Page 19 of Faceless

“Well, I do not see the harm in it,” Mrs Bennet said, “if Colonel Forster is responsible for the arrangements. Lydia has been very good lately.”

“Has she?” Elizabeth asked.

“Comparatively,” Mrs Bennet allowed.

“Compared to what?” Elizabeth asked.

“Compared to what she might have been!” Mrs Bennet said, with the perfect certainty proper to a woman arguing from an entirely imaginary baseline.

Elizabeth turned to her father. “Papa…”

He was watching all of it with his cup halfway to his mouth, his eyes creased at the corners. He caught her eye. The look between them said everything — the same thing it had always said, the private treaty of two people who found the world funny in the same way and were glad of the company.

“I think,” he said, “that the only genuine argument against Lydia going to Brighton is that she will come back and tell us all about it for the remainder of the year, and we will none of us get any peace.”

“If I come back and don’t tell you anything, you will only complain that I am secretive,” Lydia said.

“That is true,” Elizabeth said. “You cannot win, Lydia. Papa has constructed a position from which there is no escape.”

“Your sister,” Mr Bennet said, with the satisfaction proper to the delivery of a line he was pleased with, “has been constructing inescapable positions since she was approximately—”

He stopped.

His fork was halfway to his plate. A piece of lamb on the tines.

The smile had not quite gone from his face. But it was going — she saw it go — the amusement leaving around the eyes first, replaced by something that was not pain exactly but a kind of absence, an attention gone somewhere else. He reached for the cup. His hand, which had been steady all her life, was not steady now. He got the cup to his mouth. He drank.

He did not swallow.

Elizabeth had been watching his throat when the tea came back up — not coughed, not spat, come back, as though the throat had refused it. The cup went sideways in his hand. Tea went across the cloth, across his plate, across his lap.

He was making a sound she had never heard. Not coughing. Something below coughing, below breathing — the sound a throat made when it was trying to get air past something that would not move, and failing.

She was out of her chair without having decided to move. Her hand was on his shoulder. “Papa!”

Jane had got round to the other side of him. Her mother was making a sound too, high and thin and useless. Kitty had knocked her chair back and stood pressed against the wall. Mary had Lydia by the arm.

“Papa, lean forward — Papa!”

She struck him between the shoulder blades. Once. Twice. Harder. His back under her hand had gone rigid in a way bodies were not meant to be. His hand had gone to his throat and stayed there, clutching, as though he could pull whatever it was out with his fingers. His face had gone a colour that was wrong — that was not any colour a face ought to be — and she hit him again, and again, and his eyes were on her face, and they were finding her, and they were asking her something, and she did not know what he was asking, and she did not know how to answer and she hit him again.

“Papa, no! Papa!”

Something in his chest gave — not released, gave, the way a rope gave before it broke — and for an instant she had thought it had worked, had thought the thing had moved, had thought he would draw breath, and she had put both hands on his shoulders and held him and waited for the breath.

It did not come.

His eyes were still finding her face. And then, without any change she could have pointed to — no closing, no darkening, nothing she would have been able to describe afterward if anyone had asked her — they were not finding her face any longer. They were open, and they were turned towards her, and they were not seeing her.

His hand dropped from his throat.

Mrs Bennet’s cries brought the servants. Jane sent for the apothecary. Mary took Kitty and Lydia from the room. Elizabeth stayed.

She stayed when Hill came in, when the apothecary came, when the apothecary’s face did the thing faces do when there is nothing more to be done. She stayed when the room went quiet — not peaceful, not restful, just emptied of a sound she had been hearing her whole life and could not now locate anywhere.

She was still in the chair beside him when Jane came back and put a hand on her shoulder and said her name very gently.

She did not move for a long time.