Chapter Two — The Blue Room
For a moment, the music swelled. But not at the crescendo of the piece, merely when the door was opened.
And then closed. Georgiana Darcy's playing returned, through wood and distance, to its pattern of small bright pressures: one note, another, a place where the hand hesitated, a phrase taken up with care. Lady Catherine's voice followed, lower and firmer, carrying even where the instrument did not.
Anne sat where she had been placed, listening.
The fire was too high. It had been too high from the moment she sat down, though it was not too high in any way that could be reported.
Mrs. Darcy came in from the music room. Dark hair, quick step, the midday light catching at the new brightness of her consequence.
"Lady Catherine has asked that you be allowed to rest before dinner," she said. "I thought you might like to see your room now, if you are not too fatigued."
Mrs. Jenkinson rose at once. "Miss de Bourgh has had a long journey. Perhaps it would be better if the room were warmed further first. And the trunks — I should like to see that the warm gowns are laid out. She is very easily tired by stairs after traveling."
Mrs. Darcy turned her head to Anne.
Not to Mrs. Jenkinson. Not to the fire. Not to the symptoms that had already been introduced on her behalf.
To Anne.
The fire pressed at Anne's face. Her mother's voice was nearer now, perhaps instructing Darcy. The chair had begun to hold her.
"I will go now," she said.
Mrs. Jenkinson's gaze flew to Mrs. Darcy, as if the answer required translation before it could be acted upon. But before she could speak, Mrs. Darcy inclined her head.
"Very well."
Anne stood, carefully graceful. Movement, when observed, became evidence. A hand too slow to leave the chair meant weakness. A step too quick meant imprudence. A hesitation meant fatigue, and fatigue meant shawls, screens, chairs by the fire, and mother's voice entering the room.
Mrs. Jenkinson reached for her arm. Anne moved past her.
After a deliberate progress up the stairs, Mrs. Darcy opened a door and stepped inside.
"We call this the blue room."
Anne paused on the threshold.
The room had space in it.
That was its first recommendation.
Pale blue hangings softened the walls without closing them in. A sober rug held the center of the room. The bed stood ready, neat but not too formal. A small fire had been laid and not yet lighted; its restraint pleased Anne before she had time to forbid herself the word. Near the window stood a writing table, placed not for display but for use, where the morning light would fall. Beyond the glass, the ground rose gently, edged dark with trees.
The air came cooler than the drawing room.
Not cold. Cool.
Mrs. Jenkinson crossed at once to the hearth. "The fire is not lit."
"Mrs. Reynolds thought the room might be fresher if we waited until Miss de Bourgh came up," Mrs. Darcy said. "It can be lit at once."
"It should be lit at once." Mrs. Jenkinson's voice had the softness that made contradiction sound like a duty reluctantly performed — an oboe wrapped in wool, always ready to bend around another person's discomfort before that discomfort had chosen a name. "Miss de Bourgh must not sit in an unwarmed room after such a journey."
Anne did not intend to speak.
"No," she said.
Both women turned.
Mrs. Jenkinson recovered first. "My dear, you are chilled from traveling. You may not feel it immediately, but if the fire is delayed—"
"No," Anne said again.
Mrs. Darcy waited.
"I mean," Anne said, and stopped because two words had already become too many.
Mrs. Jenkinson's face softened into a triumph of concern. "You see, Mrs. Darcy, she is tired."
That was not accurate.
Anne had been tired since long before the journey. Tired was not the same as unable.
Mrs. Darcy's eyes remained on Anne. "Do you mean you do not wish the fire lit yet?"
Anne looked at the grate. The coals waited with all the patience of things that had no opinion about her constitution.
"Not yet."
"Very well," Mrs. Darcy said.
Mrs. Jenkinson made a small distressed sound. "But Lady Catherine particularly—"
"Lady Catherine particularly asked that Miss de Bourgh not be made uncomfortable," Mrs. Darcy replied. "At present, Miss de Bourgh is not asking for the fire."
