CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
After Marsh End they could not stay together, and they all of them knew it, and they said it aloud at the table, for that was the rule now.
The east was a door — Denny's word — and everything joined to it was draining the faster, and six people in one house three miles from anywhere could not have their hands anywhere in time; so they divided the no-keeper walls that remained between them, and spread across the pale valley to be near them when they went.
Elizabeth hated it before it was done, because she could see the cost of it that no one else was saying: that divided, they could not watch one another; that a person who meant to slip off and pay a wall alone in secret — a person, let us say, who had spent the whole of this fortnight promising to fail honestly and aloud — had a great deal more dark to do it in, once the party was scattered.
She looked at Darcy across the table when the divisions were settled, and he looked back, and neither of them said it, for they did not have to; he knew what she was thinking, and she knew he had already thought it; and the splitting was necessary and the splitting was dangerous, both at once, in the way everything was true at once out here.
And they wanted more hands. That was the other thing Marsh End had taught them: six was not enough, had never been enough. So Darcy wrote west, for the one man nearby who had a real keeping-gift and the standing to use it. He wrote for Wickham.
"You are certain," she said, when he had sealed it.
"No." He was honest, at least, always honest with her now.
"But he keeps Pemberley's western boundary, and keeps it competently, which is more than I should have credited him with at twenty.
He has the gift. He has done the work, for years, without complaint.
Whatever else the man is—" a pause, the old weariness "—he can hold a wall, and we have need of people who can hold walls, and I am not at present in a position to be particular about the character of the hands. "
"He spends other people's coin, William. He always has. Your sister. My sister. Every debt of his life has been paid by somebody else."
"I know exactly what he is." His jaw set.
"But this is a keeping, and a keeping can only be paid by the person whose it is; there is no one else's coin to spend; the binding takes the keeper or it takes no one.
Even Wickham cannot slip that." He very nearly smiled, grimly.
"It is the one debt in the world he will have to pay himself. Perhaps it will be the making of him."
She said nothing, for she had read more people than her husband ever would, and knew a thing he had forgotten in his weariness — that a man who has spent his whole life finding someone else to pay will find someone else to pay for anything, given the smallest crack to do it in; that one does not reform such a thing at forty in a dying county; one merely hands it a wall and a boy and looks away for an afternoon.
But they wanted the hands, so she held her tongue, which she had sworn off doing, and knew already that she would regret it.
Wickham arrived three days later, and he was exactly as she remembered and the worse for the years — still handsome, handsomer if anything, the sort of face that ages into distinguished while the character behind it quietly rots; still charming, that warm easy charm that fills a cold room; and she watched it work upon the household, watched Kitty go pink and Mary go stiff and even Anne narrow her eyes with the wary interest of a woman cataloguing a new species of danger.
She let the gift off its rein the moment he came in, an old habit, wanting to read him — and here was the thing that turned her stomach.
There was nothing there. She had spent the whole of this business reading people who carried enormous things — Darcy's braced-in-a-small-room dread, Anne's fire behind a grate, Mary's deep-water grief, Denny's carried draught — and had grown accustomed to the weight that people hold down; and she put her gift upon George Wickham, and it came back with nothing: no ache, no grief, no held thing, no pressure of any kind.
Not because he was at peace, as Harding was at peace, but because there was no room in him where the weight would go.
He had spent his whole life making certain that someone else carried it, and there was left only a charming, hollow, frictionless ease — a man who had never once in his life stood in a small room with his arms braced against the walls, because he had always, always, found a door.
"Mrs. Darcy," he said, warm, taking her hand. "Elizabeth. Still the sharpest eyes in any room, I see."
"Sharp enough," she said, and took her hand back.
They gave him a keeping — aloud, at the table, in the way they did everything now: a wall called Harrow Cross, one of the fifteen, a middling keeping, payable by one strong gift, his sort of wall exactly.
And they paired him, for they paired everyone now, not one, never one, with a young militiaman named Toby who had been fetching and carrying for them a fortnight, and who proved — of course, of course — to have a small holding gift of his own, Kitty's sort, the kind that buys time.
The plan was simple, and it was a good plan: Toby to watch Harrow Cross and hold it steady if it began to slip, buying the minutes, and to send for Wickham, who would come and pay the keeping proper, because a binding takes the one whose it is.
Toby to hold the door; Wickham to pay the price.
She went over it twice in her head and could not find the crack, and that was her failure, for there is always a crack when Wickham is in the room, and the crack is never in the plan. The crack is in the man.
Harrow Cross went four nights later, near dawn, and Toby did exactly what he was meant to do — held it, his small gift, his steadying hand, buying the minutes, and sent the runner for Wickham, who was a half-mile off at the farm they had quartered him in; and the runner went, and Toby held, and held, buying time, waiting for the man whose wall it was to come and pay what only he could pay.
Wickham did not come. They pieced it together after, in the way one always pieces these things together after, too late: the runner had reached him; Wickham had been awake; he had heard the boy out — Harrow Cross is going, sir, Toby's holding it, you're wanted, you're wanted now — and had said he would come, and had saddled his horse, and had ridden.
West. Not to the wall, but away from it; toward Pemberley, toward the boundary he kept; and when they caught him two days later upon the road he had a dozen reasons ready, smooth as cream — that he had judged Harrow Cross already lost; that he had gone to raise help from the western keepers; that no one could have paid it in time; that he had done the sensible thing, the strategic thing, and who were they to say otherwise from the comfort of not having been there.
