CHAPTER SIXTEEN
They took an empty rectory in the pale valley — the parson having sensibly fled west with his flock — and by the second evening Elizabeth understood that the greatest danger to their small campaign was not the forty failing walls.
It was that Anne de Bourgh and Mary Bennet could not be in the same room.
It was not dislike; that she could have managed; she had managed dislike her whole life.
It was the opposite. They were so exactly the same shape of person that they kept attempting to occupy the same ground, and two things cannot occupy the same ground, and so they struck sparks at every meeting, like two flints each of which had spent a lifetime being the only flint in the box.
She had set them to work together the first night, God help her, because it had seemed obvious: Mary could feel a wall; Anne carried the whole map of the east in her head, every Accord and family and where the strength ought to lie; put them together, Elizabeth had thought, and one should have a map of what was failing and what remained to hold it.
She had never been so wrong about two people in her life.
"That one is already gone," Mary said, the second morning, over a great parish map Anne had spread upon the rectory table, one blunt finger upon a churchyard to the east. "I felt it last night. It is not failing. It is failed. There is nothing beneath it to hold."
"That is the Fenwick ward," Anne said. "It cannot be gone. The Fenwick line has held it four hundred years; there are three sound Accords married into it within my mother's arrangement alone; it is among the strongest—"
"It is gone."
"You felt it from here. Two miles off, through the wall of this house and a mile of failing ground between. You will forgive me if I want a firmer basis than one woman's fingertips before I write off four centuries of—"
"You may want whatever you like." Mary did not look up from the map.
She was not loud; she was never loud; that was the thing she and Anne shared that made it so lethal — they both went quieter to fight, not louder.
"Want a firmer basis. Convene a council.
Take a vote. The ward will still be gone, because I put my hand to the note that runs to it last night and there was no note, only a hole where the note goes, and I have held a wall six years and know the difference between thin and gone as you know the difference between a sleeping man and a corpse. "
Anne's jaw did a thing Elizabeth recognised, because it was the exact thing her mother's jaw had used to do.
"I have spent thirty years," Anne said, very evenly, "learning this map, because it was the one thing anyone would permit me to have.
I know every line upon it. I know things about the Fenwick ward written nowhere, because my mother told them to me through a screen when I was twelve.
And you have been in this county four days. "
"And in four days I have felt more failing wall than you have touched in your life," Mary said, "for you have never once touched a wall, Miss de Bourgh.
You have studied them. It is not the same organ.
I could no more read your map than you could read my note, and the difference between us is that I know I cannot read the map, and you believe that studying the note for thirty years is the same as putting your hand upon it. "
The rectory went very quiet. Elizabeth put her head down over her own papers and became extremely interested in them.
For here was the thing: they were both right, which was what made it unbearable.
Mary's fingertips were the truest instrument in the county, and Anne's map was the only reason they knew where to set them; and each stood upon the one true thing she owned and refused to grant that the other's true thing was also true, because each had spent a whole life being the only person in any room who could do the thing she did.
Anne had been the reserve, the stored one — thirty years of being told, in effect, that she was too precious and too strange to be like other people — and had turned that into the map, into being the one mind that held the whole east; and here was a plain nobody from Hertfordshire feeling things Anne could only chart.
And Mary — Elizabeth knew Mary's version in her bones, for it was the family's version — Mary had been the plain one, the overlooked middle sister who studied grimly at a thing nobody valued and found, at the very end of everything, that the grim useless studying was the one gift that mattered, that she alone could hold a wall.
Each had been the only one who could do her thing for precisely as long as the other had been the only one who could do hers.
Two only children of the spirit. Both right.
Neither able to yield an inch, because yielding an inch felt, to each, like being told again that the thing she was, was not enough.
Elizabeth could have told them all of it, laid out plain, the way she saw everything.
She had learnt better than to try. One cannot tell two proud people that they are the same; they have to catch each other doing the thing they respect, and there is no shortcut for it, and it cannot be arranged.
Which was maddening, for the daylight was going, and the Wednesbury line was failing another yard while they quarrelled over a map, and they all of them knew it.
It was Kitty who cracked it, in the end. Of course it was.
She had been in the corner the whole quarrel, being invisible in the manner she had spent two-and-twenty years perfecting, and she said it timidly, into a silence, not meaning anything by it: "Could you not just — do it together?