Mrs. Darcy's voice was warm. That was the difficulty. Warmth usually preceded management: a shawl pressed upon one's shoulders, a screen brought closer, a cup urged into the hand. But Mrs. Darcy's warmth did not arrive in that fashion. It came quickly, with confidence, and then stopped where it had been answered.
Mrs. Jenkinson looked from one to the other. Her hands found the strings of the reticule and worried them once. "Of course. If Miss de Bourgh prefers. But the rose room is warmer by nature. Smaller, too, and therefore easier to manage. I believe her ladyship thought—"
"Lady Catherine thought the rose room might be used?"
"Indeed. I believe she mentioned it in her letter. The second one, or third. Miss de Bourgh has been accustomed to rooms where every convenience is near at hand. It's been her room before — very comfortable, and the curtains draw close, which is so important where there may be morning light. Miss de Bourgh's eyes are often affected by too much light. Or too little, if she strains them. And the chamber is nearer mine."
Comfortable.
Familiar.
Curtains drawn.
Nearer.
Rosings had many such rooms.
"I stayed here when I first came to Pemberley," Mrs. Darcy said. She turned to smile at the bed and touch one of the hangings. "I came to like it very much. It has the morning light, and a better fire, and it is a little airier than the rose room."
She turned back to Anne.
"I thought you might prefer it."
Mrs. Jenkinson answered first. "But if you find it too open, my dear, or too cool, or if the light should be troublesome in the morning, we can very easily—"
"No."
A wind tapped the window frame.
"No," Anne said. Her throat was dry. "I will stay here."
Mrs. Darcy said, "Very well."
Mrs. Jenkinson gathered herself at once. "We should have a tray brought up. She will need broth, if there is any ready, and a little white bread, not too thickly cut. The tea must not be strong. And there should be a footstool — not the high one, if it causes pressure behind the knee—"
"We will find the right one," Mrs. Darcy said.
Anne heard the phrase and marked it.
Not the one your mother prescribed.
Not the one Mrs. Jenkinson knows you require.
The right one.
Mrs. Jenkinson was already moving toward the door. Mrs. Darcy turned back to Anne.
"I will leave you to take possession," she said. "If anything is wanting, you have only to ring."
Anne inclined her head.
Then they were gone, the door closing with a click.
Anne was alone.
For several seconds she did nothing at all.
At Rosings, a room that might seem empty filled at once with instructions: the chair where she was meant to sit; the window that would not open because her mother disliked drafts; the bell she was expected to use before she wanted anything, lest wanting become visible too late.
The blue room did not fill. It waited.
She took one breath.
Then another.
The air had a different weight here. It had space between its contents. It did not sit on the tongue. It did not come with the stale green smell of closed hangings, nor with the sourness that sometimes lived at the back of Rosings' north rooms after rain and was explained away as age, consequence, or the necessary dignity of old walls.
Anne walked to the writing table.
The inkstand stood half an inch left of the place where most people would have put it. Mrs. Darcy, perhaps. There was something about that small alteration that made Anne trust the table more. It had been touched by a hand thinking of use rather than symmetry.
She put her fingers on the chair back.
No one entered.
She crossed to the bed. On the small table beside it stood a candle, a glass, and nothing medicinal.
Anne looked at that absence for some time.
Then she went to the clothes-press.
The doors opened smoothly, without the swollen resistance of damp wood. Inside, Pemberley's efficiency had already distributed her garments into order. Gowns hung in a neat line. Gloves, caps, ribbons, and handkerchiefs had been given places in the same order as at home.
One drawer had been given over entirely to shawls.
Anne drew it out and looked down.
Rosings had followed her in wool, silk, and cashmere.
The gray shawl for carriage damp. The cream shawl for evening chill. The embroidered one her mother thought sufficiently elegant. The softer one Mrs. Jenkinson preferred when Anne had a headache. The heavier one that made breathing difficult if wrapped too high, and two more whose only purpose, so far as Anne had ever determined, was to prove that Lady Catherine's daughter's chills could be prevented in seven different textures.
Her gowns were proper. So proper. Silks for sitting where she had been put, muslins too fine for any weather, morning dresses chosen for a life in which morning was a thing to be endured near a fire.
