Page 49 of The Vanished Bennet Sister

Chapter Twenty-two

Elizabeth

The last of the search party returned at half past two in the morning.

The footmen had covered the square in both directions and the streets beyond. None of them had found Mary.

Jane lay on a drawing room sofa with a shawl over her shoulders and her eyes closed, which was the nearest any of them came to sleep. Elizabeth sat in the armchair by the window, wide-eyed and staring out into the street. Sleep was not available to her and pretending otherwise was a waste of time. Kitty and Lydia were tangled against each other in the unselfconscious way of sisters who have shared rooms all their lives, with Lydia's head on Kitty's shoulder and both of them looking morose.

Mrs Bennet barely rested. She had been in the armchair beside the fire since midnight with the writing box on her lap and Mary's letters spread across the side table. She had been reading them in a repetitive way, each time searching for an extra detail that would bring all the necessary facts to light.

Elizabeth watched her without interfering, because she understood the reading was a way of coping with the reality of what had occurred. In addition, it was a form of acquaintance with a daughter she had not, until tonight, fully understood, and a form of penance for that same reason.

It was at past three o'clock that Mrs Bennet said, without preamble: "She knew."

Elizabeth turned to her curiously.

"This woman knew exactly what to write. Every subject. Every question." Her mother held one of the letters with both hands, as if the page required steadying. "Every subject is exactly what Mary would most wish to discuss. It is as if this woman knew what to ask about beforehand. As if…As if she had researched her."

Mrs Bennet’s words left a hushed air in its wake.

"And the questions about the family. They are asked in a way that is not natural.” She paused. Then she stood with a gasp. "Alice Haverford wrote these letters," she said. "Of course it is her. The handwriting looked so familiar. It is her. I am sure of it. She must have had Mary investigated. She knew what to write before she ever met Mary."

Lydia shook her head in disbelief. "Alice Haverford Her natural mother? You think she wrote all those letters pretending to be someone else? For months?"

"Yes."

"She aimed to gain proximity to Mary."

Mrs Bennet nodded. "Correct. It is my fault. All of it. If I had told Mary years ago or had maintained some correspondence with Alice…if I had not told Lavinia Bingley…" She stopped. There was no useful ending to any of these sentences and she seemed to know it. "I want my daughter back," she said instead, simply, the way one stated a fact that contained accurate information: "I want her home."

Jane adjusted on the sofa. "It is frowned upon in society to call on people without warning, even more so if it's done in the middle of the night. We will go to Jermyn Street in the morning, at a reasonable hour. We must ensure not to alarm the whole street, thus giving Alice, if she is indeed the one holding Mary there, cause to do something precipitous."

"Jane is right," Elizabeth said. "We wait for morning."

Dawn came in the slow, grudging manner of days that had nothing to recommend them. It was grey and cold, the light arriving as a reduction of darkness rather than illumination.

Kitty had been weeping sometime in the night; her eyes had that puffy redness. She sat up, looking around the room with a stricken expression that revealed the unsaid. She had hoped to find that the previous day was not as true as her mind presented to her, and was devastated to receive the confirmation that it was.

"When she comes back," Kitty said to no one in particular, "I am going to encourage her to speak at length about everything. The music, the theology…all of it. I have never paid proper attention. I have always let it go past me as if it were noise, but that’s not the case. Henceforth, I am going to listen."

"So am I," Lydia said with a pronounced sniffle. She continued to speak in the tone of someone making a private promise rather than a public announcement. It had none of her usual performance in it. "I always interrupted when she played the pianoforte. I always said it went on too long. It didn't. I was just not paying attention."

Jane nodded at her two younger sisters with undiluted affection. Her eyes were sad as she wiped her face with a handkerchief. "I am going to stop trying to smoothen everything for her in relation to Mama and actually say what I think. She has always known when I was keeping the peace rather than speaking directly to her. She does not need to be protected from her own or anyone else’s opinions."

"She has very good opinions," Elizabeth added. That was something she had not said often enough, which she intended to remedy.

Mrs Bennet wrapped her arms around herself. "I should like to be the one to tell her the truth. If she does not yet know all of it — about the real story behind Alice's fake name of Elena and every other detail else regarding her birth real purpose — I should like to tell her myself. I owe her that."

"You do, Mama," Elizabeth agreed. "And you will."

She had sent two notes before dawn. One to Mr Bingley, asking whether he had any intelligence of Mary's whereabouts. She included in it everything they had discovered thus far. And another to Darcy. She had sat for a moment with the second before she handed it over, aware of a tiny but real irony: that the first person her mind had supplied when she thought capable, possessed of connections, able to do something we cannot was a man she had sent away the previous afternoon with words she had not meant and had regretted within seconds of his departure.

She had not been fair to him across the season and that fact was no longer impossible to ignore. She had read the questions he asked about the Bennet family circumstances as prying, as the interest of a man forming unfavourable judgements. But the questions, viewed differently, understood through the lens of several hours of thinking about what kind of man acted with the speed and the integrity he had shown yesterday led her to arrive at a different conclusion.

She had snagged the attention of a man who wished to understand a situation, not to take advantage of it, but to know it and extend help when needed. It was a form of care, even. She had not, at the time, been inclined towards that interpretation. Now she was contrite enough to consider the chance that she had been wrong.

She had written: Mr Darcy. I write to ask whether you can render any assistance in finding my sister. I believe you have resources in this city that we do not. I also owe you an apology, which I intend to deliver in person at the earliest opportunity.