And Toby held the wall. Toby, nineteen, with a holding gift meant to buy minutes, held Harrow Cross four hours waiting for the man who was never coming — held it past his minutes, past his measure, past the safe line Harding had warned her of, because Wickham was coming, Wickham had said he would come; and a boy with a small gift and a large heart held a door open with the whole of himself, waiting, buying time for a rescue that had turned its horse west an hour before.
There is no wall in you to say enough; Harding had told her that; and Toby had no wall to say it, and no Wickham coming to say it for him, and he held, and he held, and he spent everything a boy of nineteen had, buying minutes for a man who was riding the other way. Harrow Cross held. Toby did not.
She came to the wall an hour after, and she is not going to describe the boy, except to say that he was not a husk like Wren — Wren at the least had chosen it, told, with his eyes open, a whole life poured out gladly.
Toby had not chosen this. Toby had been spent — spent by a plan that depended upon George Wickham keeping a promise, and the plan had been hers as much as anyone's; and she stood at Harrow Cross in the grey with a dead boy of nineteen at her feet and the taste of Marsh End back in her mouth, and thought one clear cold thing.
I knew. I read him the moment he walked in.
I knew there was no room in him for the weight, and I held my tongue because we wanted the hands.
She had sworn off holding her tongue. And she had held it. And here was the coin it had bought.
Darcy found Wickham upon the road and brought him back, and she was there when they brought him into the yard at Fenwick, and she watched her husband — who had sent for this man, who had vouched for him, who had said perhaps it will be the making of him — she watched Darcy look at George Wickham with a thing upon his face she had never seen there.
It was not anger. It was worse than anger.
It was recognition, curdled into horror.
For here it was, laid out plain in the yard for the two of them to see: Darcy had spent the whole time trying to pay other people's prices for them — to spare Elizabeth, to spare Anne, to carry the whole ledger himself; his sickness was a man who would take every wall in the east upon his own back out of love.
And here was the mirror of it, hollowed of the one thing that made Darcy's version bearable.
Wickham spent other people's prices too — but onto them, and not off them; he took the wall and handed you the paying; the same trade in the same currency of lives, and the only difference between the two men, the whole entire difference, was that Darcy's was a corruption of love and Wickham's was the plain clean absence of it.
"You let a boy die on your wall," Darcy said, very quiet, in the scariest-calm register she knew. "You said you would come. He held it waiting for you. And you rode west."
"I made a strategic judgment—"
"You made no judgment at all." Darcy's voice did not rise.
"You did the thing you have done every day of your life.
You found someone else to pay. Only this time the coin was a boy of nineteen with a gift the size of a candle-flame, and you spent all of it, and rode away, and you have the—" his breath caught; the iron cracked, just once "—you have the ease to stand in my yard and call it strategy. "
And Wickham, God help him, spread his hands, charming, wounded, reasonable — the exact gesture of a man who has never once in forty years failed to find a door — and she understood, watching him, why the sight of him was curing something in her husband even as it damned Wickham.
Because Darcy was looking at what he would be, if one took the love out. And he could not unsee it.
They sent Wickham west under guard the next morning — they had no time for justice, only for keeping him from being handed another wall — and Darcy found her at the edge of the pale ground where they had buried Toby, plain, and quick, a boy nobody in Kent would ever hear of.
"I did that," Darcy said. "I sent for him.
I vouched for him. You told me what he was, and I said we could not be particular about the hands, and a boy is in the ground.
" "We both did it," she said, because it was true, and because she was done sparing anyone, including herself, including him.
"I read Wickham the moment he walked in.
I knew there was no room in him for the weight.
And I held my tongue because we wanted the hands, and that is my coin in this grave too, William.
We do not get to each of us carry the whole of it.
That is the lesson of this place. We carry our own piece, and we do not pretend the other's is not theirs. "
He was quiet a long while, at the edge of the wrong-coloured ground, over a boy who had held a door for a man who rode away.
"I have spent the whole of this business," he said, at last, low, "afraid of what I am.
The sparing. The wanting to carry it all.
Your aunt's disease, in me." He looked at the grave.
"And then I watched George Wickham stand in my yard, and I understood, at last, the difference — that whatever I am, I should have died upon that wall before I let a boy pay it for me.
My sickness would have killed me. His killed Toby.
" His jaw worked. "It is not much of a thing to be proud of, that my flaw at least points the knife at myself.
But it is the first time in a month I have been glad to be the kind of broken I am, and not the kind he is. "
"It is not nothing," she said. And she took his hand, over the grave of a boy they had both helped to kill, in a dying county, in the grey.
"Your love decides too much. His self decides everything, and loves nothing.
They are not the same, William. They were never the same.
I have been fighting your version so hard that I nearly forgot there is a version with no love in it at all — and I have just watched it bury a boy of nineteen, and I shall never mistake the two again.
" And they stood at Toby's grave a while, and then went back to the arithmetic, which does not stop for the dead, which never once stops.
The fifteen had come down, these last hard weeks — some to the returning keepers, the parishes drifting home to reclaim the small wards whose blood was theirs as the greening spread; some, like Barrow, paid at last by honest hands at the table; and Harrow Cross itself was held now, though God knew at what price.
Nine walls left with no keeper: nine, and one fewer honest hand to hold them, and a door in the east pulling the harder every hour — the two of them walking back toward it hand in hand, carrying their own separate pieces of a boy's grave, aloud, together, in the way the only decent people in the whole of this business had ever done anything.