He stopped with her. The laughter came again from the back of the cottage, from the kitchen perhaps, or the parlour with the window open—a laugh she had not heard her sister make since well before Jane had stood at the altar with Mr Marsden, and before that since well before her father had been laid in the ground at Longbourn. A laugh that had belonged to the Jane of her girlhood and that she had begun, over the years, to doubt she had remembered correctly. It came across the lane on the cold air and into her ribs, and she could not, for a small while, do anything with it.
“Is that her?”
“It is.”
“How can it be her?”
“It is Jane. I know her laugh better than I know my own.”
She did not know what she had been about to do at the cottage door. She had had no clear plan past the door. The laugh undid the plan more thoroughly than any of the things she had imagined Jane might do to undo her.
Mrs Hadley opened the door before they had reached it. She did not greet them. She took Elizabeth in—the wet, the absence of the cane, the leg under the cloak—and she did not speak for some breaths, and Elizabeth understood that Mrs Hadley meant, on the strength of what was on her step, to deal with it in the order in which it had been put before her.
“Mrs Hadley. We come unannounced.”
The woman made a face. “You come dripping. Get in, miss. And without your cane! Get in before you have a chill on top of everything else.”
She drew Elizabeth across the threshold by the elbow, with Darcy following, and shut the door against the cold lane.
The Colonel sat at the kitchen table with a cup in his hand and the table set for three. Mr Hadley sat opposite him with a piece of bread and butter on his plate that he had not had time to lift to his mouth. Jane stood at the dresser with a cloth over her arm, and the laugh that had come across the lane was finishing in her, in a small private way, with her shoulders not yet square to the room.
Mr Hadley shot to his feet at the sight of Darcy.
“Mr Darcy, sir—I had not—I was about to step out to the gates—the lower gate is—I shall be no more than a quarter hour —”
“Mr Hadley. Please.” Darcy lifted a hand. “The gate shall keep. All is well this morning.”
“Sit down, Hadley,” the Colonel said from his chair. “There is no man under this roof on duty this morning, my cousin least of all.”
Mr Hadley sat down.
Jane had not got up when Elizabeth had come in at the door, and had not spoken at first. A cup of tea was at her hand. There was colour in her cheek Elizabeth had not seen on her sister since well before they had left Longbourn in November, and the laugh from the lane had not yet quite gone out of her face. She set the cup down.
“Lizzy—your leg! Where is your crutch?”
Jane got up from the table. She crossed the kitchen flagstones in three steps that had nothing of grief in them, and she did not stop at the chair Mrs Hadley had pulled out, nor short of Elizabeth to look her over, nor at any of the small distances at which she might decently have hesitated. She came the whole way, wet cloak and all, and she put her arms round her sister’s neck without a word.
Elizabeth’s arms came round Jane in answer before her head had any part in it. She had walked the length of the lane carrying a petition she had had no word for at any door of the morning, and she did not, in the end, have to put it into words. Jane’s arms were around her. The petition went out of her into the place between them where, this afternoon, no word was wanted.
The Colonel was already on his feet.
“Mr Hadley and I,” he said, “have a matter to discuss respecting the eastern gate, which has been on my mind for some hours.”
Mr Hadley, on his feet again with notable readiness, said, “The eastern gate, Colonel?”
“The eastern gate, Mr Hadley.”
They went, both of them, outside, the bread and butter forgotten on the plate. Mrs Hadley moved to the dresser with the quietness of a woman who meant to be busy with the kettle for a small while, though the kettle was already on.
Elizabeth drew back from her sister’s shoulder, her hands gone of their own to Jane’s, and found, in spite of the weeping still in her, that she could speak.
“Jane, forgive me.”
“Lizzy.”
“I have been a poor sister to you since the day they read the will. I have not written you the letters I owed you. I have not asked the questions I owed you. I have not—Jane, when I came north in January I came under a name that was not my own, and I did not write to you to tell you what I was running from. I did not write because I was afraid that, if you knew, you would come to me, and I had not the courage to be come to. You have borne all of it alone, Jane—your marriage to Mr Marsden, our father, our mother, the entail, the whole of it—and I let you bear it alone, and I knew I was letting you bear it alone, and I let it stand.”
“Lizzy— “
