Darcy glanced around. “It is in a state of being inhabited by people with too little leisure and too much illness. I have seen grander rooms in worse condition.”
“That is kind.”
“It is accurate.”
He waited while she chose where to begin. That, he quickly understood, was the greater labour. The lifting would be simple enough. The real work lay in deciding what a life had amounted to and which fragments merited carrying into another house.
She crossed to the chest of drawers first, a plain walnut thing with one handle replaced by cord. From the top drawer she took linen, folded it once more though it had plainly been folded already, and laid it in the box on the table. From the second she drew stockings, two neckcloths, a worn shawl, a workbag, a bundle of household accounts tied in faded blue ribbon. The third held Mr Marsden’s things.
Her hands stopped for a breath. Darcy saw it.
“Those may go,” she said.
“Go where?”
She looked into the drawer as if the answer might be written there. “To the church poor, if they can be used. Or burnt, if they cannot. I have no opinion.”
The garments themselves justified the indifference. They were threadbare, stained by medicine at the cuff, altered and let out more than once. No relics of tenderness there. No cherished coat kept for memory. Only the exhausted wardrobe of a man long ill and not easy to nurse.
Darcy lifted the chest when she had emptied what she wanted from it. It was heavier than its appearance warranted and awkward in the narrow passage. Mrs Marsden moved ahead to clear the door, apologizing once when apology was absurd and again when it wasunnecessary. He set the piece on the cart outside and returned to find her kneeling by a low cupboard under the window.
“Leave that,” he said at once.
“I can rise again.”
“I do not doubt it. I still prefer not to have you prove it on a stone floor.”
Something in the sentence reached her where gentler civility might not have done. She stood, brushing her hands together.
“The dishes are few,” she said. “Most of them are not worth taking.”
Most of them, he saw, were not worth owning. Two cracked plates, three sound ones, a jug with the glaze gone at the lip, six cups from at least three sets. She chose four, wrapped them in linen, and left the rest without apparent pain.
“You keep less than any lady I have ever seen pack a room,” Darcy said, because silence under such labour grew oppressive and because he hoped the neutrality of observation might serve her better than sympathy.
She gave him a brief look. “That is because most ladies expect to inhabit another room of their own at the end of packing. I expect only to borrow one.”
He set the surviving cups into the box with more care than crockery of such humble origin ought perhaps to have inspired. “You will do more than borrow while you are at Merebank.”
She bent again over the cupboard, drawing out a small tin of tea, a cloth bag of barley, two candles, half a packet of needles. “You are generous enough to say so.”
He heard the reservation under the gratitude. Not distrust of him exactly. Distrust of duration. A woman widowed young and badly provided for had learned, he supposed, that every refuge must be measured by the day until it proved otherwise.
They moved next to the bedchamber.
Here the room narrowed further, as if poverty had shut in around the bed. A strip of carpet by one side. A washstand. A chair set close beside the mattress in the unmistakable position of long attendance. On the small table stood the last of the bottles, a spoon, a saucer burned at the edge by candle grease, and a Bible left open with a ribbon marking no place at all. The air retained a medicinal sharpness under the colder smell of unused linen.
Darcy had seen sickrooms all autumn in his sister’s chambers and all winter in the village. This one affected him differently because the struggle had already ended and still occupied the room. One could not look at the chair without seeing the woman who hadsat there night after night because there had been no servant to relieve her and no sister in the next room to divide the burden.
Mrs Marsden went to the washstand and took up a hairbrush, a shaving mug, a little cracked looking-glass.
“These are his,” she said. “The mug may go. The brush also. The glass I will keep because it was mine before I married.”
Darcy set the small table aside from the bed so he could lift it later. “There is no need to explain each article to me.”
“I know.”
But she continued to do it. Not to justify herself, he thought, but because naming things gave order to an occupation otherwise too near undoing. The mug may go. The glass I will keep. This towel for rags. These sheets to Mrs Hadley if she can use them. Those papers burnt. The little flask thrown away entire. She sorted with an exactness almost severe, and only after some time did he understand what made the scene so desolate.
