Page 20 of Faceless

IX

The Entail

He had come for the funeral with his hat already in his hand and his face composed in the expression long practised before a mirror for rehearsing grief. Charlotte was beside him, quieter than Elizabeth had ever seen her, with the stillness proper to a woman who had made her accounting of a situation and found the numbers did not come out well.

Elizabeth had not spoken to Collins at the funeral. She had stood at the graveside with Jane’s hand in hers, and her mother’s crying somewhere behind her, looking at the box going into the Hertfordshire earth and thinking about the Rasselas that would now never arrive. She had not spoken to anyone she did not have to.

Collins had spoken to everyone. At length. She had heard his voice carrying across the churchyard, offering Lady Catherine’s condolences — apparently, he had been authorised to convey them. She kept her eyes on the grave, her hand in Jane’s, and did not turn around.

He came to the house the morning after. He came with papers.

He stood in the entrance hall of Longbourn with the papers in one hand and his hat in the other, looking around at the walls, the furniture, the long window at the turn of the stairs — as if he had been imagining the ownership of a room for years and was now comparing the reality to the inventory. Elizabeth came out of the drawing room and stopped in the doorway. He turned, saw her, and set his face into the expression of bereavement, which sat on him like a costume.

“My dear cousin. I trust you slept. These are hard days. Very hard days.” He shook his head slowly. “One does not prepare for loss. One cannot.”

“No,” Elizabeth said. “One cannot.”

“Lady Catherine herself said as much to me. And she has had cause, very recently, to know something of grief — poor woman, quite prostrated.” He pressed his lips together. “A great man. A very great man. Lady Catherine is quite undone. I flatter myself I was of some comfort to her in the first hours, but a loss of that magnitude — one does not recover.”

“Yes.” Elizabeth ducked her face to dash a private tear from her cheek. It would not do for Collins to see it and chide her that sorrow was a selfish indulgence. “My father was a great man.”

“Yes — yes, of course, Mr Bennet was — yes. A very respectable gentleman. But I was referring, as I ought perhaps to have made clearer, to Mr Darcy. Of Pemberley.”

Elizabeth blinked. “Mr Darcy? What has he to do with this?”

He drew himself up slightly. “Did the news not reach Hertfordshire? I had assumed — why, it was in the papers weeks ago. But I suppose you do not take the fashionable papers.”

She shook her head. “What was in the papers? Did he marry Miss de Bourgh? I cannot think why I should—”

“My good cousin, he has died! Did you really hear nothing of it?”

Elizabeth’s mouth fell slack. “Died? Mr Darcy! But he seemed so healthy. Was it quite sudden?”

“Terribly, I am afraid. A carriage accident on the Dover road. Very sudden. The signet ring identified him — his father’s ring, I believe — and Lady Catherine was informed within the week.” He drew a breath and released it with eulogist’s gravity. “A great loss. To the family. To the country.”

A carriage accident? A healthy man, a strong one, with the best-maintained carriage in the neighbourhood? It seemed wrong, inconsistent with what she knew of him — which was not much, but included the impression that the world did not inconvenience him without difficulty.

She swallowed. “Indeed, I am sorry to hear it.”

Miss Darcy would be shattered. The colonel would be shattered. Miss de Bourgh — even Lady Catherine, beneath all the performance of consequence, had clearly loved her nephew in the way she loved everything she considered hers.

She opened her mouth to say something of this, and Collins said, with a brisk forward motion — one piece of business discharged, another waiting — “But you will forgive me, these are matters for another time. I should speak with you about the question of the house.”

The question of the house.

She closed her mouth. The information about Darcy — his death, its strangeness, the grief it would cause people she hardly knew or had never met — went to the back of wherever she was keeping things, behind her father’s last sentence, the pale rectangle on the wall, the Rasselas that he would never read.

She turned and went back into the drawing room.

Collins followed her to the doorway and said something else about Lady Catherine’s devastation, something about the blow to the family. She stood with her back to him, her eye on the fireplace. He was more moved by Mr Darcy’s death than by her father’s. She had no space left to be astonished by this, and so she was not.

Collins followed her in. He had a way of moving through Longbourn that was already proprietary — a half-step of possession in his gait, a tendency to touch the doorframes as he passed through them, lightly, with the tips of his fingers, as though confirming that they were solid and real and his.

He spent the morning going through the house. He did not ask permission, and no one offered him any. Mrs Bennet had barricaded herself in her bedroom, where she had been largely resident since the night Mr Bennet died. Jane sat in the drawing room with Kitty on one side and Mary on the other, her hands folded in her lap with a visible effort. Lydia seemed equally distressed over her father’s death and the fact that the Brighton scheme evaporated. She sat in the window seat with her knees drawn up, her face pressed against the glass, looking out at the garden. It was the longest Elizabeth had ever known her to be quiet.

Elizabeth followed Collins.

Not to be agreeable, but because someone had to, because Jane could not do it without breaking, because she knew every room in this house as well as she knew her own face. She could not stand to let him move through it alone with his papers and his proprietary fingertips.