CHAPTER FIFTEEN
One smells it before one sees it. She had expected rot — some honest stench of death she might brace against — and it was worse than rot; it was the smell of nothing, a scoured, mineral, empty smell, like the inside of a cave, like a room shut so long the air has forgotten how to be air.
It came up the last mile on the wind out of the east and lodged at the back of the throat, and the horses disliked it, and so did she.
Denny had stopped speaking two miles back, which was how she knew they were near. And then they came over a low rise, and there it was, and she forgot, for a moment, the ordinary business of breathing.
The ground had gone wrong. She had heard it described a dozen times in a fortnight — pale grass, wrong-coloured earth, the colder paler green — and none of the describing had done a single thing to prepare her, for the words had made it sound a shade, a tint, a thing one might notice on looking.
One did not have to look. It struck the eye like a blow.
A whole valley of it: grass gone the colour of a drowned man, grey-green, bloodless, wrong in a manner that made the eye slide off it hunting the ordinary green it knew ought to be there, and finding everywhere that pallor instead.
It ran from the ridge beneath them down across the fields and up the far side, a mile of dead colour under a living sky; and threaded all through it, dark against the pale, were the graves.
Churchyards. Dozens of them. Every parish for miles, and the pale ground had come up among the stones and swallowed the grass between them, so that the dead stood in a sea of the wrong colour, and the wrongness was thickest exactly where the bodies lay, as though the ground were hungriest for the places to which it had already been given the most.
Meryton, Mary had written her, had it creeping a yard a season off the edge of one churchyard. This had eaten a county.
"Oh," said Kitty, very small, at her side — Kitty had come east after all, sent for from Rosings, told the whole truth and left to choose, and choosing this, God help her, Elizabeth's silliest, bravest sister — staring at the pale valley with her reins gone slack. "Oh, Lizzy. It is so big."
"I know."
"You said it was bad. You did not say—"
"I did not know," Elizabeth told her. "No one told me the size. I do not think anyone who has seen the size has been in a fit state to write it down."
They came down off the ridge to the nearest wall. It was not a wall, of course but there was a churchyard wall of actual stone at the foot of the valley where the line ran, and Mary swung down before her horse had fully stopped and walked to it as though the rest of them were not there.
Elizabeth had watched Mary a great deal these three weeks, and had learnt to read her as she read everyone, and what she had learnt was that Mary was never rattled; that her whole plain competence was built upon a stillness so complete it had taken twenty years to understand it was not dullness but the opposite — a woman holding herself so steady she could hear a note in a stone that no one else in England could hear.
Mary put both hands flat upon the churchyard wall.
And Elizabeth watched the stillness break.
It was small. A stranger would have missed it, would have seen a plain woman resting her hands upon stone.
Elizabeth saw the shoulders come up; saw the head tip, the listening tip, the one Denny did — and then saw it stop, saw her go rigid, saw the breath she drew catch halfway and not finish, and her fingers press flatter against the stone as though holding down a thing that was trying to get out from beneath her palms. She stayed so a long while.
No one spoke. Even Anne, who filled every silence she was given, said nothing — for they were all of them watching the one person present who actually knew what she touched, and all of them reading the same thing off her back, and it was the most frightening thing Elizabeth had seen since she came into this.
Mary Bennet was afraid. The woman who held a wall every morning in all weathers and called it Tuesday.
The expert. And her fear went through the party the way Denny's draught went through a room, for if Mary was afraid, then it was worse than any of the amateurs had been equipped even to fear about.
She took her hands from the wall and turned, and her face had gone the careful blank of a person spending everything they had to keep it blank, and when she spoke her voice was level, and the levelness cost her; Elizabeth could see precisely what it cost.
"It is not one wall," she said.
"What?"
"I have been thinking of it as one wall. The east. One long line, failing." She looked back at the pale valley, the drowned-green miles of it, the graves standing in their sea of wrong. "It is not. Come. Put your hand on the stone. You will feel it without the gift — you felt the river."
Elizabeth went, and put her hand upon the cold churchyard stone, and Mary was right; she felt it without reaching.
But it was not the single clean pull of the river.
It was dozens of pulls, crossing, tangling, each one a separate wall failing at its own pace in its own direction — a whole snarl of them, like standing in a room full of people all falling down separate staircases at once and feeling every stumble through the floor.
"Every parish is its own wall," Mary said, low, to her alone, while the others watched.
"Every churchyard, every old ward, every stretch some long-dead soul laid down — I had thought them one line, because at home they behave as one line; they are joined; they hold together.
Here they have come unjoined. Each fails alone now, at its own rate, and there are—" she stopped, and did a thing Elizabeth had never seen her do, which was lose her place in a sentence "—Lizzy, I cannot count them.
I stood at our wall six years and always knew exactly how much wall there was and exactly what it wanted.
I put my hands on this and cannot find the edges of it.
There is more failing wall in this one valley than I have mornings left in my life to hold. "
That was when the fear got properly into Elizabeth — not at the smell, or the pale grass, or the graves, but there, at the sound of her unflappable sister saying I cannot count them in a voice with the floor gone out from under it.
"How many hands would it want," Anne asked, quietly, from behind them — her mother's daughter, going straight to the arithmetic — "to hold what you are feeling. If you had to guess."
Mary was quiet a moment. "My mother-in-law's twenty," she said — meaning Lady Catherine's twenty, the council, the fifteen years — "would have held one wall.
This section. Perhaps. If they were trained and ready and stood every day.
" She looked down the valley. "There are forty sections like this one that I can feel from where I stand, and I cannot feel the far end, and behind us there are five of us and a girl who found her gift a month ago. "
The number landed in the middle of them, and no one picked it up.
"So we cannot hold it," Kitty said, very quietly, saying the thing the rest were too practised to say, which was the whole reason Elizabeth had brought her. "We came all this way, and we — cannot. There are not enough of us. There are not enough of us by hundreds."
No one answered her, because she was right, and everyone who knew anything knew she was right, and the only person qualified to tell her otherwise was standing with her back to a churchyard wall having just confessed she could not find the edges of the thing.
Darcy moved up beside Elizabeth. He did not take her hand — they were past that, out here, before the thing itself — but he stood close, and she felt the heat of him against the mineral cold coming off the pale ground, and for once he did not reach for the sparing, because there was nothing here to spare anyone from; it was too large to soften; one cannot tuck a dead county beneath the other letters.
"Then it is the third case," he said. Flat.
To all of them. "Truly. Not the theory of it.
We cannot hold this as it ought to be held — by many hands, gently, over years.
There are not the hands, and there is not the time.
Which means it will be held the other way.
The way the instruction is written for." He looked at the box, which Denny carried now, strapped to his saddle, for Darcy would not have it under his own hand every hour of every day. "By the few. At cost."
Spare no one. The words settled into the pale valley as though they had been written for exactly this ground, which, she supposed, they had.
"Well," said Anne, into the terrible quiet, dry as the burnt screen, holding the whole party up with it in the way that only she could.
"My mother did always say I should amount to something eventually.
" She looked out over the forty failing walls she could not see the end of.
"I do not suppose she pictured this. Come.
We can hardly solve England from a ridge smelling of a cave.
Where do we sleep, and which of these do we lose first? "
They rode down into the valley of the wrong colour; and behind her Elizabeth heard Mary murmur, so low she was not certain she was meant to catch it, in the plainest and most frightened and most honest voice she had ever heard her sister use: "All of them.
If we are not clever, we lose all of them. "