At least she would be warm enough.
She closed the drawer.
The window drew her next.
She did not go to it at once. She walked first to the dressing table, touched the smooth lid of a small box, lifted it, found nothing in it, and set it down again. She went to the hearth and looked at the unlit fire. She returned to the writing table and moved the chair a little, then put it back because it had already been right.
Only then did she cross to the window.
The casement was shut.
Of course it was shut. It was late autumn; she had just arrived from a journey; Pemberley was not a house of lunatics. But the frame did not meet the sill perfectly. A narrow seam of air entered where the lower edge had settled unevenly with age. Not a draft. A draft was an accusation. A thread.
Anne placed her hand before it.
The air touched her palm. Cool, fine, hardly there. It carried wet leaves and cold earth and something she could not name — only that it did not smell of rooms.
There was no need to open the window. Opening it would be a decision with consequences: Mrs. Jenkinson's cry, a maid sent for, Lady Catherine informed, a fire lit too high in correction, the entire apparatus of care set in motion by one latch.
Her fingers found the crack between sill and frame.
Coolness gathered there. The ache behind her eyes did not vanish. Her breath did not become easy. She did not bloom like a ridiculous flower in a moral tale for young ladies.
But the room had not argued with her.
The window, imperfectly fitted, had not been corrected. The air came because there was a way for it to come.
Behind her, in the corridor, a board answered weight.
Anne's hand dropped. She turned from the window and sat down at the writing table, as though she had been sitting there for some time.
The steps approached, paused, and came on more softly. Mrs. Jenkinson. Anne knew it as one knows weather one has lived under for many years: the slight hurry contained inside propriety, the hesitation before a door, the care already gathering itself into usefulness.
The handle turned.
Chapter Three — First Dinner
The dining room had been prepared with great care, all of it directed at the appearance of no care whatsoever. Elizabeth had overseen this effort herself and was not entirely sure it had worked.
The table shone with all the mild splendor appropriate to a first family dinner: enough silver to satisfy consequence, not enough to look anxious; dishes arranged with that particular abundance which is only successful when it appears inevitable; candles placed to flatter the company without blinding it; flowers low enough not to interrupt conversation and not so pretty as to suggest Elizabeth had tried to charm a woman who would rather have inspected the stems.
Everything had been done.
This, Elizabeth had discovered, was the dangerous part of being mistress of a great house. At Longbourn, disorder was an old resident and could be blamed for almost anything. At Pemberley, where the soup arrived hot, the servants moved without haste, and every chair seemed to have been waiting all its life for the person now approaching it, any defect must either be invented or belong to her.
Lady Catherine likely was equal to both alternatives.
The room was high and dark-paneled, warm with candles and the faint smell of beeswax. The tall windows had already begun to lose the evening.
Darcy stood at the head of the table, grave and proper, with the look of a man who had inherited not only land and duties, but the obligation to receive his aunt at dinner without permitting his wife to enjoy the spectacle too much. Lady Catherine was placed at his right hand. Miss de Bourgh, after a hesitation so small that only a hostess new enough to notice everything could have marked it, was seated at his left. Mrs. Jenkinson took the chair below her, already arranging herself toward Miss de Bourgh rather than toward the table. Georgiana and Kitty were nearer Elizabeth, and Mrs. Annesley, placed opposite Mrs. Jenkinson, sat with the composed usefulness of a woman who could see without seeming to observe.
The arrangement was correct. Elizabeth knew it was correct because she had considered it for twelve minutes and Mrs. Reynolds had approved it in six words, which was nearly enthusiasm.
Lady Catherine surveyed the table, her mouth already prepared to find it wanting.
She did not look long. A long look would have implied uncertainty. Lady Catherine's glance moved from dish to dish with the brisk authority of a general reviewing troops who, though properly dressed, could not be trusted to understand the campaign.
"The table is tolerably well covered," she said.
Elizabeth inclined her head. "I am glad it pleases you."
"I did not say it pleased me."
