CHAPTER FOURTEEN
They went east along the rivers, at Denny's asking, and it was the second day before Elizabeth understood the asking, and wished she had not.
He rode at the front. Not to lead — Mary led, who knew the roads — but because the water spoke to him and he wished to hear it before the rest of them arrived at it; a great quiet man on a plain horse, three lengths ahead, his head tipped a little as though he were attending to a thing beneath the hoofbeats.
He was attending to a thing beneath the hoofbeats.
Elizabeth had thought that a figure of speech until she watched him do it for a day.
The first day the rivers were only rivers, and she let herself half-believe the east was a matter of paper and dead men's boxes, a disaster one planned against in warm studies; the Kentish water ran past them brown and cold and dull, going about its business. The second day it ceased to be dull.
They came down to a ford near the Medway crossing at midmorning, and Denny reined in and said nothing, which she had already learnt was the loudest thing he did; and she rode up close, because his silences were information and she would have been a fool not to read them.
"Put your hand in the river," he said, low.
She got down, and knelt upon the cold bank, and put her bare hand into the Medway, and it was water — freezing, quick, ordinary around her fingers — and then it was not.
She felt it not with the gift but with her skin: a wrongness in the current, a pull that had nothing to do with the way the river actually ran, as though somewhere far downstream a great cold mouth had opened beneath the world, and every drop of the water knew it, and leaned, very slightly, toward the place it was going to be swallowed.
The cold of it went up her arm and settled behind her teeth.
She took her hand out. "That is not the current."
"No."
"That is the pull. The one Mary named. It is in the water."
"It has always been in the water." Denny did not look at her; he looked downstream, east, at the ordinary brown river running toward a thing he could feel and she could only just touch.
"Water runs to the low place; that is the whole of what it does; it has done nothing else since the world began.
And the lowest place in England, this season, is a stretch of the eastern line that is opening, and every river that touches it is leaning that way, and I feel it the way you would feel a floor tilt beneath a table you were sitting at.
" His hands were steady on the reins; his voice was not, quite.
"I felt it once before. At Selsey. The night a line opened and Captain Harding took me down to the mill to close it.
I was two-and-twenty, and I put my hand in a brook and felt the water try to run backward, and I have spent twelve years hoping I should never feel it again. "
"And now?"
"Now I have felt it three weeks, and it worsens with every river we cross.
" He looked at her at last, with the face of a man who knows precisely what the feeling is asking of him, because he has paid it before.
"It does not stop, Mrs. Darcy. That is the thing about a low place.
The water does not reconsider. It goes, and goes, and takes what it can carry, until someone gets down into the channel and gives it something else to run to instead. "
He meant a person. She understood him, kneeling on the cold bank with the river's wrong pull still behind her teeth.
Something else to run to was a person; it had been Harding, at Selsey; it would be one of them, in the east. She did not say it.
He knew that she knew, and there was no profit in the pair of them saying it aloud over a ford.
They rode on, and the rivers worsened, and she could not now unfeel it — that was the thing Denny had done to her, and she did not think he had done it to be cruel, but because she was of the sort who would rather know.
Every stream they crossed, she felt the tilt; the whole watered country very slightly canted toward a mouth in the east, and the nearer they came the steeper the cant, until by the third afternoon she rode through ordinary green country with her stomach permanently half-dropped, the way one feels upon a boat when the deck will not hold still.
No one had said the word afraid. None of them was going to.
But she watched it move through the party river by river, the way the draught moved through a room ahead of Denny: Mary's shoulders a degree tighter at each crossing; Anne, who had no calluses for this, gripping her reins a little whiter and saying a little less; and Darcy riding close to her at every ford, every single one, saying nothing, because he did not have to — she could read the thing in him growing louder with each mile, the let me spare you this, pressing at the grate; and he kept the promise, kept it beautifully, let her see it and did not act upon it, and the labour of that was written the length of him.
Denny felt the most and showed the least. That, she understood now, was the whole of his gift — not the feeling of the draught, but the carrying of it; being the one who felt the floor tilt first and rode on regardless, three lengths ahead, so that the rest of them had a half-mile's warning written in the set of his shoulders instead of taking it raw behind their own teeth. He had carried it alone three weeks.
They stopped for the night at an inn whose name she did not catch, and she found him after in the yard, alone, with his sleeve pushed up and his bare hand in the horse-trough, standing there, listening.
"You can feel it even here," she said. "In a trough."
"It is all one water," he said, not turning.
"Trough, river, well, tomorrow's rain. It all runs to the same low place in the end, and it is all of it leaning, and a man with my particular useless gift cannot put his hand in a horse-trough in Sussex without feeling a county three days east begin to come apart.
" He dried his hand upon his coat, plain and unhurried.
"Mary says I am not to do it. Says I shall wear myself listening to a thing I cannot yet mend. She is right. I do it regardless."
"Why?"
He was quiet a moment. "Because when the hour comes — when we reach it, and it is time for someone to get down in the channel and give the water something else to run to — I should like to know the exact shape of it first. To have listened so long I know it like my own pulse.
So that when I go down—" he stopped, and corrected it, and she watched the correction cost him "—so that when someone goes down, they do not meet it as a stranger.
You do not want to meet that as a stranger.
Harding met it as a stranger his first time, and it took years off him in a night. "
When I go down. He had said it before he caught it; and she had heard it; and he knew she had heard it; and neither of them remarked that Denny had already, quietly, three weeks ahead of the rest, begun to volunteer — had been standing at troughs and rivers learning the shape of the thing, so that when it asked for a life, his should be the one that met it least like a stranger.
He was doing it for Mary. Obviously. So that it should not have to be her.
And Mary, Elizabeth would have wagered her own gift, was three days west at that moment doing the identical arithmetic from the other end — learning the wall by heart so that it should not have to be him.
Two people, married, at the two ends of the same water, each quietly training to be the one who died so that the other need not.
It was not even her family, and it was the same disease, only done so gently, so wordlessly, so entirely like devotion, that a person might watch it for years and call it a good marriage.
Perhaps it was a good marriage. Perhaps that was the worst of it.
She went in before her face could do the thing it was doing, and lay awake a long while in a strange bed with her husband breathing beside her, not asleep either, both of them pretending; and she did not do what Denny did, could not, had no ear for water; but she lay there and knew, in the body now and not on paper, the thing she had only known on paper a fortnight since.
The east was real. It was not a box and an instruction and a dead woman's warning.
It was a mouth in the ground three days east, and every river in England was leaning toward it, and there was a great quiet man asleep down the passage who had already decided to be the thing that filled it, and a plain woman three counties west who had decided the same, and somewhere ahead a stretch of pale ground where the water was going down and would not come back.
She put her hand flat upon her husband's chest in the dark, over the heart that kept trying to spend itself in her place, and felt it going too fast, and knew her own was doing likewise, and neither of them said the true thing, because some of the true things are held better in the body than the mouth.
Two days, then. And then the wall.