Page 8 of Miss Bennet is Gone

"And if she'll not come quiet?" It was the only thing the man said that was not yes, his eyes on the carpet, his voice careful. "If the draught is slow, or she takes a fright in the lane?"

"She will be too far gone to take fright. But if I am wrong, you are a manservant carrying his mistress home from her fitting, for she has been taken ill, and you will say so to whoever troubles to ask. They will not trouble. No one stops a man carrying a fainting gentlewoman to her carriage; the whole world is built to hand him through the door and wish the lady better. That is the use of doing it in daylight."

A pause. "I will, my lady."

"Then that is all."

He bowed. He turned for the door, and kept his eyes on the door and took himself out, and the latch met its frame without a sound.

Once, Anne might have pitied him. She had spent years unable to meet her mother's eye either. But flinching had never carried her a single foot out of Rosings; it was the ones who stopped flinching and started planning who got free.

She was not on the footman's side, whatever the two of them shared. She was on the side of the door he had been so glad to reach, and she meant to walk through one of her own before the season turned.

Anne wished her mother goodnight in a steady voice and went up. Tomorrow at two o'clock the one thing standing between Anne de Bourgh and the rest of her life would drink a sweet glass of wine in a quiet back room and wake in a house she could not leave.

Anne did not let herself think of Elizabeth as a person. She had given up being able to afford that some while ago.

4

Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Mrs. Gardiner's parlor was a thing Elizabeth had not known she wished to see until she was seeing it.

The great lady settled on the good sofa with her gloved hands quiet in her lap, admiring the curtains, while Mrs. Gardiner poured out as though she received the daughter of an earl every week of her life.

And the curtains were admired truly, that was what Elizabeth could not reconcile. Lady Catherine did not praise Cheapside the way the great praise the small, as a coin handed downward. She praised it the way one capable woman acknowledges another. "You chose these yourself," she said. "No one chooses this well by sending a servant."

Mrs. Gardiner, who had in fact chosen them herself, after a week of swatches, was very nearly hers from that moment.

It went on in that vein. Lady Catherine asked after the Gardiner children and listened to the answers as though she expected to be examined on them later.

Told that Mr. Gardiner was in the import trade, she did not perform the small cooling Elizabeth had braced for, the polite frost that came over fine people when warehouses were named in the same breath as a wedding.

She said instead that her own steward had lately been cheated by a Bristol man over a quantity of timber, badly enough that she had begun to wish she kept a man of business she could actually trust and asked whether Mr. Gardiner might be persuaded to look over how the thing ought to have been drawn.

Mrs. Gardiner said her husband would be glad to. Lady Catherine said she would send the papers round within the week, and looked, saying it, like a woman who meant to.

Elizabeth watched her aunt be courted, there was no better word for it, and watched her aunt enjoy it and hunted the whole while for the deception and did not find it.

Mr. Gardiner was at the warehouse, and the house was quiet, and the morning light came in mild and ordinary on a scene Elizabeth would not, a fortnight before, have believed she would live to see.

Anne had brought a gift for her and offered it in her awkward way. It was a fan, a small one, ivory sticks and a painted paper leaf, pretty without being grand.

"For the wedding," Anne said. "It is only a fan. But the church will be close with everyone breathing in it, and a bride's hands are never given anything to hold."

She did not quite meet Elizabeth's eyes as she said it, and Elizabeth, who had a soft place for shyness because she had so little of it herself, liked her the better for it.

"It is lovely," Elizabeth said, and meant it. She opened it and the painted leaf showed a garden, and two small figures walking in it. "I shall carry it and think of you."

Lady Catherine asked after the wedding again as she had the day before, wanting the answers, not the credit. Where they would stand; who was coming up from the country; whether Mrs. Bennet's nerves had survived the planning of it.

Elizabeth said her mother's nerves had survived magnificently, at the expense of everyone within hearing, and Lady Catherine said that was the only proper way for a mother's nerves to survive a wedding, and Mrs. Gardiner laughed outright into her cup.

Anne said little. She sat a little apart and watched the room, watched Mrs. Gardiner fill Elizabeth's cup before it was quite empty, watched Elizabeth lean to tuck a cushion at her aunt's back, watched the easy unthinking traffic of affection pass back and forth between them with a steadiness Elizabeth might have found strange, had she been looking for anything strange.

She was not. She was happy, and happiness is the worst possible condition for noticing anything at all.

"And the gown?" Lady Catherine said.

"Nearly done. There is a last fitting this afternoon. Aunt Gardiner is to come and rule on whether I shall be allowed to sit down in it."