Darcy's eyes moved once to the foot of the table and away again. His mouth did nothing at all. This, Elizabeth had learned, was often where the smile was kept.
Lady Catherine took up her soup spoon. "A table ought to be covered, not crowded. There is a distinction. Many young women, on first coming into houses of consequence, suppose abundance to be the same thing as arrangement."
"I am fortunate in having Pemberley's habits older than my opinions," Elizabeth said.
"A house's habits are not always its safeguards. Old servants, like old rooms, may require direction."
Mrs. Reynolds was not in the room to hear herself described as a possible architectural defect, which Elizabeth considered one of Providence's more merciful arrangements.
"The direction of old servants," Darcy said, "is most useful when it begins by understanding what they already do well."
Lady Catherine looked at him. "You were always too satisfied with Pemberley."
"I have had a great many opportunities to improve it."
"Hm." Not assent, but a sound Lady Catherine used when facts had presented themselves in an inconvenient order.
Dinner proceeded.
The first course was served with the quiet competence of a house in which every person understood that a dish must be offered before it was wanted and removed before it was regretted. Lady Catherine found the fish placed a little too far from Darcy, the sauce more richly made than she preferred at Rosings, and the footman at Elizabeth's left either too tall for the station or insufficiently conscious of being tall. She did not say this last aloud, but she looked it with such precision that Elizabeth, catching sight of the poor man's ears reddening, very nearly admired her.
Miss de Bourgh ate little. This could not be counted a discovery; Mrs. Jenkinson had watched the plate from the instant it was set before her, and Lady Catherine had already declared, before the soup, that Anne never ate heavily after travel. The declaration seemed to satisfy everyone else. It did not satisfy Elizabeth, though she could not have said why. Miss de Bourgh's smallness at table did not look like a lady indulged in delicacy. It looked like a person for whom every mouthful had been made public.
"Not that dish, my dear," Mrs. Jenkinson murmured when the footman approached. "It is a little too highly seasoned. Perhaps the white meat. Only a very little. Miss de Bourgh does not take much in the evening."
Miss de Bourgh's eyes did not lift.
The footman who had been reaching dishes for the ladies looked to Mrs. Jenkinson, then to Miss de Bourgh, and then, because he had been trained in a house where the wishes of guests were to be discovered without a public trial, to Elizabeth.
Elizabeth said, "Of course, Miss de Bourgh may choose what she likes." A small sentence, meant to be nothing more than hostessly ease.
The corner of Miss de Bourgh's mouth moved, once.
Lady Catherine said, "Anne does not always know what will agree with her. Mrs. Jenkinson has had the charge of her health many years."
Mrs. Jenkinson softened into gratitude and anxiety at once. "Indeed, my lady, I only mean to prevent any discomfort."
Miss de Bourgh said nothing.
The footman waited.
Elizabeth became aware, with some surprise, that she had presented the room with a difficulty. Not a great difficulty. No one was angry. No one had raised a voice. The sauce stood patiently between health, preference, rank, and poultry.
Darcy's attention was on his aunt; Lady Catherine's on Elizabeth; Mrs. Jenkinson's on Miss de Bourgh; Miss de Bourgh's on the table. Georgiana had gone very still. Kitty looked at her plate with an air of passionate interest in potatoes.
Elizabeth smiled.
"Then perhaps the plain portion first," she said, "and Miss de Bourgh may tell us if she wishes for anything else."
It was not victory. It was not defeat. It was sauce.
The footman served the plain portion. Miss de Bourgh took up her fork.
Mrs. Annesley, across the table from Mrs. Jenkinson, remained the picture of calm. But her eyes, when Elizabeth glanced that way, were on Miss de Bourgh's plate for half a second and then on Elizabeth.
Only half a second.
Enough.
Elizabeth returned to her own dinner with the uncomfortable sensation of having put her foot upon the edge of something covered.
Lady Catherine, having allowed the food to pass through its lesser trials, turned next to the household.
"The room is not much altered since I was last here," she said.
"Very little," Darcy replied.
"Your father had judgment in rooms."
"Yes."
