Page 57 of Hard Home

"And then last Tuesday Maggie fell down the area steps and screamed, and I got to her first, and I picked her up and I held her and I said all the things one says." Jane looked up. "And she went on screaming. For six or seven minutes. Until my aunt came."

Neither of them said anything for a moment.

"It is like being told one has gone a little deaf," said Jane, "and finding that one is very much less tired in the evenings."

"Does it hurt?"

"No. That is what I cannot explain to anybody, and why I have not tried. Nothing hurts. Everything is easier." She smiled. "I am simply a very pleasant young woman who is fond of children and no earthly use to them, and I shall be perfectly happy, and I would rather be in Hertfordshire and worn out. There. Now you know it, and I have said it once, and we need not say it again."

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Elizabeth lay awake a long while in the spare room over the street.

She had never once, in two-and-twenty years, considered the possibility that a gift could stop. It had not been available to her as an idea. Her own had come on at eight or nine and had never varied by so much as a day's strength; her mother had spent hers, which was different; Denny had given his to the ground, which she did not know about; and here was Jane, sleeping properly for the first time in a decade, with the whole of it simplygone quietnine weeks after leaving Hertfordshire and four days after Bingley did not call.

She could not make the two facts stand in the same sentence without producing something monstrous, so she left them in separate ones, and slept badly, and was cheerful at breakfast.

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Mrs. Gardiner got her alone for half an hour before the carriage came.

"And is Mr. Wickham still the most agreeable young man in Hertfordshire?"

"He is very much occupied at present with Miss King, who has ten thousand pounds."

"Ah." Mrs. Gardiner folded a shawl. "And what do you say to that?"

"I say what everybody says, which is that a young man with nothing must do something. I have no right to be affronted and I am determined not to be interesting about it." Elizabeth heard herself being brisk and did not like it. "Aunt — may I say something that will sound very strange?"

"You may say anything you like at nine in the morning. It is the only hour of the day when I can be relied upon."

"Miss King's grandfather was the last of the Kings of Bulstrode, and there is an Accord there, a very small one, and it descends in the female line." Elizabeth said it steadily. "And mysister Mary has been keeping an account of whom Mr. Wickham stands up with at assemblies, and it is not the prettiest girls and it is not the richest, and it is not — aunt, it is not the ones with money. It is the ones withline. Every time. Five assemblies."

Mrs. Gardiner did not laugh. She was, Elizabeth thought afterwards, the only person in England who would not have laughed.

But she said, gently: "My dear, do you know how many young women in Hertfordshire have some scrap of an old family behind them?"

"Mary says nine."

"Mary is nineteen and has a book. I should have said thirty, and I should have said that a good half of them have never had it mentioned since their grandmothers died, and that a young man who is looking about him at a country assembly will end by paying attention to the girls whose mothers make him welcome — which will be, unfailingly and for reasons that have nothing to do with any Accord in England, the girls whose families think themselves a little better than their neighbors." She put her hand over her niece's. "It fits, Lizzy. It fits perfectly. That is what worries me about it."

Elizabeth was silent.

"Say it aloud in a room in London and hear how it sounds," said Mrs. Gardiner. "That is all I mean. In Hertfordshire in the winter, with your sister reading you a pedigree, it is a discovery. Here it is a young woman explaining that a handsome man who dropped her is engaged in a conspiracy." She smiled. "I am not saying your sister is wrong. I am saying you have no way in the world of finding out whether she is right, and that you are going into Kent for six weeks, and that I would rather you spent them looking at the country."

"Yes," said Elizabeth.

She let it go. She was ashamed of how relieved she was to let it go — it had been heavy, and it had been Mary's, and it had made her uncomfortable in her own house for a fortnight — and it went down out of sight for eleven weeks.

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Two other things were settled before the carriage came.

The northern tour was fixed: Mr. Gardiner's business would not release him in July, so it was put off to August, and the Lakes were spoken of, and Elizabeth was so happy about it that she said aloud that no tour of pleasure had ever begun so well.

And Kitty was spoken of.

"I have not forgotten," said Elizabeth. "You said Harley-street in the spring and I have done nothing about it."