Page 21 of Faceless

He went through the dining room without comment. The sitting room. The morning room, where he opened two drawers of the writing desk, looked into them, and closed them again. He went to the study — her father’s study, the room already beginning to smell of another man’s arranging — Collins having moved the desk on his first visit yesterday so that it faced the window differently, the lamp in the wrong place, the chairs wrong — and stood in the centre looking around with a satisfaction he did not bother to conceal.

Then he went to the library.

He stood in the doorway looking at the shelves. Two hundred years of accumulated reading, more or less — her father’s forty years of additions layered over the Longbourn collection proper, the spines all colours, the arrangement entirely personal, the shelf-height adjusted twice to accommodate oversized folios that her father had bought from a man in Meryton who had not known what he had. Elizabeth had spent a third of her life in this room. She knew where everything was.

Collins gestured to the shelves. “These, of course, will remain with the property.”

“Not all of them,” Elizabeth said.

He turned to her with mild surprise, with an expression not accustomed to being contradicted. “My dear cousin, the contents of the house pass with the entail. The books are part of the house.”

“The books on that shelf,” Elizabeth said, indicating it, “are my father’s personal library, set aside by me this week. Purchased by him over forty years, most of them. Many inscribed. Many given as gifts, with the names of the givers written in them in the givers’ own hands. They are not fixtures of the building. They are not part of the entailed property, and they do not pass with it.”

“I think you will find—”

“I think you will find,” Elizabeth said, “that a man’s personal possessions are entirely distinct in law from the property of the estate. If you intend to claim otherwise, you will need to demonstrate the legal basis for that claim. I will wait.”

Collins’s expression shifted from mild surprise to something cooler. “Lady Catherine took a considerable interest in the library when I described it to her. There are volumes here of some age that properly form part of the estate’s history. I should be failing in my duty as the new master of this property if I allowed them to be removed without proper assessment.”

“Lady Catherine’s interest in my father’s library is not a legal instrument.”

Jane appeared in the doorway behind Collins. “Lizzy…”

“No,” Elizabeth said. “You know I am right, Jane.”

Collins turned to Jane with the relief proper to one who had found a more reasonable audience. “Your sister is understandably distressed. I do not hold it against her. In her position, one naturally feels—”

“My sister,” Jane said, with a gentleness that had steel somewhere behind it, “is making a legal argument. She is not distressed.”

Collins turned back to Elizabeth. His colour had risen. His eye went to the shelves, returned to Elizabeth, and stayed there — the calculation he made this time not of cost and convenience but of something older, something nearer to insult.

“My dear cousin. I have been patient. I will not debate legal points with a young woman in a state of bereaved agitation. The library remains.”

Bereaved agitation. The phrase arrived in her chest like a hand closing. She did not meet his eye. Her eye went to the shelf she had indicated — the shelf she had sorted in the evenings after the funeral, crying at the desk over volumes her father would never open again, writing each inscription into a list because her eye could not manage the words on their own pages — and she held her voice.

“The shelf I have indicated contains my father’s personal property. You will not have it.”

Whatever Collins had come into the room prepared to yield had left him. In its place was the posture proper to a man whose dignity had been challenged in his own house by a woman who had not been offered it.

“We shall see,” he said, and turned on his heel and went.

Elizabeth did not follow him. She stood where she was until his footsteps had descended the stairs, and then stood a little longer, looking at the shelf where the gap already was — the old worn copy of Johnson gone, taken on Collins’s first visit, a loss she had not yet found a way to think about directly. The gap was shaped exactly like the thing that was missing. Her hand went to it, flat against the wood, and stayed there — because if she moved, she would either run after him or sit down on the floor, and she could afford to do neither.

X

In Her Keeping

Charlotte found her there, in the passage outside the library — had only arrived, as Charlotte had always arrived at the right moment, though the right moment now was considerably worse than any they had previously shared.

“He had agreed to a fortnight.” Charlotte’s voice was low, her eyes on the floor. “I had spoken to him over two hours about it. He was not—” she stopped. “He was less without feeling on the matter than you might suppose. He will still grant it, Lizzy. He requires a concession. A demonstration by this evening — something that will serve as recognition of his authority in his own house. If he has it, you will have your fourteen days. If he does not—”

She did not finish.

“Two weeks for my dignity,” Elizabeth said. Her jaw ached. “I cannot, Charlotte. He took the Johnson on his first night here, and you know Papa bought that specifically to read with me. He moved the desk in my father’s study before Papa was two days buried. He may be my father’s heir. He is not going to have my father’s mind as well.”

Charlotte’s hand went to her arm and stayed there. “I know,” she said.

“Ask him again. Tonight. Please.”