CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
He waited four days, and she gave him the credit of it, for it meant he had at least learnt something: after the study, and the promise, and the whole of in the open, he did not attempt it again in the middle of the night, where she had shown him she would be watching.
He waited for the daylight, and the ordinary bustle, and a moment so entirely unremarkable that no one would think to mark it — which was, she reflected afterward, a more dangerous species of cunning than the midnight kind, for a house forgives itself its daylight hours.
The Barrow ward went at dawn upon the fourth day, one of the fifteen, with no keeper of its own — a middling wall, Mary said, not the worst of them, payable by a single strong gift, and Mary said it in the flat voice of a woman telling the company which of them was expected to die that day, because that, it transpired, was what saying it aloud actually sounded like, and none of them had grown used to the sound.
They argued it out at the table, aloud, as they had sworn; and it was a terrible conversation, and it was the honest one, and it ran the better part of an hour and settled nothing beyond the resolution to ride out and decide at the wall which of them was strongest to take it.
And then, in the ordinary jostle of the ride out, in the small confusion of six people getting themselves onto horses, Darcy was simply gone.
She felt it before she saw it — whether by the gift or only by seven years, a wrongness, an absence, the particular quality of quiet that a man leaves behind him when he has slipped a gathering he always meant to slip.
She counted heads, and there were five, and the box was gone from Denny's saddle; and the whole of it arrived in her at a stroke: that he had sat through the honest hour like a man biding his time, and had agreed to the argument, and had let them all believe he would abide by the table, and had then, in the last five unwatched minutes, taken the box and ridden for the Barrow ward alone, to be there first, to have it paid before the rest of them arrived to argue over it — so that they should top the rise and find the thing already done, and him already whatever the letter leaves a man, and no vote to be had, because the price would already be spent.
In the open, he had promised her. And he had lied to her in the broad daylight, gently, by the simple expedient of walking away.
"Elizabeth," said Mary, seeing her face. "What—"
"Barrow. Now. He has gone to do it alone." And she was on the horse before she had finished the sentence.
She had never in her life ridden as she rode then.
The pale ground blurred past, wrong-coloured, the graves wading in it, and she did not feel the cold, nor the saddle, nor her own hands, but only the one thing hammering under her ribs — not like this, not alone, not without me; you do not get to leave me by walking off in the daylight and calling it love — and she rode a good horse harder than she had any right to, and hated every yard of the distance.
She came over the rise above the Barrow ward, and there he was, at the wall, the box open upon the ground beside him, a letter unfolded in his hands, his lips moving over it; and the pale ground at his feet had already begun, faintly, to darken.
He had begun.
"WILLIAM."
She was off the horse before it had stopped, and across the ground, and she struck him — actually struck him, both hands flat to his chest, the whole of her weight behind them, in the way one shoves a man back from a ledge — and the letter went out of his hands and fluttered down into the wrong-coloured grass, and he staggered, and the darkening of the ground stopped where it stood and went no further. He caught her wrists. "Elizabeth—"
"Do not." She was shaking; the whole of her; she could feel her own pulse behind her teeth. "Do not you dare say my name gently. Not now. Not with the box open at your feet and a letter in the grass that you were reading alone."
"It is a middling ward. I can pay it. It lies within what I—"
"That is not the point, and you know that it is not the point, and the fact that you reach for the arithmetic instead of for the promise tells me you know precisely what you have done.
" Her voice cracked, and she let it. "You swore to me.
Four days ago. At that table. Before Anne, and Mary, and Denny.
In the open. And the very first wall that came with your name a possibility upon it, you sat through the honest argument like a man running out the clock, and then you took the box and rode off into the daylight to do the exact thing you had sworn you would not, quietly, so that it should be done before I could reach you. "
"To spare you the watching of—"
"To spare me." It came out of her like a thing tearing.
"Do you hear yourself? To spare you. William — that is the sentence.
That is the entire sentence. That is the sentence your aunt spent her last breath warning me of, and here it is coming out of your own mouth over an open box, and you cannot even hear that you are saying it. "
He went still. The ground stood half-mended and half not beneath their feet, held at whatever line his reading had reached, the box open, the letter in the grass; and her husband stood there with her wrists in his hands and his own broken promise scattered about him, and she watched the thing land upon him at last, all the way.
"Listen to me," she said, and made her voice go low, because loud would not reach him and low might.
"Three nights ago I sat upon a roof with Anne de Bourgh while she wept — Anne, who does not weep — and do you know why she means to spend herself?
Because her mother spared her a life in order to store her against exactly this.
Thirty years behind a screen, kept full, kept safe, kept back, so that when the hard year came she should have the most to give.
Her whole life decided for her, by a person who loved her past reason, for her own good and the greater good, and called it protection — and it was theft.
You told me so yourself, in Kent. You said your family would spare a woman the truth if the truth were the last plank off a sinking ship. "
"That is different—"
"It is not different. It is the same. It is exactly and precisely the same, and you are the only person present who cannot see it, because you are standing inside it.
