Page 32 of Faceless

“Jane… did he… do more?”

Jane swallowed and turned her hands over in her lap. “He ran his hand down the front of me, slowly, with the flat of his palm, the way one might measure a length of cloth, over the muslin, and rested it between my legs through the gown. The whole weight of it. He said he would expect a great deal of me in that quarter, and would not tolerate reluctance, and then he stood there with his hand where it was and watched my face in the glass and made a sort of tugging motion, back towards… He waited until I understood that he could have kept his hand there as long as he chose to, and that there was no one in the house who would have come if I had called. I was looking away — I could not watch! But he waited until I finally looked up at him in the mirror — specifically, at where his hand was. Then he took his hand away.”

Elizabeth’s hand went out and gripped the edge of the windowsill. The street below was very busy and very far away.

“He bid me arrange my gown. Once I had, he walked me down the stairs and returned me to the drawing room. My aunt asked if I had liked the house. I told her I had. He kissed my hand at the door and complimented my colour. When he handed me into the carriage, his hand went where it had been in the glass, and he kept it there a moment too long, and he was looking at my face the whole time. As though we had an understanding now.”

The flatness broke. “I have washed and washed, Lizzy. The print of his hand does not come off.”

Elizabeth had been still throughout. She remained so a moment longer, because if she moved at once she did not know what her body would do; she felt the floor of her stomach drop very slowly into nothing, and a heat went up the back of her neck, and her mouth filled with something she had to swallow down twice before it would go. She had pictured a great many men in her life upon hearing of an engagement. She had not pictured one who unpinned a girl’s fichu in front of a looking-glass while her aunt sat downstairs and told the girl to stand straighter.

Her first thought was that she would tell her uncle that very morning that he must stop the engagement today, while they still could.

Her second was that she could not, because Jane’s name was already in the registry of the parish, and Mama had already told everyone they ever knew, and the settlement had been paid. Her third was that none of those things mattered against what Jane had just told her, that Uncle could manage the money, that Mama could be told whatever Mama needed to be told, that the vicar would have to be made to understand — and at the same moment she knew, with the part of her mind that had always been honest with her whether she wished it or not, that the vicar would not be made to understand, that Mama would weep and rail and call Jane ungrateful, that without an alternative offered the engagement would close over Jane like a tide, and that there was no alternative on the table because all of this had been arranged precisely because there was none.

She could put Jane in a coach to Meryton. She could write to Charlotte tonight. It was, after all, Elizabeth who had offended Mr Collins, not Jane. She could write to her aunt’s cousins in Derbyshire — there was a widow who might do with a companion, there was — there was —

There was nothing. There was no cousin with means of her own. There was no friend in a position to take a portionless girl indefinitely. There was no living for Jane that did not begin with a man’s permission. The whole structure of her sister’s safety ran through the hands of men, and they had reached the point at which the only man with means to interpose himself was Blackwood himself, and Blackwood had spent the afternoon explaining in considered tones what he intended to do with the privilege.

She made herself unclench her fists. She made herself draw breath. She made herself look at Jane, because Jane had needed three days to bring herself to say any of this aloud and would not be repaid for it by an audience that broke before she did.

“I cannot do it, Lizzy. I have been telling myself for almost three weeks that I could. I cannot. And yet, tomorrow… it will be done for me.”

Mary stirred at the sound of their voices, turned over, and went back to sleep.

Mrs Bennet was at the narrow table in the larger of their two rooms when Elizabeth came through, already dressed, her hair pinned tight, a cup of tea going cold in front of her. Kitty and Lydia were in the next room, their voices coming through the wall in the low bickering of two sisters who had spent a week in the same room as their mother and had very little left to give each other.

“You look a fright, girl,” Mrs Bennet clucked when Elizabeth appeared.

“Good morning, Mama.”

“He is coming at ten. Do you mean to go like that? Mr Sibley is coming at ten to take you to call upon his mother and you cannot go looking like that.” She looked Elizabeth up and down with the eye she reserved for occasions that required something of her daughters. “You have not slept.”

“I slept perfectly well.”

“You have not. I can see it. And Jane is worse, I expect — she has been making herself ill for days over nothing at all, nothing whatever, when she ought to be proud. A baronet, Elizabeth. Do you know what that is worth?”

“I have some idea.”

“Then stop carrying on as though you are both being sent to the gallows.” She set down her cup. “You will go, and you will be agreeable, and you will make a good impression on his mother, and you will come home and tell me it went well. That is all that is required.”

“And if it does not go well?”

“It will go well,” Mrs Bennet said, “because you are sensible enough to make it go well. You are not a fool, Elizabeth, whatever else you may be. Mr Sibley is a wealthy man. He has chosen you. He will keep you, and the settlement will keep your sisters, and that is what this family needs.” She picked up her tea again. “Jane’s nerves are her own affair. I will not let them become yours.”

“Jane is not being nervy. She is frightened.”

“Jane is always frightened. She has been frightened since she was four. It has never stopped her doing what she needed to do.” She regarded Elizabeth over the rim of her cup. “Now go and dress properly. I will not have you disgrace us today.”

Elizabeth went through to the other room, stood in front of the small glass above the washstand, and studied her own face until studying any longer became useless. She pinned her hair, put on her coat, went out. She walked to meet Thomas Sibley without thinking about where she was walking, because thinking about it was a door she could not open.

XV

The Devil She Did Not Know

She was back by noon.

She came through the door and stood in the passage with her back against it, her eyes closed, just breathing, for perhaps ten seconds. Then she heard her mother’s voice from the next room and she opened her eyes and went in.