could not leave it, and was of the sort — Mary knew her to be of the sort, Lady Catherine had known, Harding had known — who cannot look at a low field filling and walk away and let it be another's to drain into.
The kindest thing her sister had ever done for her was to decline to spare her this.
It was also, she understood, sitting cold in the sunlit window, the thing that would cost her everything, for one cannot be spared into safety, nor told into it either, and Mary had done the braver thing, and the braver thing has a price, and the price was that now she must act.
She thought of Denny — a man who feels the draught first and says nothing until you are ready; a man who learned a wall so that his wife need never hold it alone; a man and a woman at the two ends of a churchyard, mending ground morning and evening, two hands so that neither need be one — the very thing Lady Catherine had made her promise not two days since, already built, already quietly holding, three days west of the disaster and joined to it by the same buried water.
And she thought, before she could prevent it, of a nursery in Derbyshire, and a child of four who had gone still at a ward upon a lintel and looked at the place where there was nothing to see.
One wall. The whole of it. Joined. Which meant the low field drawing the water out of Meryton was drawing it, however slowly, however far off, out of Pemberley too; out of the ground her daughter was to inherit; out of the wood that leaned.
She folded Mary's letter along its own hard crease, in the way Mary would have wished it folded, without ceremony, and went to find her husband, to tell him the thing his aunt had made her promise she would always tell him — all of it: the low field and the draining and the draught beneath the door and the child's ground three counties off — for there was one mercy she had sworn to take from no one and to give to no one, and it was the mercy of being spared the truth, and she would not hand her sister's plain courage to Darcy softened into a thing he thought she could bear.