" She twisted her wrists free — gently, and he let her, for he would never hold her against her will — and took his face in her two hands instead, cold upon his cold skin, and made him look at her.
"William. Look at what you have just done.
You looked at your wife, and you decided — out of love, real love, the truest thing in you — that she was not to be permitted a part in the choosing of her own husband's death.
You decided it for me. You rode off into the daylight to make the decision alone and hand me the finished fact of it.
That is what Lady Catherine did to Anne for thirty years.
You are doing it to me. Now. This morning.
With the best heart of any man I have ever known, you are doing the very thing that broke the woman who wept upon that roof. "
The breath went out of him. She felt it go, under her hands — the moment it reached him, the moment he stopped defending and began, at last, to hear — and his face did the thing it had done in the cold room the night his aunt died, broke along the same old seam, and he shut his eyes.
"I cannot—" His voice was wrecked. "Elizabeth, I cannot watch it be you. I have tried to be the man who lets you choose, and I cannot; the wanting is bigger than I am; it is bigger than the promise; it is the largest thing in me and it will not obey."
"I know."
"Then how do I not do this?" His eyes opened, and they were desperate, and it was the most honest she had ever seen him. "If the wanting will not obey — tell me how. I will do anything, I will do the impossible thing, only tell me what the thing is."
And there it was — the thing she had climbed a roof to half-understand three nights since, and understood entire only now, standing upon half-mended ground with a letter in the grass.
"You do not stop wanting it," she said. "You cannot, and I am not asking you to; that is the mistake we have both been making — the belief that the answer is for you to stop wishing to save me.
You will wish to save me until the day one of us dies.
So would I. I want to save you so badly at this moment that I can taste it; I should have taken that letter up out of the grass and read it myself, had I reached you a minute sooner; do not imagine I am above this — I am not; I am exactly as sick with it as you are.
So it is not about the wanting. It is about what you do with the box while you want it.
You want to save me — then say so. Aloud.
Across the table. I want to spend myself instead of her, and I cannot bear it, and please, please let me.
Say it to all of us, and let me say no, and let us fight, and lose the fight, and still not do it — that is the thing, William, that is the marrow of it; not to stop wanting to spare me, but to want it with your entire heart, and tell me that you want it, and then not do it.
To hand me the choice while it is killing you to hand it over.
That is not a smaller love than the sparing.
It is a larger one. It is the largest thing there is, and it is harder than dying, and I need you to be that instead of this. "
He was weeping now — her iron, unweeping husband, upon a hillside in a dying county, with the pale ground gone half-green at their feet.
"Pick up the letter," she said, gently now, the anger gone out of her, only the love left and the terror beneath it.
"Do not enact it. Fold it up. Put it back in the box.
And we will ride back and take the Barrow ward to the table and argue it aloud as we swore; and if it should turn out that it must be you — told, and chosen, and all of us knowing — then it will be you, and I will hold the lantern and hate every second of it and let you, because that is your right, the same as it is mine.
But not like this. Never like this. Not stolen.
Not in the daylight with my back turned. "
He bent, and took the letter up out of the wrong-coloured grass with a hand that was not steady, and folded it along its crease, and put it back into the box, and closed the lid; and the sound of that iron lid coming down was the sound of the thing they had come to fight taking the first true wound it had taken — not defeated, and not gone, for it would reach for her again and they both knew it, but named now, aloud, upon a hillside, between the two people it lived inside.
"I am sorry," he said, to her, wrecked.
"I know."
"I shall do it again."
"I know that also." She took his hand off the closed box and held it. "And I shall catch you again. Every time. In the open. That is the marriage; we agreed to it; I shall only have to be quicker."
He let out a thing that was very nearly a laugh, terrible and wet. "You rode Anne's gelding half into the ground to reach me."
"I would ride it off a cliff. Do not tempt me to prove it.
" And she drew him up off the half-mended grass — and felt, as she took his weight, how much of it there suddenly was, for the reading he had begun and not finished had left its mark upon him regardless: he was grey, and slow, and leaned upon her arm going back to the horses in a way Fitzwilliam Darcy had never once leaned upon anyone.
The binding had taken its toll for the mere beginning of it.
Not the whole price — he had stopped, or been stopped, before the ground would take the whole — but a wall does not let a hand touch it for nothing, and he would be a day or two mending from the little he had spent.
It frightened her more than the darkening grass had: that even the aborted attempt had cost, that there was no free reading, that the box charged something for every page a person so much as started.
Least of all the holder, she thought, and understood a little more of what it meant.
They rode back the slower way, side by side, with the box on his saddle between them where she could see it — and she did not take her eyes from it the whole way, and he knew that she did not, and neither of them pretended otherwise; and that, God help them, was what trust had come to look like in their marriage: not that he would cease to reach for the box, but that he would let her watch him do it.
The Barrow ward they took back to the table that same night, aloud, as they had sworn; and they argued it the honest hour, and settled it the honest way — paired hands, told and chosen, no one slipping off alone — and it held, and it cost, and it was the first wall the whole company paid the way they had all been swearing walls ought to be paid, which was together.