CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
They broke up the way a company breaks up when the thing is done — slowly, and badly, and with a great deal of pretending nobody minded.
The east had keepers coming home now. Anne had spent a fortnight with her mother's map, finding the old families, putting the walls back into the hands whose they truly were — a thousand small hands, each to hold a little, in the way it was meant to be before it had been thinned.
The parishes were drifting back; the green was spreading, a yard here, two there; there was an east again, worth the keeping, and it no longer needed six exhausted strangers and a box.
So they went home. All to different homes, which was the ache of it.
Mary and Denny to Meryton, to the churchyard by the yew and the slow keeping they had chosen.
Anne to Rosings, to be mistress of a great cold house with the screen burnt out of it.
Kitty back to Pemberley for now, to learn the gentle end of her holding gift where the north was quiet.
Georgiana and Cassandra and Darcy and Elizabeth to Derbyshire, to the wood that leaned and the ground that had stopped thinning and the ordinary enormous business of a life.
And it was the parting of Mary and Anne that she watched, upon the last morning, because it was the one that mattered most for what came after.
They did not embrace; of course they did not; two plain proud women who went quieter to feel the more would sooner have walked into a wall than fallen upon each other's necks in a farmyard.
They stood a careful yard apart in the grey morning while the horses were brought round, and conducted what was, upon its face, the most businesslike conversation in England.
"You will write the moment you feel anything shift," said Anne.
"In your ground or any ground you can reach.
The instant. Not when you are certain — when you first wonder.
I had rather have ten letters about nothing than miss the one about something.
" "And you will send the map corrections as the keepers come home," said Mary.
"Who has which wall now, and which of them are any good, and which will need watching because they are proud or careless or old.
I cannot feel a keeper's competence from Hertfordshire.
You can find it out. Between us—" "Between us we watch the whole country," Anne finished.
"Your hands, my map. What we did in one room in one dreadful night, for years now, by post." A pause.
"It will not be as fast as being in the same room.
Letters take days. We shall miss things.
People will—" she did not say die, not upon a parting morning "—things will get past us that would not, if we were quicker.
We shall not catch everything." "We shall catch more than anyone has caught in four hundred years," said Mary, "which is a great deal better than nothing, and nothing is what was watching the east when it began to go.
Nobody's hand was upon it. Now there will be two — three hundred miles apart, but two, watching, always.
That is not nothing. That is the opposite of nothing.
" She very nearly smiled. "It is a keeping, Anne.
That is what we have made. Not a wall. A keeping of the whole thing, the two of us, for as long as we are spared.
Slow, and imperfect, and by post. But a keeping. " "A keeping," Anne agreed.
And then she did a thing Elizabeth had never seen Anne de Bourgh do, and suspected no one else ever had either.
She held out her hand. Not for the flinch-away tending of a sickroom; not the crushing grip upon a freezing roof; only her hand, held out, plainly, in a farmyard, to a woman a careful yard away — an ordinary human offer, the kind of small warm gesture that thirty years behind a screen had taught her to fear, and that she had decided, now there was room in her, to try.
Mary looked at it. And took it. Plain rough wall-keeper's hand in diminished lady's hand, one firm shake, in the way one closes an agreement — which it was, and also was not, and both of those were true.
"Right," said Mary, gruff, letting go before either of them had to feel too much about it.
"That is settled. I shall write when we are home.
Do not answer with anything sentimental or I shan't write again.
" "I would not dream of it," said Anne. "Sentiment is for people with the leisure to indulge it.
We have a country to watch. Go home, Mary.
Keep your wall. I shall keep my map. And we shall keep one another supplied with the truth about the ground, plainly, for the rest of our lives, and call it operational, and never once call it what it is.
" "Never once," Mary agreed, and climbed up beside Denny, and did not look back, because looking back would be sentiment, and they had agreed there should be none of that.
Anne watched the cart out of the yard regardless, until it was gone over the rise.
Elizabeth did not remark upon it. Some things one lets be true.
The first letters came within the fortnight.
She knew, because Anne wrote to her about them — dry, delighted, complaining — and because Mary mentioned them in her own plain way, and between the two accounts she could see the shape of the thing that was starting, the thing that was going to outlast every one of them.
Mary's first letter to Anne, Anne told her, was four lines, and contained no greeting, no inquiry after health, no ornament of any kind.
It said: Meryton wall steady. Felt a flutter east of Ware, probably nothing, watch the Ware ward, whose is it.
The yew is leafing. Denny sends respects he would not phrase this warmly himself.
— M. "Four lines," said Anne, reading it to her with a face of profound satisfaction, "and three of them useful, and the fourth is Denny being fond by proxy because Mary will not do it directly.
