It has come to my notice that certain accounts left in irregular posture at the late Mr Bennet’s death have not been regularized to the satisfaction of those entitled to enquire into them, and that goods now occupying the house which, by the legal course of entail, revert to me, may stand in a relation to such accounts less simple than ladies are apt to suppose when guided chiefly by feeling.
I would be most unwilling to expose your excellent mother or your estimable sisters to the scrutiny which formal adjustment sometimes necessitates. Yet I cannot in justice to my own future household permit ambiguity where rectitude is demanded. If, however, a spirit of proper submission and renewed confidence were shown, I have reason to think much may still be softened which otherwise must proceed in the ordinary channel.
I remain, madam, your well-wisher,
William Collins
He read once, and then again, more slowly. “He threatens legal ruin as courtship. And calls extortion softness if accepted under clerical phrasing.”
“That was what I made of it as well.”
He laid the paper down with a motion that showed exactly how much he wished to tear it. “Your uncle saw this?”
“A copy. Not this original. By then he had advanced more money than he could safely spare and was trying to find me a place with a family near Lambton where my name would not be first on anyone’s lips.”
He straightened. “Lambton?”
She took the letter back. “My aunt, you see, was raised there. I could not bear to show him another instrument by which Ihad become an expense.”
He looked down. “You were never an expense.”
Her hand on the memorandum slid the breadth of a knuckle across the table toward his where it lay on the chair-arm between them. It stopped and stayed for the length of a breath, and then she drew it back into her lap because it had begun to shake. He had seen the movement. He did not move his own.
She could not answer him.
“I fled before the arrangement could be completed. That was the final folly, though perhaps the most understandable. Collins had written through an attorney’s clerk—a Mr Tilney of Gray’s Inn, whose name I believe you know. My mother was in hysterics. Jane was beyond reach in Derbyshire. My uncle wept when I said goodbye to him in the coach yard at St Albans and gave me the last of what he could spare. I took the mail to Nottingham, and from Nottingham by stages to the Derby road, and from Derby I walked. Eleven days. You know the end of it. I did not intend to be found in any valley. I intended to disappear. And I came within a quarter mile of succeeding by a route I would, afterwards, have preferred to any other.”
“Do not ever say that to me again.”
She met his eyes.
“I will not. I only mean that I did not come here in the hope of rescue. I came here because I had run out of options. Your valley was the last available one because it did not appear on any map I had ever read. I did not know there was a house at the end of it or that you were its master. I knew only that the snow might hold me, and that if it did not, there would at least be no returning to anywhere I had been.”
Neither of them spoke for some time.
“This may seem irrelevant to the subject at hand,” he murmured, “but in my mind, the two are nearly one and the same. A few days ago, when we walked to the water, something happened. You did not speak of it, but I saw. What explanation have you?”
A shiver traveled down her spin. When she answered, her voice had left the cadence of the legal account behind.
“The dark drew back from my hand and I could see the stones under it. I pretended I had gasped at the cold, but the gasp was because the water had cleared, and then because it had answered me. I did not understand what that meant. I do not entirely understand now. I know only that the water has been mending things in this valley since I arrived—my leg, Georgiana, the lamb, Nan’s cough, Mrs Hadley’s rheumatism—and that it has beenfailing in the same way these last few days, when you tried to be kind but neither of us dared be honest with the other.”
He did not speak.
“I think,” she said—and here her voice did not quite hold the level she had been keeping—”I think the mere has been telling your steward the truth. I think it is drawing dark because of what lies between us in this room. I think it will draw darker until one of us lifts the silence off it. I have lifted what I can lift. The rest is yours.”
A log in the grate broke and resettled. Neither of them looked at it.
“I will not act on any of this tonight. Any answer I give you in the hour after you have put this into my hand will be the answer of a man whose judgement is not his own. You have given me the truth, now let me be worthy of it by waiting until I can tell you what I mean to do with it, rather than what I feel in the seven minutes after hearing it.”
She nodded. “That is more than fair, sir.”
“I will speak with you tomorrow morning. Early. Before the household is stirring. Without Mrs Marsden present, if you will.”
Elizabeth swallowed. “Of course.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
HewentpastNortonwithout seeing him, past the staircase without touching the rail, and out into the yard by the side door because the side door did not give onto the study or onto any place he could be seen from any window he recognised.
