CHAPTER TWENTY
She found Anne upon the rectory roof a little after midnight, which was, upon reflection, exactly where a person who had spent thirty years learning to be alone in a full house would go to be alone in an empty one.
There was a flat leaded stretch behind the chimney-stack where some earlier sexton had plainly retreated to smoke a pipe out of the wind, and Anne was sitting in it with her knees drawn up and her mother's shawl about her shoulders, looking east, toward the pale ground one could not see in the dark but could feel regardless, a faint permanent wrongness pulling at the edge of everything.
"You will catch your death up here," Elizabeth said, coming up through the little hatch.
"From the look of the ledger," Anne returned, without turning, "that would be the efficient course. Sit down, if you are going to. You did not climb onto a roof at midnight to lecture me upon the cold."
So Elizabeth sat, upon the freezing lead, and felt it come up through her skirts, and neither of them remarked upon it; and for a while neither of them said anything at all, which was the thing about Anne — she was the one person of Elizabeth's acquaintance who would let a silence be a silence, who did not rush to fill it, having learnt across thirty years behind a screen that the greater part of human talk is only people frightened of the quiet.
Elizabeth let it be quiet a while, and then said the thing she had climbed the roof to say.
"You have decided that it is going to be you. The next great one — one of the fifteen with no keeper. I watched you at the table this morning; you did the sum, and you arrived at yourself before Anne had finished asking the question. You have already chosen. Have you not."
"Yes," said Anne. Only that; no argument, and no softening; and there was something almost restful in dealing with a person who would not waste one's time by being spared.
"Tell me why," Elizabeth said. "The true why. Not the noble one."
Anne was quiet a moment, drawing the shawl the closer about her.
"Because I was made for it," she said. "I do not mean that grandly.
I mean it as a plain fact, in the way one would say that a knife was made for cutting.
My whole life was an arrangement, Elizabeth; you know it; my mother looked at me when I was six years old, saw what I was, and built the remainder of my childhood around the keeping of me full.
Unspent. Reserved. She stored me as one stores winter fuel against a hard year — no exertions, no marriage, no ordinary life that might draw off so much as a drop of what I carry — thirty years of being kept back.
" She looked east. "And here is the hard year, the very one she stored me against, arrived exactly as she always knew it would; and here am I, holding thirty years of unspent life, more than any of you, more perhaps than the whole of you together; and there are fifteen walls with no keeper; and the arithmetic is not difficult, and has not been difficult since Kent.
I am the reserve. So I spend. It is not even tragic, when one looks at it squarely.
It is tidy. It is the most sensible disposition of the resources at that table, and my mother would approve of it entirely, and that is rather the point of the thing — I was built to be spent, and now there is at last a matter worth the spending, and it would be a waste not to.
Thirty years of storage for nothing, otherwise.
I had rather the storage came to mean something. I had rather be the fuel than the ash."
And there it was: the most dangerous sentence Elizabeth had heard since she came into the east, more dangerous by far than any binding, because it was reasonable — because it was a woman who had been robbed of a life, volunteering to have the robbery pay off, and calling the volunteering common sense.
"No," said Elizabeth.
"Elizabeth—"
"No. Hear me out, for I shall only say this the once, and then you may argue with it as long as you like.
" She turned and looked at Anne full on, because this was a thing that could not be said sideways.
"You have done the arithmetic, and the arithmetic is correct, and I am going to refuse it regardless, and I want you to understand exactly why, because the why is everything — it is the only thing in the whole of this that matters.
You wish to spend yourself because you were stored to be spent.
Because your mother spared you a life — spared you marriage, and exertion, and the ordinary drawing-down of a person that the rest of us are pleased to call living — and kept you full against precisely this hour.
And now you would cash it in. You would let the sparing pay off.
You would make your whole robbed childhood worth it by pouring the proceeds of it into a wall. "
"Yes," said Anne. "That is it exactly. That is not an argument against; that is only—"
"It is the argument against. It is the entire argument against." Elizabeth did not raise her voice; she lowered it, into the register she had learnt from a dead woman and was using, upon the roof, against that woman's own daughter.
"Because if you spend yourself because you were spared a life in order to be spent — then the sparing was right.
Then your mother was right to store you.
Then thirty years behind a screen was good husbandry after all, and the theft of your whole ordinary life stands justified, in retrospect, by the fact that you spent the proceeds of it well.
You would be the proof that it had been worth it to store you.
And I will not permit you to be that proof.
I watched you burn a screen in your own hall, Anne.
I am not going to watch you climb back in behind it to die. "
Anne said nothing. In the dark Elizabeth could just make out her face, and it was doing a thing she had never seen it do, which was nothing at all — gone entirely still, in the way a person goes still when a thing they have built their whole understanding upon shifts a half-inch beneath them.