Mary feels which are gone, and Miss de Bourgh knows which of the ones that are left were meant to be strong; so between you, you would know which of the still-living ones are about to surprise everyone by dying — because they were supposed to be safe, so nobody is watching them. Would you not?"
Silence. Mary looked at Anne. Anne looked at Mary.
And Elizabeth watched the exact thing happen that she could not have forced with a week of managing — watched each of them, at precisely the same moment, do the arithmetic upon Kitty's simple question and arrive at the same answer and understand that the answer required the other one.
"The strong ones no one is watching," Anne said slowly. "The ones the whole plan assumed were safe."
"Because a wall everyone knows is failing gets hands put to it," Mary said, just as slowly. "It is the ones that were meant to hold that will go quietly, with no one there, and take three others down when they fall, because they were load-bearing—"
"—and I know which ones were load-bearing—"
"—and I can feel which of those has begun to slip—"
They both stopped, and looked at one another across the map with the identical expression of two duellists who have discovered they are set back to back against the same enemy; and it was the first time in four days Elizabeth had seen either of their faces without a wall up.
"You would have to tell me the instant you felt one begin," Anne said. Grudging. Testing.
"You would have to tell me which ones to feel for," Mary said. "I cannot hold my hand to forty walls at once. If you tell me which twelve matter, I can watch those." A pause. "I cannot do it without your map."
"And the map is worthless without your fingers.
" Anne said it flat, as though it cost her, because it did.
"It always was. I have had a perfect chart of a country I could never once touch.
Thirty years." Something moved behind her eyes.
"Which is rather the whole of my life, put plainly.
A map of a place I was not permitted to stand in. "
"Yes," Mary said. Not unkindly; Mary was never unkind; she was only true.
"And I am a woman who can feel every stone of a place and never once knew its name until you told me.
We are two halves of a person, Miss de Bourgh.
It is insufferable. I noticed it the first hour and have been furious about it ever since. "
"So have I," said Anne.
"I know. I could tell. It is why I could not stand you."
"Entirely mutual."
And then — Elizabeth was sitting three feet off and would swear to it — the corner of Anne's mouth performed its ghost of a thing, and the corner of Mary's mouth did the identical thing back, two plain unbeautiful competent women recognising themselves in one another at last; and something settled between them that Elizabeth knew, watching it, would outlast every soul in that room.
They worked until dawn. Elizabeth fell asleep in a chair near midnight to the sound of it — the two flattest, driest voices in England going back and forth over a map by candlelight, this one; no, this one; feel here; no, you are a half-mile off; there, yes, that is it, write it down — and woke stiff and cold at first light to find them still at it, and a list made, and the list the first thing since they had come into the valley that looked like a chance and not a wake.
"We have twelve," Anne said, when she saw Elizabeth stir.
She looked as though she had not slept and did not care.
"Twelve walls that were meant to be safe and are not, that will go quietly and take others with them if no one is there.
Mary can feel all twelve from three positions I have worked out.
We cannot hold forty. But we may hold the twelve that matter — which, if we are right, and we are right, keeps the other twenty-eight from falling like a rope of climbers. "
"It is not hands enough even for twelve," Mary said, plain as ever, refusing to let anyone be spared the truth even in victory. "Not to hold them. Only to watch them, and buy time, and be there when one goes so it does not take the rest. It is not a solution. It is a delay."
"It is a delay we did not have yesterday," Anne said.
"Yes." Mary very nearly smiled again. "It is. Well found, sister-in-law. You are less useless than I feared."
"You are exactly as useless as I feared," Anne returned, "and it transpires you are useless in precisely the manner I required. Go to sleep. We begin the watch tonight, and I have no intention of keeping it beside a woman who has fallen asleep on her feet, however unreasonably competent she is."
Elizabeth lay in her cold chair and watched the two of them, and thought: there it is.
The thing Lady Catherine wanted and could not force.
The thing I could not force either. Two hands, neither one alone — built out of pure friction, by a shy girl's plain perfect question, at a candlelit table in a dying county; a partnership begun as a quarrel, which would end, she would have staked her gift upon it, as thirty years of letters between the only two people who ever wholly understood one another.
They would never call it a friendship. Neither of them ever would.
And that, she thought, watching them bicker their way toward the first hopeful dawn of the campaign, was exactly how she would know it was the realest one either of them would ever have.