Chapter Forty-Six
Pemberley—July
Thepostcameupto the breakfast room a little after nine, on the salver Mrs Reynolds had been bringing in to two generations of Darcys at the same hour with the same air she had attended all her morning offices for one and forty years. Mrs Reynolds set the salver at Darcy’s elbow and the smaller correspondence tray at Elizabeth’s.
Elizabeth took up her sister’s letter and looked at the smear of red wax at the seal. “Jane has held her wax to the candle too long again. I have told her that the wax wants the flame for the count of three and not the count of six. She has, over the course of at least a dozen years, ignored me on all occasions.”
“It is not for you to instruct your sister in the management of her seals.”
“It is for me to instruct her in anything she shall presently require to manage. The Merebank seal is at present the worst in Derbyshire, and on the present trajectory shall achieve a reputation by Michaelmas.”
“There are worse seals in Derbyshire.”
“Indeed! Your cousin Fitzwilliam’s. I believe he has been learning from Jane.”
“My cousin puts his seal on with a deliberate carelessness intended to convey to his correspondent that he had a great many more important things to do than seal a letter properly. Your sister’s seals are the result of genuine effort honestly applied. They are therefore worse.”
Elizabeth laughed fondly. “That is a fine distinction, Mr Darcy.”
“It is the distinction your good sister deserves.” Darcy was opening his second letter as she said this. The seal was black. He stopped with the seal half broken.
She put down Jane’s letter. “Black wax. From whom?”
He did not at once answer her. He broke the seal the rest of the way and unfolded the letter and read the first lines, and looked up at her. “My uncle has written.”
“And the death is —?”
“Lady Catherine. Ten days ago. An apoplectic seizure at Rosings.”
She did not at once answer him. No words seemed sufficient to the moment. “You had not better break that to me at a distance of seventeen feet, Fitzwilliam. Come down to my end of the table.”
He came to stand beside her with the letter still in his hand. He read it through once and then went back to particular passages to summarize them for her.
“The seizure was on Monday last. My uncle had not written until he had something to write. He has written now because he has directed Mr Stanley at Doctors’ Commons to seal the chest under the date of her death and to hold it against any call short of his own executor’s. That is the chest containing every letter her ladyship had written to Mr Collins last autumn on the subject of the paper, and every further letter of February in the same urgent vein after Mr Collins had signed at Northmere. My uncle observes—and the observation is, I shall warn you, not delicate—that the chest is in itself a sufficiency against any of the late principal’s subordinates who should be tempted to act on her behalf.”
“He is enjoying this letter.”
“He is. He has been waiting since a long time to write a letter on this subject and was not disappointed when the occasion came. The second of the three has gone to Mr Collins at Longbourn by the same morning’s post, conveying the news and remarking that the arrangements of March stand, that the paper at Mr Ellison’s office stands, that my uncle is now in the further capacity of executor in a position to ensure both continue to do so; and that he shall regard any communication from Longbourn beyond the conventional condolence as an occasion for the originator’s full apology. The letter would have arrived at Longbourn already. Mr Collins did not, I should think, take the news with any pleasure.”
“The third has gone to the chief magistrate of the county in which Longbourn lies, informing that gentleman that the affair of the £140 paper last autumn had been examined by my uncle as a private connection of the family and was found to have been at all times concluded; that the late Lady Catherine’s interest in the matter had been a personal grievance pressed upon Mr Collins, in whom such legal standing as the matter possessed had rested; that Mr Collins had signed an instrument in my study at Northmere in March acknowledging the duress under which Mrs Darcy had acted; and that anycommunication upon the subject from any quarter is to be referred to my uncle’s offices before any further office takes notice of it.”
“Then the matter is closed.”
“It was closed before her death. It is more closed now. And by ten this morning, when my uncle’s three letters arrive at their offices, it shall be closed in three places at once, with no room for any party to take a different view of it.”
“I had prepared the small civility of the genuine sorrow for the news whenever it should come. I have given it. That is the whole of what she shall have of me. I shall not count her death among the things I owe to anyone, because to count it so should grant her, in the after, an office she did not hold in the before—that of having been required for my safety.”
“You shall not grant it her. I had been about to say the same and had not found the form. You have given it the better form.”
She did not at once answer him. She put her hand on Jane’s letter—the letter she had set down a quarter hour earlier and had not, in the news her husband had been giving her, taken up again. She picked it up now, broke the smeared seal, and read it through in silence. He waited.
“Jane writes that the mere woke on Monday last week.
“Woke? What does that mean?”
Elizabeth lifted a shoulder and showed him the word in the letter. “That is what she says. Half past nine in the morning, the bars came up at the southern reeds and stayed an hour together, and the water went to the pewter and pearl of March, and at half past ten went back to its summer blue as though nothing had happened. Mrs Pemberton’s hands felt like a girl’s for it by dinner. Mr Hadley walked down to the bank that evening and would not be drawn until Wednesday morning, at which point he told Jane the matter should be put to me by the next post.”
He sat down on the chair next to hers and took her hand.
