Page 22 of Miss Bennet is Gone

Anne sat at her own window, unbarred, because she was a daughter and not a prisoner, though the difference had begun to seem to her a matter of degree and not of kind, and was angrier than the afternoon could account for, and more restless.

Her mother found her there before dinner. Lady Catherine did not knock; the house was hers and so were its people, and a closed door was an oversight rather than a request.

“You have been sitting with her,” she said. It was not a reproof; it had been Lady Catherine’s own suggestion, early on. Go and look at her, Anne, take the measure of her, I should like to know from someone other than a servant how she does.

Anne had obeyed it as she obeyed everything, and only now, with her mother in the doorway awaiting her report, did she understand that she had stopped doing it for her mother and had not noticed the moment it changed.

“How does she seem?” Lady Catherine asked. “Her spirits? Is she holding to this refusal, or is the room doing its work? I had thought by now she would have begun to bend. Lonely walls teach most people a wonderful humility.”

And Anne, who had sat that afternoon with a woman more unbent than anyone she had ever met, a woman the walls had taught nothing but the precise inventory of her own cage, a woman who that very hour had reached across the whole width of the thing dividing them to ask what would you read as though Anne’s wants mattered.

Anne opened her mouth to report this, because reporting was what she did, and heard herself say, instead, in a voice quite steady, “She is wavering. She puts a brave face on it for pride, but the solitude is wearing on her. I should not be surprised if a few more days brings her to it.”

It was a lie. It was a complete and deliberate lie, the first she had ever told her mother in eight-and-twenty years of perfect, exhausted obedience, and it came out of her mouth smooth and whole, as though some part of her had been quietly manufacturing it in the dark for days against the moment it would be wanted.

Lady Catherine’s face eased into satisfaction. “Good,” she said. “Patience, then. We have a great deal of it and she has none of the things that make patience bearable.” And she went down to her dinner contented.

Anne sat on at the unbarred window in the falling dark, and did not go down, and could not for the life of her have told anyone why she had lied, only that she would lie again tomorrow, and that something in the house had shifted onto a footing from which she did not think it could be shifted back.

12

By the fifth day, the search had taken on the character of a man feeling along a wall in the dark for a door he is no longer certain exists.

Sable had done what a Bow Street man could do and reported, in his economical way, that he had done it. The coaching inns gave nothing, the livery stables gave nothing, the turnpike books for every road out of London gave a great deal of traffic and not one closed carriage that wanted explaining.

He had begun, now, on the harder and slower work, the letting-agents, the houses newly opened or newly staffed, the question of who in the past two months had taken a residence and filled it quietly with strangers, but this was a labour of weeks, and they did not have weeks, and he did not insult Darcy by pretending otherwise.

Colonel Fitzwilliam had walked half of London on his own account, calling in every discreet favour a soldier of his standing could call, and had narrowed the field of the possible by a great deal and the field of the actual by nothing at all. The dark had been mapped. It had not been lit.

What could be done in the daylight, Lady Matlock did. This was its own kind of warfare, and she was its general, and Darcy had come to understand in those days that the battle for Elizabeth was being fought on two fronts at once.

The hidden one, in lanes and letting-offices, for her person; and the open one, in morning-rooms and across teacups, for the thing that would matter just as much if they ever got her back, which was her name.

A young woman who vanished eight days before her wedding was a scandal that would outlive any number of recoveries; a young woman taken ill, nursed quietly by a devoted family, her wedding postponed for her health, was merely unfortunate.

The difference between the two was a story, and the story had to be told, over and over, in exactly the right voice, by exactly the right people, to exactly the right rooms and there was no one in England better placed to tell it than the Countess of Matlock, who had spent a lifetime learning which sentence, dropped where, would travel.

So she called on the women whose drawing-rooms set the temperature of the Season, and she spoke of dear Miss Bennet’s sudden illness with precisely the measured warmth of an aunt who is concerned but not alarmed, for alarm is contagious, and curiosity feeds on it, and a countess who seemed worried would have set a dozen tongues working before her carriage reached the corner.

She let it be understood that the wedding was merely deferred; that the family was united and calm; that she herself had every expectation of standing up at the ceremony before the summer was out.

She was so good at it that Darcy, watching her come away grey-faced and exhausted from an afternoon of seeming serene, understood that she was spending herself as hard in those rooms as her son and Sable spent themselves in the lanes.

Lady Matlock knew the truth, that much they had given her, because she could not have fought the open war without it, and because she was family in the way that counted.

She knew Elizabeth had been taken. She did not know how. She had not the particulars, for the particulars were few and ugly and Darcy had a horror of multiplying the people who carried them.

And so she went into the drawing-rooms armed with the great fact and ignorant of the small ones, never dreaming that the smallest of them wore her own name and her own hand, and was not in any drawer or any evidence-box or any man’s keeping at all.

The threat, when it came, came from the one quarter the cover story could neither manage nor reach. Longbourn.

It was the great structural mercy of the whole catastrophe, and Darcy was clear-eyed enough to be grateful for it even while it shamed him, that Elizabeth’s family lived two days’ hard travel away in Hertfordshire and had not been expected in town until the very eve of the wedding.

The distance was the cover’s ally. It meant a lie could be maintained in letters, which can be composed and corrected and made to hold their face, rather than in person, where Mrs. Bennet’s nerves would have brought the entire edifice down in an afternoon of weeping and proclamation.

But the distance was also the cover’s single greatest danger, for the same reason. A family held at arm’s length by letters is a family that begins, in time, to wonder why.

Jane had been writing those letters from the first night, and the writing of them was its own slow torture, for Jane could not lie to her father with any of the ease Lady Matlock brought to a drawing-room.