CHAPTER NINETEEN
They came back to the rectory in the full light of the morning, and no one ate, though someone had laid out bread and cold meat upon the map-table, because someone always does, the body's small offices continuing indifferent to grief; and the food sat there untouched while five people who had watched an old man empty himself into a wall sat about it and declined to meet one another's eyes.
It was Anne who broke it, as it was always going to be Anne, for she was her mother's daughter and her mother had never in her life flinched from an ugly number.
"We have to count it," she said. "I know that none of us wishes to.
But we have seen this morning what one of them costs, so that now we know the unit of the sum, and a plan built upon refusing to look at the sum is precisely how my mother came to have a county fail three years before its time.
" She drew the parish map toward her across the untouched bread.
"So. Mary. How many walls, in truth — your best count. "
"Forty that I can feel from where we sit," Mary said, after a moment. "More beyond that. Call it sixty across the whole of the east, and it may well be more."
"And to hold sixty."
"You cannot hold them; we have settled that already; you can only be there when each one goes, and pay it, so that it does not carry three of its neighbours down with it.
" Mary regarded the map as though it had done her a personal injury.
"Some are small — a sexton's ward, like this morning, one keeper and one life's gift and the thing is held.
Some are great — the Fenwick sort — and those would want more than any single person has to give. "
"So the sum," Anne said, "lies somewhere between sixty small prices and a dozen great ones."
"Yes."
"In lives."
"In lives," Mary said, "or in what is left of a life afterward, which is sometimes a worse price than a life and always a longer one to pay."
No one spoke for a while, and into that silence Elizabeth did the arithmetic regardless, because she could no more decline to do it than decline to breathe, her whole cursed gift being the seeing of the shape of a thing whether she wished to see it or not.
Sixty small prices; a dozen great ones; and upon their own side of the ledger, five keepers and a girl who had found her gift a month since, and a box of bindings each payable only by the one soul it named, and a whole county of ordinary Elias Wrens who did not yet know that they were the coin.
It did not balance. It did not come within a mile of balancing; and that, she understood now with the taste of the morning still in her mouth, was the very nature of the third case: it was not a problem that a clever person solved, but a debt that could only ever be partly paid, in the one currency of which no one alive can mint a further ounce, so that the arithmetic was always, from the beginning, going to end with more walls than there were people willing to be spent upon them.
"How many of the sixty," Darcy asked, quietly, "have a keeper of their own — a Wren — someone whose it is, who will pay it themselves."
Anne consulted her mother's map, and her mother's memory, and took a while about it before she answered.
"Perhaps half. The old parishes — the families that kept a ward and a spade between them for centuries and never told a soul — they will do as Wren did, most of them, God help them, and gladly, because the binding is theirs and they have always known it.
But half again were held by lines that have thinned, or died out, or married away from the county — my mother's own doing, a part of it, for she moved the strong blood to wherever the plan had need of it, and left some old wards with no one whose they are any longer.
" She stopped, and her jaw did the thing that her mother's jaw had used to do.
"Those are the ones that fall to us. Because a binding with no one whose it is takes no one — or else takes whoever happens to be standing beside it, willing to make it theirs. "
"How many of those," Elizabeth said.
Anne looked at the map for a long time before she would put a number to it. "A dozen," she said. "Perhaps fifteen. That we should have to take upon ourselves, personally, each of us more than once."
And there it was upon the table, counted at last: fifteen walls with no keeper but themselves, and six of them to do the keeping, one of the six barely trained.
The sum stood written plain now where every person in the room could read it, and what it said, in the flat and patient language of arithmetic, was that they did not all of them walk back out of the east; that some of them were the price; that the numbers had said as much since Kent, and they had all been not-looking, and now Anne had made them look, and there was the ledger, and it would not come out even without the spending of people whom they loved.
Elizabeth looked round at them — at Anne, flat and grim and unflinching; at Mary, who knew walls and knew exactly what she was volunteering for every time she said I will take the watch; at Denny, who had been quietly teaching himself the shape of the thing at troughs and rivers for weeks in order to be the first to it; at Darcy, who had come into the east intending to be the whole of the ledger by himself — and she saw that every one of them had already, privately, decided to be a figure in the sum, and that they were all of them doing it in silence, and nobly, sparing one another the saying of it aloud.
