CHAPTER TWELVE
A great funeral in the country is not a grief but a market, and Elizabeth learnt it standing in the black-draped hall of Rosings four days after, watching half of Kent arrive in its best mourning to pay its respects to a woman most of them had feared and none had liked, and to discover, while it was about it, precisely what she had left and to whom.
Grief was upstairs, private, in a plain woman from Hertfordshire who had come a day too late and a daughter who had ceased to hide.
Downstairs it was arithmetic in a black coat.
Mr. Collins arrived first, as he must, having presumably slept in the carriage to accomplish it.
He came through the door already weeping, or producing the sound of it, and crossed the hall toward Anne with both hands extended and a face arranged into so perfect a topography of grief that Elizabeth could have drawn a map of it — here the valley of Loss; there the promontory of My Own Great Sympathy; and running through the midst of it the broad navigable river of What This Must Mean For My Living.
"Miss de Bourgh," he choked, "or — I should say — that is — one hardly knows, in the sad press of the moment, the correct — the style—"
"The style is unchanged, Mr. Collins," said Anne. "I was Miss de Bourgh yesterday and am Miss de Bourgh today. What has altered is that yesterday I sat behind a screen, and today I own the chair upon which you are standing rather too close."
Collins retreated from the chair. "A great loss," he attempted. "A very great — her ladyship's patronage, her guidance, her — one scarcely knows how the parish is to—"
"The parish will do precisely as it did before, for I have read every letter my mother ever wrote you upon the subject of running it, and I mean to go on writing them, in her hand and her temper, and you will not be able to tell the difference, and neither will the parish.
Do have some ham. You have come a long way to be reassured about your house, and may as well be fed while you are. "
Elizabeth turned and studied a portrait for a moment.
Across the hall Charlotte caught her eye — Charlotte, who had married the man and managed the marriage as a good sailor manages weather — and there passed between the two of them the entire understanding of two clever women watching a third clever woman come into her power.
Charlotte lifted one eyebrow a fraction: she will do.
She will do, Elizabeth agreed, across a room full of black.
The county went about its work. She watched a widow establish, over cold meat, that her second son and Anne were of an age.
She watched two brothers who had not spoken in a decade discover a shared and tender memory of the deceased at the precise moment it became material to a boundary dispute.
She watched a clergyman price the candles.
And she understood, standing there with a cup of somebody's indifferent wine, that this was the very machinery her aunt had spent fifteen years working through — not around, but through; that she had taken this grasping, calculating, marrying, inheriting country engine, and turned it, family by family, toward the holding up of a wall none of them knew existed, and used their greed for their own good, and let them hate her for the interference.
It was very nearly admirable. It was very nearly the most cynical thing Elizabeth had ever seen.
She was no longer certain those were different observations.
Anne burned the screen the evening after the funeral, herself, in the great hall hearth, once the county had gone home fed and reassured.
Elizabeth came down to find her feeding it in panel by panel — the lacquered thing that had stood before her thirty years, the wall of it, the delicacy of it — the fire well caught, the paper going up in long bright curls, and Anne watching it with the flat complete attention of a woman balancing an account.
"That is arson," said Elizabeth from the stairs. "In your own hall. I am fairly sure the magistrate is now yourself, so I do not know to whom you would report it."
"I report it to myself, and dismiss the case.
" She fed another panel in. "Thirty years I sat behind this.
My mother had it made when I was six, the year she understood what I was and determined the county must not.
Sandalwood frame. Very fine. It cost more than the curate earns in a twelvemonth, to hide a child in a room she was already sitting in.
" The fire jumped. "I have wished to burn it since I was nine, and could not, for the burning would have raised questions, and questions were the one thing the screen existed to prevent.
Now there is no one left to spare the questions to.
She is dead. I am the last person in England who knew what the screen was for, and I find I would rather be cold in a hall with no screen than warm in a life with one.
Also it burns beautifully. Sandalwood. Smell that. "
Elizabeth came down and stood beside her and smelled it, and it was true — extraordinary, the whole hall gone warm and resinous and sweet, thirty years of concealment going up as the finest-smelling fire she had ever stood at.
