“No.”
“And you have been monstrously wrong to keep the whole of it from me this long.”
Elizabeth met her eyes. “Yes.”
Jane’s mouth trembled once. “I might have helped you bear it if you had trusted me.”
That, more than any mention of law or shame, struck home. “I know,” Elizabeth said. “That is the part least pardonable.”
Jane sat again, but nearer now, at the bed’s side rather than by the window. She took Elizabeth’s hand, though the gesture shook between tenderness and reproof.
“I do not know yet whether I am angry with you more for the forgery or for believing I would rather be spared than burdened. Perhaps I shall decide by degrees. But we have done with secrets and lies. Do you hear me?”
Elizabeth’s throat tightened. “I hear you.”
“Good. Then I shall not write blindly.” Jane looked once at the packet, once at the closed ledger on the table, as if the two objects together named the whole strange crossroads of this house. “But neither will I go on helping you hide danger from men who have earned better usage than deceit. Uncle must be reached wisely, yes. And before long Mr. Darcy must know what it costs him to shelter you.”
Elizabeth flinched despite herself.
Jane did not relent. “No, listen to me as I have listened to you. I do not say this because he likes you. I say it because he is a gentleman under his own roof, with a sister to protect and a name that may be dragged into your necessity whether he chooses it or not. You had no right to decide the whole matter for him indefinitely.”
The sentence struck with merciless justice because it was true.
Elizabeth turned her face aside. “I thought he was safer not knowing. A man who acts in an emergency stands clear of the law. A man who learns, and is silent, does not.”
She closed her eyes. “And I was afraid.”
Jane’s fingers tightened around hers. “I know. That is why I can forgive so much and so little at once.”
They remained thus, joined over the hateful little bundle of papers. The fire had burnt low. Morning light lay cold on the writing case by the window.
At last Jane said, with the calm of a woman accepting labour rather than relief, “We will think first whom to write, by what hand, and how much may be committed to paper. After that, we shall decide what is to be told here and when. But you will not put me off again. If I ask, you answer. If I warn, you hear. If I see danger where you see only sacrifice, you will remember that I have earned some judgement in this matter too.”
Elizabeth turned back and saw in her sister’s face not softness defeated, but softness armed.
“Yes,” she said.
Jane brushed the tears from her own cheeks with an impatient hand, then took up Collins’s letter once more.
“Very well,” she said. “Let us begin by hating him properly, and afterwards we will determine how not to be ruined by him.”
Chapter Eighteen
Bythethirddayafter the surgeon’s reprieve, the house began to conspire against Elizabeth’s confinement.
Not by proposing that she be permitted to move to a chair. Mrs Hadley had put an end to that folly before breakfast with a look so contemptuous that even Mrs Reeves had let the subject drop. But the curtains were drawn wider to admit the best of the afternoon. A third pillow was brought. Then a fourth and a fifth until Elizabeth was nearly sitting up properly. Georgiana’s notes, more frequent and easier now, referred to the pianoforte downstairs as if it had been personally injured by neglect. Mrs Reeves declared that if Miss Bennet must lie abed, she need not do so in an aspect of permanent punishment. Jane, standing between these authorities and her sister’s restlessness, yielded inch by inch and called it prudence.
“If the leg swells,” she said, “or the pain worsens, or she is overtired, everything is put back at once.”
“Aye,” said Mrs Hadley.
“At once,” said Elizabeth.
“You have a lamentable tendency,” said Mrs Reeves, “to repeat good sense as if repetition improved it. Martha, bring the smaller table here. Nan, the blue shawl, not the brown. If Miss Bennet must be confined, she shall at least be confined decently.”
“I shall be everything respectable,” Elizabeth promised.
“For now,” said Mrs Hadley. “If you wish to remain so, you will lie still and let sensible people better your circumstances.”
