Page 143 of Hard Home

"A life," she said. "Or a line of them. And I am nineteen, and I shall not marry, and I have no line to spend; I have only the one life, and it would be the whole of it, and it would not be quick.

"I have thought about that. I want you to know that I have actually thought about it and not merely said the brave thing. I have thought about being a woman of forty who has spent twenty years going out to a wall at half past six, holding a thing shut, growing thinner, while you are at Pemberley and Jane is at Netherfield and Kitty is married and my mother is with my aunt Philips; and about being fifty and doing it still, and sixty; and about dying of it slowly the way my father is dying of it, in a still room, with nobody able to say what is wrong.

"And I have thought about the other thing, which is worse, which is being the woman whocouldhave held it and did not, and living out a comfortable life somewhere while Meryton empties, a family at a time, and there is a very good farm nobody wants and a church with no roof.

"I do not know which I could bear. That is the truth, Lizzy, and I have been sitting here since noon and I have not got past it, and I am not going to pretend to you that I have."

---

Elizabeth did not tell her not to think about it.

She did not tell her that it would not come to that, or that papa might recover, or that Mr. Darcy would find another way, or that she was too young, or that no one would ask it of her — all of which she had ready, and all of which were the things everybody in this story had always said, and every one of which had turned out to be a way of not telling somebody something.

"Then here is what I think," said Elizabeth, "and you may do what you like with it.

"I think you are probably right about the second door. I think you have been right about more things than anybody in this family and been thanked for none of them, and I think if you tellMr. Darcy what you have just told me he will go very quiet and then agree with you, because it is true.

"And I think that if it comes to it — if papa dies in the spring and the ground is in the churchyard and there is nobody else — then it will beyourchoice, and yours only, and I will not let anybody make it for you, including papa, and including me, and I will fight anybody in this house who tries.

"But I am not going to tell you to do it. And I am not going to tell you not to. Because you are the only person who is going to have to go out to that wall, and the one thing I have learned this entire year — the only thing — is that the people who love you are exactly the people who cannot be trusted to decide what you can carry.

"So it is yours. The whole of it. And I am sorry, because I think you would rather I took it off you, and I am not going to, because that is what we have all been doing to each other since October and it is how we got here."

Mary looked at her for a long moment.

"That," she said, "is the first time in nineteen years that anybody in this house has treated me like a person who can do arithmetic."

"I know."

"I do not know whether to thank you or not."

"Do not," said Elizabeth. "I have got very tired this year of being thanked for things."

---

Mary got up and put the books away, squaring them on the shelf, and put the deed back in its box, and closed the lid.

"I shall talk to Mr. Denny," she said. "Not because he will tell me what to do — he will not, it is the thing I like best about him — but because he is the only person who has ever done the actual work, and I want to know from somebody who has held a ward what it is like on the inside, hour to hour, before I decideanything. Mr. Darcy holds Pemberley but he was born to it and it answers him; Denny built a thing at Selsey out of himself and mended it for a year and lost it, and he knows what I am asking about in a way that nobody else does."

"That is very sensible."

"I am always sensible," said Mary. "It is the only thing anybody has ever granted me and I have got a great deal of use out of it." She picked up the box to carry it up to their father's room. "Lizzy. When you are married, and at Pemberley — will you write to me? Not about the ground. About the ordinary things. Who dined, and what the country is like, and whether the peaks are as they say."

"I promised you that in July," said Elizabeth, "and I have not forgotten, and I have been saving up Derbyshire for you the whole autumn, and I shall write every week, and I shall be extremely dull about it, and you will love it."

"Yes," said Mary Bennet. "I shall."

She carried the box out and up the stairs to sit with her father, who was awake, and who liked her to read to him now, which he had never done in his life; and Elizabeth heard, through the floor a few minutes later, the small even sound of her sister's voice going steadily on, reading something out, in a house where the light was going.

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Lieutenant Denny had been eleven weeks at Longbourn, or rather at the Philipses' in Meryton, from which he walked out to Longbourn every day and had long since stopped pretending it was for any other reason.

His commission was gone. The letter had come in October: he was struck off, without a court, for absence; there was a paragraph about the leniency of not pursuing a charge of desertion in a time of no active service, which everyone understood to be Captain Harding's hand, reaching back from wherever the regiment now was to do the one thing he could still do for the man. Denny had read it twice and folded it and said that it was better than he had expected, and had not spoken of it again.

He had a little money of his own, a hundred and thirty a year, from a grandmother; it was the whole of his prospects, and it was enough to be poor on and not enough to marry on, and he knew it, and so did Mary, and neither of them had said a word about any of that either.

She found him on the Saturday in the churchyard, which was where he was to be found most mornings now, walking the wall with his hand on the stone, doing out of habit the thing he had been trained to do and no longer had any standing to do anywhere.