Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
The morning after the ball was grey and quiet and smelled of frost, and Elizabeth came down at eight to find the Netherfield servant already at the door.
A parcel. Brown paper; her own volume, which she had not expected back this morning. She stood in the hall and turned it in her hands before she opened it, in the manner of a woman deferring a moment she has been thinking about since three in the morning.
Inside, the book was as she had left it — her own marks, her own bent corners, her arguments in the margins. His pencil marks. All present. And then, at the back, where she kept the loose leaf she used as a placeholder, there was something that had not been there before.
A slip of paper, folded small. Two lines, in the small upright hand:
I find the conversation wants continuing beyond what the margins will hold.
If you are of the same mind, I will call on Thursday with a question about the Cowper that I find I cannot answer without you.
Elizabeth stood in the hall for a full minute.
She read it again.
She folded it, very carefully, and put it in her workbox, in the place where the other piece of paper had once been. The coal-weight was different this time. This one was warm.
Upstairs, she heard Jane beginning to move.
She heard her mother, already half-awake in the territory of Thursday's visit, producing opinion.
She heard the house settling into its morning, the familiar ordinary weight of Longbourn in November, which she had lived in all her life and which felt, this morning, slightly larger than it had been last week.
She had sent a book. It had come back with the argument still in it.
She opened it one more time, standing at the hall table with the frost on the window. The poem about the garden. His eight pencilled words.
I had not considered it so. I should have.
She took out her own pen.
The Netherfield servant was waiting in the entrance.
She was aware of this. She wrote anyway, at the bottom of his slip — four words, which was all that was needed — and then she looked at them for a moment, because four words written in a hallway on a grey morning are a small thing and also, she was discovering, not a small thing at all.
Thursday, then. Bring your question.
She folded it, and was reaching for the sealing wax when she heard Jane on the stairs.
She moved faster than was entirely dignified.
The slip was folded, sealed with the plain wax she used for household notes — not the good red, which would have told its own story — and in the servant's hand before Jane had reached the landing.
Elizabeth was standing at the hall table with the Cowper open in front of her, looking at it with the expression of someone engaged in innocent reading, when her sister appeared.
Jane looked at her. Jane looked at the servant departing through the door. Jane looked at Elizabeth again.
She had, Elizabeth thought, seen quite enough. She was Jane; she always saw enough. The question was simply what she would do with it.
"Good morning," said Elizabeth.
Jane's expression did a small and complicated thing — something between amusement and tenderness and the particular satisfaction of a person who has been hoping something would happen and has just found evidence that it has.
"Good morning," said Jane. She came down the last step and put her hand briefly on Elizabeth's arm, warm and certain, and then went through to the breakfast room without another word. She did not look back. She did not need to.
It was both the kindest and the most infuriating thing she could have done, and Elizabeth loved her for it entirely.
She stood in the hall alone for a moment with the Cowper in her hands.
The servant was gone. The house was waking up around her — she could hear Hill, and the kitchen, and presently her mother would be down with her full Thursday attention, and Lydia would be somewhere above wanting something, and the morning would become the ordinary morning it was supposed to be.
Only it wasn't, quite. It was the morning after the ball, and she had sent four words to Netherfield on plain wax before Jane had reached the landing, and she was standing in her father's hall holding a book with another man's pencil marks in it, and she found she did not want to put it down.
She put it back on the hall table, open at the garden poem.
She could read his eight words from where she stood. I had not considered it so. I should have. Below them, in the clear light of the November morning, the poem's last line: some days the garden is enough.
It no longer quite did.
Later — Thursday, and after Thursday, and in the long patient ordinary days of a courtship conducted through two estates and one bookseller's catalogue that slowly became their shared shelves — she would tell him that the morning after the ball was when she knew.
Not the dance, though the dance had been exactly what it was.
Not his defence of her mind to Caroline, though she had heard a version of it eventually.
Not even the pencil mark in the margin of the garden poem, though that remained, to the end of her life, her favourite sentence.
It was the question. I find the conversation wants continuing beyond what the margins will hold.
She thought, standing at the hall table with the frost on the window and her mother's opinions beginning their descent from above, that for a man who had spent most of October telling her his good opinion was lost for ever once parted with, he had come a very long way in rather a short time.
She had probably come some distance herself.
The garden poem's margin read: some days the garden is enough.
It no longer quite did.
What came after Thursday — the calls, the quarrels conducted across a parlour table, the slow and not entirely easy progress from private understanding to something more — belonged, as all the best things did, to the unrecorded hours.
The End