"To my mother," Anne said, to the flames, dry as the match.
"Who was right about everything and kind about none of it, and whom I shall miss with my whole chest for the rest of my life, and never forgive.
" She watched the frame char. "That is the tribute.
She would have understood it. It is the only kind either of us was ever able to make. "
Elizabeth did not answer. Some fires one simply stands at.
Kitty had come for the funeral. Elizabeth had near forgotten it in all the rest — her sister Kitty, sent up from Pemberley in the black-edged rush with a note pinned to her, because Georgiana had thought the family ought to be represented and Kitty was the one who could be spared.
Spared. The word followed this family about like a dog.
She had been three days at Rosings, useful in the small invisible ways nobody marks — fetching, sitting with the plain sister who had come too late, keeping Mr. Collins occupied with a heroism that ought to have been decorated — and Elizabeth found her the morning after the screen-burning in the cold breakfast room, and watched her do a thing she did not know she was doing.
She was holding a cup of tea; nothing remarkable in that.
But her other hand rested flat upon the doorframe — the warded doorframe, the old blessing worked into the wood, the same kind Cassandra had gone still at three counties north — and Kitty's palm lay upon it easy and absent, and there was the faintest steadiness coming off her and into the wood, a small quiet holding, the sort of thing one would never remark unless one had spent a fortnight learning to read exactly that.
She had a gift. Her silly, overlooked, given-away younger sister had a gift, and it was small, and it was real, and no one in two-and-twenty years had ever given her the air to find it, because there had always been a Lydia to be louder or a Lizzy to be cleverer, and Kitty was only ever the one who might be spared.
"Kitty," said Elizabeth, carefully, keeping her voice as ordinary as the tea. "Do not move your hand."
"What? Off the door? Lizzy, I am only standing—"
"I know. Keep it there a moment." She came and stood close and set her own hand upon the wood beside her sister's, and felt it — the little steadiness, the wall of the ward going a fraction firmer beneath Kitty's palm without her asking it to. "Do you feel that?"
"Feel what?" And then — Elizabeth watched it cross her face — she did. A flicker. "That is — the door feels—" She frowned. "Warmer? No. Steadier. Is that me?"
"That is you."
"I do it to horses," Kitty said, faintly, as though confessing to something foolish. "When they are spooked. I put my hand on the neck and they go quiet. I always thought it was only being kind to the horse."
"It is not only being kind to the horse."
She stared at her own hand upon the doorframe as though it belonged to a stranger, and something happened in her face that Elizabeth had never once seen there in two-and-twenty years of overlooking her: she became interesting to herself.
And Elizabeth knew, in that moment, exactly what she was about to do.
She had come into the room with a sister she could spare and she was going to leave it with one she could use, for the east was a low field, and it was draining, and it would want every hand there was, even the small ones, particularly the small ones; and she had just found one that nobody had been using.
Lady Catherine, four days dead, would have approved entirely.
That was the thing that stopped her a half-second — that she was about to do the family thing, the exact thing, reach for a person because she was of use.
But it was not the same, and she made herself certain it was not the same, and it was not, for she was not going to spare her the knowing.
She was going to tell her the whole of it, the low field and the cost and the draught beneath the door, and let her choose.
"Kitty," she said. "Sit down. I am going to tell you something true, and it is frightening, and I am not going to make it smaller to be kind.
You have a gift. It is real, and it is wanted, and there is a thing happening in the east that will want it.
I shall tell you everything. And then you will decide. "
Kitty sat down slowly, the tea forgotten, her hand still half-reaching toward the door.
"Nobody has ever told me anything true and frightening before," she said.
"They always decide I cannot—" She stopped.
Her chin came up, a fraction, the exact fraction Elizabeth had watched come up in a dozen Bennet women when the ground shifts.
"Tell me. I am sick of being the one who gets spared. "
There, thought Elizabeth. There is the whole family in a single sentence. And she drew out a chair, and sat across from her youngest useful sister in a cold breakfast room in a dead woman's house, and told her the truth.