“Did she eat anything today, Mrs Hadley?”
“Half a piece of bread with the second cup of tea, miss. She is in her body well enough. She is only quiet.”
“Quiet.”
“Quiet, miss. As one is when one has resolved on a thing one would rather not have had to resolve. I cannot put it plainer than that. It isn’t my place to.”
Elizabeth opened the envelope.
It was not long. The hand was Jane’s. The warmth was not.
I shall not return to Northmere. I have written to my aunt Gardiner and shall travel to her as soon as I am able, which I trust will be by the end of the week. I should be obliged if my trunk and writing-case might be sent down with Hadley’s cart when he next comes up. I have asked Mrs Hadley not to wait for an answer.
J.M.
That was all of it.
She read it twice. The first time for the words. The second time for what the words had been forced to make room for, by the leaving out of them.
She refolded the paper along its already-made crease. She set it back on the table. She did not look at Mrs Hadley, because Mrs Hadley had known what was in the envelope when she handed it over, and any look exchanged would be the answer she had been told not to wait for.
“Thank you for bringing it up,” Elizabeth said.
Mrs Hadley pressed her hand once and rose.
Georgiana turned to the basket.
When the door had shut, Elizabeth looked at the window. The afternoon was very still. The light came across the lower lawn in a long quiet wash and reached, beyond it, the upper edge of the mere, which was holding the sky in the way it had not held the sky in twenty years. Mrs Pemberton’s hands. The colour off the weir. A woman crying for an hour at a meadow returning to itself.
And Jane—Jane signing herselfJ.M.
She did not move yet. She set the note inside the cover of the book on her lap. The next thing was coming up under her ribs as the dark had come up the night they brought her in, and she did the same thing now she had done then. She did not let it speak, and she did not let it stop.
But it had begun.
Hadleyentered,hiscapin his hand, the cap turned by the brim through his fingers in the gesture by which he delivered a piece of news he had not yet decided how Mr Darcy would receive.
“Two bits of news, sir.”
“Yes.”
“The first piece is the water, sir. She is drawing truer today than she was yesterday. Not right. Truer. The line on the post at the boathouse this morning is two inches lower than it was Monday evening, the rust is gone from the inlet, the reeds at the western end have lifted off the surface. I have not seen her so close to right since the autumn before last. I should have come up at any time today to tell you. I am telling you now because I came up to tell you the first thing, and the second thing belongs in the same telling.”
“The second piece?”
“Miss Bennet has gone down across the meadow. I did not see her go, sir. Mrs Pemberton’s boy saw her. She was on the cane. She did not call to him as she went past, and the boy did not call to her, because the boy has a piece of judgement on him for nine years old. He come up to the dairy ten minutes ago and told his mother, and Mrs Pembertonsent up word.”
Darcy had risen from his chair. He did not afterwards remember rising. “Where on the meadow did the boy see her?”
“At the upper gate, sir. Going down the south path.”
“How long has it been?”
“At twenty past the hour by my reckoning. I beg pardon, sir, that is—forty-five minutes, sir. Mrs Pemberton’s boy did not come up to the dairy at once. He had a goose to look to.”
Forty-five minutes.
And she still with her name on a warrant, walking about the village where anyone might find her.