"He did not permit fashion to disorder what was already handsome."
"No."
"And yet young people are always for contrivance. A table moved here, a screen there, a lamp where no lamp is required, a passage made inconvenient in the name of convenience. Mrs. Darcy, I hope you have not begun moving Pemberley about merely to prove that you may."
Elizabeth set down her glass. "I have moved very little."
"That is wise."
"Only the small table in the morning room, two chairs in the blue room, and one inkstand."
Kitty made a small sound which might have been a cough and might have been admiration.
Lady Catherine's eyes sharpened. "An inkstand?"
"The light was better half an inch to the left."
Darcy looked down at his plate.
Lady Catherine considered this answer. "Half an inch may be the beginning of a great deal."
"I shall proceed by fractions."
"Do not be pert, Mrs. Darcy."
"No, Lady Catherine."
It was perhaps not the answer Lady Catherine wanted. It was certainly the answer Elizabeth's father would have enjoyed, which made it necessary for her to take a spoonful of soup and think of something else.
The something else was Kitty. Who had been astonishingly silent.
This was not, in itself, a defect. Elizabeth had often wished for such a quality in her younger sister and had once believed that if Kitty could be brought to silence for half an hour, the peace of Europe might be secured by the same method. But this silence was not Kitty's ordinary surrender to boredom, nor her old sulky imitation of Lydia's displeasure. It was alert, effortful, almost heroic. She sat with her shoulders set, her hands in her lap, and her face arranged in a careful expression of modest stupidity which did her more credit than many intelligent speeches would have done.
Still, Lady Catherine noticed her.
"Miss Catherine Bennet," she said. "How are your mornings employed at Pemberley?"
Kitty's lips parted.
Elizabeth could see the answer assembling itself. Music, walking, reading, Georgiana, Mrs. Annesley, perhaps even the new ribbon Elizabeth had promised could be altered for her blue frock. Every word Kitty had not spoken for twenty minutes crowded toward freedom.
Then Kitty's eyes moved.
Not to Elizabeth. Not to Georgiana.
To Mrs. Annesley.
Mrs. Annesley's expression did not change. She only looked back at Kitty with perfect calm, as if silence were a room and she had already opened the door.
Kitty's mouth closed.
Elizabeth had never been prouder of her sister in her life.
Lady Catherine waited. Kitty, by some miracle of Providence, terror, and excellent instruction, remained silent.
Georgiana spoke.
"Miss Bennet practices in the mornings, ma'am."
Lady Catherine turned to her. "Practices what?"
"The harp."
"The harp." Lady Catherine made the instrument sound less like an accomplishment than a form of imprudence.
Georgiana's voice, when she answered, was soft, but did not fail. "Yes, ma'am. I have been showing her the first exercises."
"You?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"A little instruction is often worse than none, where there is no method."
Georgiana's chin lifted.
Darcy's gaze moved to his sister. He did not lean forward; he did not raise his voice; he did not rescue his sister in any way that could be called rescue. But his whole attention gathered. It was rather like watching a door close quietly against weather.
"Georgiana has been diligent in her own studies," he said. "I do not doubt her ability to guide a beginner in the first principles."
"Brotherly partiality is an amiable error. It is not a system of education."
"No," Darcy said. "But neither is suspicion."
There was a pause.
Georgiana's eyes darted to Elizabeth — quick, anxious, almost apologetic, but not defeated.
Elizabeth smiled at her.
Not too much. Too much encouragement in Lady Catherine's presence might become another accusation. Only enough to say, Yes. That was well done.
Georgiana's shoulders eased by the smallest degree.
Lady Catherine had not finished.
"Girls are never improved by having their hands idle, Mrs. Darcy," she said. "If they are not practicing, they should be reading; if they are not reading, they should be working. Conversation is very well when it follows usefulness."
"The principle is an excellent one," Elizabeth said. "It must explain why Mr. Collins reads so much aloud."
Darcy's hand, near his glass, stilled.
Kitty looked at her plate, trying to hold her face still. Mrs. Annesley's eyes lowered, but not quite in time.