"You are saying," Anne said, slowly, "that if I spend myself, I let her win."
"I am saying it is more complicated than winning, and yes.
" Elizabeth let out a breath that clouded in the cold.
"Anne. If it comes to it — if there is a wall, and it is genuinely yours, and there is genuinely no other soul to take it, and you choose it, told, and with your eyes open, the way Wren chose his — then God help me I will stand beside you and hold the lantern and not say one word, because that is your right, and I would never take a person's own choice from them; it is the entire thing I am fighting for out here.
But that is not what you are doing tonight.
Tonight you are not choosing a wall. You are volunteering to be used, in the way you were always meant to be used, because being used is the only shape of purpose anyone ever permitted you to have.
That is not a choice. That is the screen.
That is you, thirty years on, doing the one thing you were stored to do, because no one ever showed you there was another thing you were allowed to be. "
"And what," said Anne, and there was an edge in it now, a real one, "am I allowed to be, in your generous estimation? What is the other thing? For I am two-and-thirty and have never once had one, so do enlighten me."
"Alive," said Elizabeth. "At the end of this.
That is the other thing. That is the whole radical proposal — that you might be a person who lived; who got the ordinary drawing-down after all, thirty years late; the marriage or the not-marriage, the exertions, the wasted ordinary days, the whole cheap glorious business of a life spent upon nothing in particular.
You have never once been offered that — not by your mother, not by this family, not by the arithmetic.
I am offering it. Refuse the wall. Be the one of us who is left.
Let some other life be the price, if a price must be paid, and carry the unbearable ordinary weight of having lived when others did not.
That is harder than spending yourself, Anne.
To take a wall the easy way would be no bravery at all. "
The east pulled at the dark. Somewhere a long way off a wall they could not see leaned a little further toward its falling.
Anne was weeping. Elizabeth had never seen it, and did not think anyone alive had; it was silent, and furious, and entirely without performance — only tears running down a still face in the cold, a woman weeping in the way she did everything else, privately, competently, with no notion at all of how to do it aloud, because no one had ever given her the air for it.
"I do not know how to want that," she said, hardly a voice at all.
"To be left. To live. I have not the — there is no practice in me for it.
I have thirty years' practice at being spent, and not one hour's practice at being a person who gets to stay.
You are asking me to want a thing I was specifically built to be unable to want. "
"I know," said Elizabeth.
"It is easier to die. That is the horror of what you have just said to me, and I cannot unhear it. It is easier. The wall is the easy thing. It is the thing I know how to do."
"I know that it is." And Elizabeth reached across, in the dark, upon the freezing lead, and took Anne's hand — Anne, who flinched from touch, who had spent thirty years untouched behind her screen — and she did not pull away, but gripped back, hard, her cold fingers crushing Elizabeth's.
"So learn the hard thing. You have a whole family of us out here now, God help you, and not one of us is going to let you do the easy thing quietly in the dark.
That is the difference. That is the whole difference between us and her.
When you reach for the easy thing, we shall be watching, aloud, and we shall make you argue, and we shall be insufferable about it; and one day — not tonight, but one day — you may catch yourself wanting to stay, out of nothing grander than the sheer aggravation of being loved this badly by people who will not have the decency to shut up about it. "
A sound came out of Anne that was half a sob and half, God help them both, a laugh. "That is a threat," she said, wet, and furious, and holding Elizabeth's hand like a spar in deep water. "You have made being loved into a threat."
"I learnt it from your mother," said Elizabeth. "It is the only dialect this family speaks."
They sat a long while upon the freezing roof, the two of them, hand in hand, looking east at the thing they could not see: the never-told, and the one who could not look away; the woman who had been spared a life, and the woman who could not spare anyone anything; two poles of the one terrible question, and somewhere between them, upon the cold lead, the question sitting unanswered, because it could not be answered that night, only held — whether love spends the beloved, or lets her live; whether the honest thing is to pay, or to stay.
They did not solve it. But something happened up there in the dark that was better than the solving of it, and Elizabeth felt it settle into them both as the cold got into their bones: that she and Anne ceased, upon that roof, to be allies, which is a thing of use and arithmetic, and became the other thing — the thing Anne had never once had, and Elizabeth had nearly forgotten she was able to give outside of her own marriage.
Neither of them would ever call it that.
But when at last they climbed down off the roof, half-frozen, near dawn, Elizabeth knew two things she had not known going up.
That she would burn the whole east to the ground before she would let Anne de Bourgh be spent to prove her mother right.
And that Anne would do precisely the same for her — which was going to be the difficulty, for she was the other one who could not be stopped from paying, and there were now two of them who had each, that night, privately resolved to die before they would let the other do it.