Page 25 of Faceless

The smile did not reach her eyes. Elizabeth had known her aunt for seventeen years. She had seen her tired, stretched, worried, bereaved. She had never seen this — the bearing up that did not seem to reach for hope, but only endurance.

Mr Gardiner’s attention kept returning to his wife, a long, careful attention that came back to her every few minutes like a man testing ground he does not trust. Once, when Mrs Bennet had said something more about the good china, he reached across and laid his hand briefly over his wife’s where it rested on the arm of her chair. Mrs Gardiner turned her hand beneath his, answered him once with her fingers, and let him go. Neither of them turned towards the other while they did it.

Elizabeth set her cup down.

“Aunt,” she said, quietly enough that her mother did not hear. “What is wrong?”

“Nothing that cannot—” Mrs Gardiner set the teapot down carefully on the tray, closed her mouth hard upon the rest of the sentence, and turned her face towards her husband.

“Nothing is wrong,” Mrs Bennet said, loudly and serenely, having heard enough to feel addressed. “Lizzy is always imagining things. I have said so for years. There is nothing wrong that a good night’s sleep will not—”

“Fanny,” Mr Gardiner said.

Mrs Bennet stopped as though he had caught her arm.

Mr Gardiner set down his cup. His gaze moved from Elizabeth to Jane and then around the room at all of them — his wife with her careful hands folded in her lap, his nieces arranged across the furniture of a sitting room that was too small for everyone in it, his sister gone temporarily still — and whatever he had been holding back for the past two weeks gave way.

“I had intended to wait,” he said. “To let you recover yourselves first, to give you a day or two. But you are here now, and there is no use in waiting, and you will understand the situation well enough to see that waiting changes nothing.” His gaze dropped to his hands. “I saw my solicitor on Thursday. The house will go up for sale within the fortnight. We are… the situation has become one that does not permit delay. There is no remedy. I want you to understand that I looked for one. I have been looking for one since April.”

The room went quiet.

“But…” Mrs Bennet turned to her brother as if she had heard something wrong and was waiting for the correction. “The house? This house?”

“Yes.”

“But why? What has happened?”

Mr Gardiner glanced once at his wife and then back at his sister. “I made an investment two years ago. A trading company — well-regarded, reliable returns. There was no reason to doubt it, and for two years, we saw excellent returns. But then, in April, a substantial investor withdrew everything. All at once, in the space of a week. It broke confidence in the firm. Others withdrew. The firm collapsed.” The next sentence came flatter. “There was nothing left to recover.”

“What… nothing? Oh, that cannot be—”

“Nothing, Fanny.”

“But surely—” She looked around the room as though there might be an alternative explanation somewhere in it. “Surely there is something. Some property, some — Edward, you are a careful man. You have always been a careful man. Surely there is something.”

“There is not, Fanny.” His voice was not without gentleness. “I am sorry. I have been trying since April to find a way around the matter. There is no different way.”

Mrs Bennet stared at him as the meaning entered her face. “In the last two weeks,” she said, very quietly. “While we were—”

“I know, sister. I did not wish to trouble you at such a time, but my creditors have run out of patience, and I have had to… economise. Selling the house should permit us to keep some share of the warehouse with which to rebuild.”

She closed her mouth. Opened it. Closed it again.

The last two weeks. Her father had died in the last two weeks. Collins had arrived. The library had been fought over. The neighbourhood had declined to help. The cart had been hired. They had come south through Barnet — all of it in the same fortnight that the Gardiners had been sitting in this house, knowing that they had nothing.

“We did not know the extent of it yet when we came to Hertfordshire,” Mr Gardiner said. “We came because you needed us. We would have come regardless. But by the time we returned home —”

“You came to the funeral,” Jane said. Her voice was very quiet.

“Of course, we came,” Mrs Gardiner said. “Of course we did.”

Jane’s eye came to her uncle. “You said nothing of any of this. You said ‘whatever you could do’.”

“Yes.” Mr Gardiner lowered his gaze to his hands. “I meant it. I mean it still.” He lifted his eyes to the room. “What I can offer is not what I would want to offer. The house will go. We will find somewhere smaller. You are welcome wherever we are. We will make room. I cannot do more than make room.”

Mrs Gardiner turned her face away. Her shoulders rose once, very slightly, and fell. When she turned back, her eyes were bright. She did not say anything. There was nothing to say.

Then Mrs Bennet’s face crumpled. The sound that came out of her was not the sound Elizabeth was used to, not the agitated complaint she had heard all her life from a mother with nerves, but something rawer and more frightened, something that came from lower down.