Page 22 of Faceless

“I will ask him. I was going to ask him.”

Elizabeth pressed Charlotte’s hand, once, and went to find Jane.

Jane was in their old room, folding linens into the second of the trunks. She did not look up when Elizabeth came in.

“Lizzy. Give him the books.”

Her brow raised. “Give them? No.”

“Give him the inscribed ones. Give him the Lady-Catherine flattery. Keep Papa’s margins. Let Collins have the covers. You may fight him over the rest in a year when we are not five women being driven from a house.”

“I have been sorting for three evenings, Jane. I have Papa’s inscriptions in a list. The law is on my side.”

“The law,” Jane said, “will not put a roof over Kitty and Lydia in two weeks.”

“The roof is already not ours.”

Jane set the linen down. When she turned, her face was not gentle either. “Lizzy. I am asking you. For Mama, for Mary, for Kitty, for Lydia. Please. Give him what he wants.”

Elizabeth’s fists balled, and she could feel the hot track of a tear running down her cheek. “I cannot.”

“You can.”

“I cannot give him my father!”

The thing that had been holding in Elizabeth’s chest since the library gave, finally, and she put her hands over her face. Jane crossed the room, put her arms around her, and held her while she cried.

“I know,” Jane said. “I know. I know.”

After a while, Elizabeth got her breath. “I am not going to yield, Jane.”

“I believe I knew that already.”

“I am sorry, Jane.”

“I know that, too.”

She did not yield at dinner. Collins kept his eye on her across the table, awaiting a concession that had not been scheduled. When the concession did not arrive, he retired to the study that had been her father’s and closed the door.

She wept that night in the room she shared with Jane, with her face pressed into the pillow and Jane’s hand on her back. Neither of them spoke. There was nothing useful either of them could have said.

She wrote to Dawkins on the morning of the next day. She sat at the desk in what had been her father’s study — the desk already angled differently, the lamp in the wrong place, the inkstand Collins’s now — and wrote the shortest letter of her life. Her father had ordered a copy of the Rasselas. She was writing to inform Mr Dawkins that he need not send it. Her father had died on the evening he wrote. The bill for any trouble already incurred might be sent to her at her uncle Gardiner’s, in Gracechurch Street. She signed it, sealed it, gave it to Hill to be taken to the post with the other letters, and sat at the desk for several minutes afterward without moving, because there had been something final about writing it that she had not been prepared for — more final than the funeral had been, more final than Collins going through the library the first morning.

She was in the library by eight that same morning, sorting. The shelf had grown longer. A second shelf was taking shape beside it — her father’s correspondence, his two small cabinets of pamphlets, the annotated Blackstone he had kept by his armchair. She took each volume down, confirmed the inscription or the marginal hand, entered it on the list. Her hands would not quite hold still. There was no one in the room to see them.

Collins observed from the doorway through the morning and did not interfere. He was assembling his own account, which was not a list but a grievance, and each volume she removed from the shelf lengthened it.

By the third morning, the matter could no longer be contained. He came down to breakfast with an opinion on propriety, which he delivered over the eggs as though it were addressed to the room rather than to Elizabeth — something about the conduct becoming young women of good family, something about the duty owed to the master of a house one occupied as a guest, something about the improper example a conspicuous want of submission offered to the younger sisters who were observing it. Elizabeth did not answer. Her hand closed on her cup until she could feel the edges of the china. She drank her tea. She went back to the library and continued to sort.

Kitty was crying somewhere in the house. Mary was not. Mary had not said more than a dozen sentences since the funeral.

He was waiting for her in the drawing room that evening with Charlotte beside him and his hat already in his hand. He had given the matter considerable thought, he said. He had prayed upon it. He had been obliged, with great regret, to arrive at a decision. The family would be given five days. For, of course, they could not travel on a Sunday, and he would not have them here by the following Monday.

“Mr Collins—” Jane began.

“I am not a hard man,” Collins said, “but I cannot indefinitely extend the courtesies of a house whose inhabitants decline to recognise the authority of its owner. The example is corrupting to the younger girls. It is corrupting to my own wife. I owe it to the household, and to the memory of your late father — a memory for which I continue to grieve — to require conduct becoming of ladies in their present condition.”

The memory of your late father. Elizabeth’s nails were in her palms. She did not meet his eye. Her eye went to Charlotte, who had hers on the floor.