Page 149 of Hard Home

Papa was in the library today and quite himselfmeant a good day, and Elizabeth came to live for that sentence and to be cast down for a week when it did not appear.

Mr. Jones came againmeant a bad one.

Mrs. Bennet wrote once, a triumphant letter about the wedding clothes and the county's admiration and a Mrs. Robinson who had said something, which Elizabeth read twice and put away and was, unexpectedly, glad of, because a letter like that from her mother meant that at Longbourn the front rooms were still the front rooms, and life was still going on in them, and somebody was still indignant about Mrs. Robinson, and that was its own kind of report.

And Mary wrote.

Mary wrote every week, on the Sunday, in her small exact hand, and her letters were unlike anybody's in the world, and Elizabeth kept every one.

They were, on the surface, the dullest letters ever written. They contained the measurement — always the measurement,first, in the first line, with the day and the hour:Sunday, half past six. Nine yards inside the wall at the north-east. No change.And then they contained the note —the note is as it was; stronger in the mornings; very faint the night of the 3rd, when papa slept badly and Mr. Jones gave him something— and then they contained a page, or two, of what she was learning.

For Mary had begun her study, and she wrote it to Elizabeth as she went, because Elizabeth had asked her to and because, she said, writing it to somebody made her think it through properly instead of merely feeling it.

I can feel the ward on the church now,she wrote in December.Denny has been teaching me and it took six weeks. It is not like hearing the note. The note is a thing that is there whether I attend to it or not, like a clock; the ward is a thing I have to reach for, and put my hand on the stone, and go quiet, and then it is there, like the warmth off a wall in the sun. It is very faint and very old and it does not want mending, and I understand now what everyone has meant for a year when they said this county is wrong, because a ward this old ought to be threadbare and this one is not, it is whole, and that is because it has never once had to work, because the thing it would have kept out has been kept elsewhere, underneath, by the other thing, the whole time.

I am learning to tell them apart with my eyes shut,she wrote in January.The ward, and the note, and the pale ground, which has a third feeling, which is not a sound and not a warmth but an absence, a place where my hand expects something and there is nothing. Denny says that is the important one and the one that will save my life if I ever do this, because a person holding a ward has to be able to feel the edge of the bad ground in the dark, and most who are lost are lost because they stepped wrong.

Papa likes me to read to him,she wrote, at the end of a January letter, in a different ink, plainly added later.We have done the whole of Cowper and are on the Rambler, which he pretends to despise and will not let me skip a line of. He does not talk about any of it. But yesterday he said, out of nothing, that he was glad I had not gone away with the rest of you, and then he said that it was a selfish thing to be glad of and that I was to go the moment there was no reason to stay, and then he said he did not mean that either, and then he asked me to go on reading. I did not know what to write to you about that so I have written all of it.

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Elizabeth read that last one standing at the window of her own morning-room at Pemberley, with the snow on the hills, and then she went and found her husband and gave it to him to read, which she did with all of Mary's letters that touched the ground, because they had agreed at the start that there should be nothing kept flat between the two of them, ever, on any subject, whatever it cost; it was the first article of their marriage and they had both meant it and it was harder than either had expected and they kept it.

Darcy read it twice.

"She is doing in one winter," he said, "what a warding recruit does in three years, and she is doing it alone in a churchyard in the dark with no master but a cashiered lieutenant, and she is nineteen."

"Twenty in March."

"Twenty in March." He gave the letter back. "Lizzy. I am going to say a thing and I want you to hear the whole of it before you answer, because it is not the thing it will sound like at the start.

"I think she is going to be able to do it."

Elizabeth sat down.

"I did not think so in the autumn," said Darcy. "In the autumn I thought it was a brave notion of a girl who had found a use for herself at last, and that when it came to it the blood would not answer, because the blood is the part everyone has always been sure of. I have been reading her letters all winter and I no longer think that. I think she was right in the library in November and everyone was too frightened to follow her: that the oath does not want blood so much as it wantsundertaking, and that undertaking is her whole gift, and that she is the second door, and that it was standing open the whole time and nobody looked at it because it was shaped like Mary."

"Then—"

"Then when your father dies," said Darcy, "she will be able to take it up. Which means it will be a real choice, and not a tragedy that happens to her. She will stand in that churchyard as a woman who can do the thing, and decide whether to spend her life on it, and there will be no one able to tell her she cannot and no one able to tell her she must, and it will be the loneliest choice anybody in this family has ever made, and it will be entirely hers.

"And I have thought about it a great deal, and I do not know what I hope she chooses, and I have decided that not knowing is the correct state to be in, and that any man who was sure what she ought to do would be exactly the kind of man who has wrecked something every time he appears in this story."

Elizabeth was quiet for a while.

"She will choose to do it," she said.

"You cannot know that."

"I have known her for twenty years and I have watched her since October and I know exactly what she is now, which I did not for the first nineteen." Elizabeth looked out at the snow. "She will do it. Not out of grief, and not out of duty, and not because anybody asks her — she has arranged her whole winter precisely so that it will not be any of those. She will do it because she hasspent her entire life being the person nobody needed, and she has found the one thing in the world that only she can do, and she will not be able to walk away from beingnecessary. It is the deepest thing in her. It is deeper than fear.

"And the terrible part," said Elizabeth, "is that that is not a bad reason. It is not a noble reason and it is not a reason anybody would put in a sermon, but it is a true one, and it is hers, and it is better than being spared."

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Word came in February that Lady Catherine de Bourgh had begun.

It came sideways, through Charlotte, who wrote to Elizabeth now with a frankness that their new connection had unlocked — for Elizabeth was her Ladyship's niece by marriage, and there was a savage comedy in that which both women enjoyed and neither mentioned to Mr. Collins. Lady Catherine had, Charlotte wrote, opened a correspondence with three families in the eastern counties; had had a surveyor at Rosings for a fortnight; had ordered old papers up from a muniment room and had a man from the Society reading them; and had said, at dinner, apropos of nothing, that she supposed she should have to do the whole of it herself, as she had always had to do everything herself, and that it would take fifteen years and she did not expect to be thanked.