“In such weather?”
“Yes.”
The answer excluded more than it contained. It rebuffed him and made him more curious than before.
“I had supposed,” he said, keeping his voice as idle as he could, “that sisters who are merely fond do not generally take winter roads alone.”
“Then you suppose correctly.”
There was nothing to be done with that except admire, against his judgment, the calm with which she guarded her sister. Elizabeth had secrets enough to make half the county industrious if they were once spoken of in a drawing room. Mrs Marsden meant that none of them should be hers to speak.
He tried once more, very lightly. “And was Miss Bennet always so determined?”
Mrs Marsden looked at him over the basket of books. The answer, when it came, was the nearest thing to open feeling she had yet given him in the whole morning.
“Always. Only not always wisely.”
He did not know why that sentence affected him as it did. Perhaps because it was said with such exhausted love. Perhaps because it described a quality in Elizabeth he hadalready seen too clearly with his own eyes and should have liked, for prudence’s sake, to find less compelling.
The last things to be sorted were papers from the table drawer and a small workbox from beneath the bed. The papers she divided into three neat parcels—those concerning the rent, which she kept, those relating to doctors and apothecaries, which she wished burnt, and Mr Marsden’s unfinished notes, which she looked through without expression and then returned to the drawer.
“You will leave those?” Darcy asked.
“There is nothing in them but remedies he meant to try when he was stronger, letters he meant to answer when he was less tired, and figures for money we never had. The dead are entitled to privacy in some matters.”
He thought that a remarkable generosity toward a husband who had, by implication if not direct accusation, given her too little comfort in life. Yet perhaps generosity cost her less now than remembrance.
The workbox proved lighter than it looked. Thread, buttons, scissors, a packet of needles, three lengths of ribbon, and beneath them all a piece of fine muslin folded around nothing.
Mrs Marsden touched it and went still.
Darcy turned away at once to the window, affording her the decency of privacy even in a room too small to contain much. After a time she said, very quietly, “This may go too.”
He looked back. Her eyes were wet, though no tear had yet fallen.
“It need not, if you—”
“It ought,” she said. “I bought it in September because I meant to make curtains for the bed when Mr Marsden was better and we had the room painted. I had measured the window twice. It appears I was planning for a life much given to postponement.”
The composure cracked then, not with display but with fatigue. She sat on the edge of the bed and covered her eyes briefly with her hand.
Darcy set the workbox down and remained where he was. Near enough, should she require assistance. Far enough not to turn grief into spectacle.
“I am sorry,” he said, and because anything larger would have sounded false in that poor room, the plainness served.
She lowered her hand. “Forgive me. This is ridiculous.”
“No.”
“I am not crying for him, you see.” The words came low and ashamed, as if she were confessing a hard defect. “That is the unpardonable part. I did grieve for him. I do grieve for him, in a manner. He suffered. He was frightened. At the end he was kinder than before, and that ought to matter. But this—” She looked round the bedchamber, at the bare table, the drawer left open, the muslin in her lap. “This is not for him. It is for all the little improvements that were always to be made later, and the easier season that never came, and the house I kept waiting for until there was no house left to keep. One should not be vain enough to mourn a plan.”
“One may mourn wasted hope without vanity.”
Her mouth trembled once. “That is a very gentlemanly doctrine.”
“It is one I mean.”
She bowed her head. When she spoke again, the voice was held. “You are good to me, sir.”