It is the finest letter I have ever received.
I have read it eleven times. I intend to answer it with something even more austere, purely to see whether she can bear it.
" And Anne's first letter back, Mary told her later, in her flat way, was this: Ware ward is the Corbetts', old family, sound, but the keeper is near eighty and his son is a fool.
Watch it. I shall write to the Corbetts about the son.
The yew leafing early means a mild season, my mother always said, though my mother was wrong about a great many things and possibly that too.
Respects to Denny, phrased exactly as warmly as he would like and no warmer.
— A. "She insulted her own dead mother in a letter about ward maintenance," Mary told her, and there was something in her plain face that was as near to love as Mary came, "in the middle of useful information.
That is — Lizzy, that is the most Anne thing I can imagine, and I have decided it means we are going to get on. "
And that was the whole beginning of it — the thing Lady Catherine's memory had promised her a lifetime since, in a life where she had known only the shape of it and not the cost: that Anne de Bourgh and Mary Bennet corresponded for thirty years, and never once called it friendship.
Now she knew how it had started. Not with fondness; with a quarrel over a map, and a burnt lie, and a shared spending at a great wall, and a diminished woman's hand held out in a farmyard, and four austere lines about the Ware ward.
It was founded upon the realest thing there is — not affection, which comes and goes, but shared cost. They had spent themselves at the same wall; they knew, each of them, exactly what the other was willing to pay, because they had watched each other pay it; and that is a deeper ground to build upon than liking.
Liking is cheap. To have watched someone say their own enough at a wall and mean it — that is the thing one builds thirty years of letters upon.
They would write until they were old; longer than any of them, she would have guessed, for Mary and Anne had the look of women who would be austere and useful into their eighties, keeping the whole country between them by post, catching the next thinning before it became the next Marsh End, being the two hands on the ground the east had not had when it began to go.
The future was secured, was the thing. That was what the thirty years of letters were — not a friendship, though it was one, secretly, unnameably, but a watch.
A permanent, patient, imperfect, three-hundred-mile watch upon the ground of England, kept by the only two people alive who fully understood one another, founded upon a shared spending, and it meant that whatever came next — the next thinning, the next slow drift toward a third case, in their lifetimes or in Cassandra's — there would be two hands feeling for it before it was a door.
Nobody had been watching, when the east went.
That was the whole of the catastrophe. A full desk in London, a report unread, no hand upon the ground.
Now there would be two hands. Always. For thirty years.
That was the thing they had bought, out there, past all the grief and the green: not merely an east that held, but a watch that meant it might never have to be held like that again.
Anne folded Mary's four-line letter and put it away in her mother's old writing-box — the one that had held the arrangement letters, the true accounts, the ledger of a magnificent catastrophe — and Elizabeth understood the rightness of it: that the box which had held Lady Catherine's brilliant lonely deciding-for-everyone now held the first of thirty years of two women telling one another the plain truth about the ground and letting the country choose what to do with it.
The same box. The opposite use. The theft, turned into the watch.
"She would have hated it," said Anne, closing the lid — meaning her mother; meaning the letters; meaning all of it.
"A Bennet and a de Bourgh, keeping her country between them by post, telling one another everything, sparing one another nothing.
" The ghost of a smile. "She would have hated it, and been more relieved than she could ever have said, and died a little less afraid for the world had she known it was coming.
" "You could tell her," Elizabeth said. "At the grave.
When you are home." Anne considered this.
"I might," she said. "I should have to insult her about something at the same time, or she would know it was not sincere.
" She almost laughed. "But I might. I have a great deal to tell her, now I think of it.
That the east held. That I chose Wednesbury and stopped myself and lived.
That I have a—" she could not say friend; she would never say friend "—that Mary and I are going to — that I have a correspondent now, a good one, the best one, who tells me the truth about the ground and insults my map and is going to be the great work of my diminished life.
" She closed the writing-box. "Yes. I shall tell her all of it.
At the grave. And insult her, so that she knows I mean it. "
And Elizabeth thought that was the truest thing anyone could bring to Lady Catherine de Bourgh's grave — not flowers, not forgiveness, but her daughter, diminished and alive and standing upon her own chosen feet, come to tell her, plainly, aloud, insulting her all the while so that she should know it was real: It held.
And we are watching now, so that it might not have to be held like that again.
You could have simply told us. But we worked it out.
And we are not going to make your mistake.
We are going to tell one another everything, for thirty years, and call it operational, and keep the country safe by refusing, ever again, to spare anyone the truth.
You would have hated it. You would have been so relieved.