The whole room was full of people being Elias Wren in advance of the event, and not one of them would say so, because to say so aloud would be to invite the others to argue, and it is a good deal easier to be spent in secret than to be talked out of it.
Even now. Even having watched. It was the same disease, wearing its Sunday clothes.
"Whose life is the next one?"
It was Kitty who said it, into the middle of the silence, and every head at the table came up, because it was the question — the one that had been lying beneath all the arithmetic, the one that none of the rest of them would say, being every one too experienced and too noble and too well practised at sparing — and her youngest sister, a fortnight into the whole of it, said it plainly, for the simple reason that she did not yet know one was not supposed to.
Which was exactly why Elizabeth had brought her.
"Kitty—" Mary began.
"No, I want to know, and somebody ought to say it aloud.
" Kitty had gone pale, but her chin was up, at that Bennet fraction it came to when the ground shifted beneath a Bennet.
"You are all of you sitting here doing sums about lives, and being terribly quiet and grown-up over it, and I can read every one of your faces, and every one of you has already decided that it is going to be you, and you are all being brave and silent about it precisely so that nobody is given the chance to stop you.
" She looked round the table. "That is what Mr. Wren did.
He sat under his lantern and decided it all by himself, and it was very brave, and nobody got to say a proper goodbye to him, and his daughter's face this morning—" Her voice caught, and she rode over it.
"I do not want any more faces like that daughter's.
So I am asking the rude question. Whose is the next one?
Because if we say it aloud, then at least we are allowed to argue about it, and at least nobody is spent in secret before I have had my chance to say that I would rather it were me. "
The silence that came after that was a different sort of silence, for she was right, and she had said the thing, and once a thing is said it cannot be unsaid, and they were all of them obliged now to look at one another across the untouched bread and be people who had been caught.
"It will not be you," Elizabeth told her, because that at least was true, and she could give her sister that much.
"Your gift is a holding gift and not a spending one; you keep a wall steady for a minute or two; you do not pour yourself into it.
You are the one who buys the others their time — which is not nothing, which is the very opposite of nothing — but it is not the next life, and it will not be you, and I am sorry. "
"Why are you sorry?"
"Because I can hear that you wished it might be a possibility," Elizabeth said, gently.
"That after two-and-twenty years of being the one who is always spared, you wanted, just the once, to be allowed to be the one who mattered enough to be spent; and I am telling you that it will not be you, and I can see that it lands upon you like being spared all over again.
" She held her sister's eyes. "It is not that.
To be the one who buys the others their minutes is how the half of them will live to argue another day.
But I hear you, and you are right about the rest of it, and so. "
She looked round the table. "And so we say it aloud, from this hour.
All of it. Kitty is right, and I am ashamed that it took the youngest and least-trained person in the room to say the plain thing while the rest of us sat being noble over the bread.
No more deciding in secret; no more being Elias Wren under a private lantern.
When the next wall comes, we say whose it is, aloud, across this table, and we argue about it, and nobody — nobody — is spent before the rest of us have had our chance to fight over it.
" She looked at Darcy as she said the last of it, and he looked back at her, and did not flinch, and did not pretend it was not aimed at him.
"That is the rule, and it is the only way that six people do a thing like this without becoming the very thing we came into the east to hold back. Are we agreed?"
"Agreed," said Anne, first, because she hated it and knew it to be right, which was the whole of Anne in a single word.
"Agreed," said Mary; and Denny nodded; and Kitty, fierce and pale, nodded after him.
Darcy was the last of them, as she had known he would be.
"Agreed," he said, at length, and she heard beneath the word the entire cost of it to him — the man who had meant to carry the whole ledger alone, binding himself now, before witnesses, to argue about it first. "In the open," he said. "God help me. In the open."
And they sat there, six people about a table with an ugly sum written upon it and a plate of bread that no one was going to eat, having agreed at last to the one thing that made the arithmetic bearable — not that it balanced, for it never would, but that when they came to spend, they would spend it in the daylight, and say whose it was, so that the people who loved the one being spent might at the least have their say before the paying.
It was not a great deal. It was the entire difference between this family and Lady Catherine's, all the same; and it fit into three words; and it had wanted the silliest of the Bennet sisters to make them say it.