Lady Catherine stared. "Mr. Collins is a clergyman."
"Yes. That is why I am sure his usefulness is very great."
This answer did not improve matters. Elizabeth had known it would not improve matters when she began it. There were times when prudence, finding itself outnumbered by provocation and soup, retired from the field.
Lady Catherine drew herself up. "Mr. Collins has a proper respect for improvement. He understands the value of regular application. Young women are too often allowed to suppose that a taste for an accomplishment is the same thing as the discipline required to acquire it."
"Kitty is applying herself," Georgiana said.
It was a tiny sentence, and it would have been nothing in another voice. In Georgiana's, it was nearly a declaration.
Darcy looked at his sister with surprise so warm and quickly hidden that Elizabeth felt it on his behalf.
Lady Catherine looked less touched. "Miss Bennet is fortunate in her friends."
Kitty's eyes remained on her plate. Her cheeks had gone pink.
"She is," Elizabeth said. The words came out before she had decided whether they were wise.
"Friendship, Mrs. Darcy, is an agreeable word. It is not always a useful one. Young women require direction."
"Sometimes," Elizabeth said.
"Always, where they are young."
"Then we must be grateful that none of us will be young forever."
Lady Catherine did not smile.
Miss de Bourgh did not smile either. But Elizabeth saw, or thought she saw, something alter about the stillness of her mouth.
Not amusement. That would have been too easy.
Recognition, perhaps.
Or only fatigue.
Elizabeth was beginning to distrust the word.
The second course replaced the first. Dishes were removed; others took their place. The servants moved like parts of a machine designed to conceal the fact that people were making it work. The room warmed by degrees. The candles brightened.
Outside the windows, where the curtains had not yet been fully drawn, the last color of evening had vanished, leaving only black glass and the reflected company: Lady Catherine, tall in judgment; Darcy's back, grave; Georgiana, pale and intent; Kitty, heroic; Mrs. Annesley, composed; Mrs. Jenkinson, forever bent slightly toward Anne.
Anne.
Elizabeth found herself looking at Miss de Bourgh more often than courtesy required.
At Rosings, she had hardly looked at her except as one looked at a fact in Lady Catherine's possession. Miss de Bourgh had been there, always there, pale and small beside her mother, the daughter who would have been a delightful performer, the heiress who had been intended for Darcy, the silent consequence by which Elizabeth had once been measured and found inadmissible. It had been easy — too easy — to mistake the silence for vacancy, the pallor for insignificance, the stillness for want of any strong preference.
But that afternoon Miss de Bourgh had said no.
Only no. Twice. Quietly. Not with boldness. Not with any of the spirit Elizabeth would once have admired most readily. But she had said it, and Mrs. Darcy — new, uncertain, and perhaps too pleased with herself for noticing — had obeyed.
Now, at dinner, Miss de Bourgh sat beside Darcy and seemed again to be disappearing into all that was said about her.
Lady Catherine's gaze followed Elizabeth's.
"Anne would have been a delightful performer," she said, "had her health allowed her to learn."
The sentence was so familiar that for one instant Elizabeth was back at Rosings: Lady Catherine calling across the room while Elizabeth sat at the instrument, explaining taste, practice, and Anne's lost excellence with the perfect satisfaction of a woman who had turned disappointment into a compliment to herself.
Then she was back at Pemberley again.
Georgiana had just held her ground. And Anne sat at the table while her mother placed her whole unlived accomplishment before the company like another dish.
"She had all the taste that could be wished," Lady Catherine continued. "None of the strength. It is a great pity. But health cannot be commanded, even where every proper attention has been paid."
Mrs. Jenkinson stirred, though no one had asked for anything.
Miss de Bourgh's face did not change.
No flush, no protest, no visible pain. Not even the small tightening that might have given a witness permission to be indignant on her behalf. Miss de Bourgh listened to her mother speak of what she would have been and looked as if she had heard a chair described, or the weather, or a road that had never been repaired and never would be.
Perhaps she did not mind.
Perhaps she had long ago ceased to mind.
Elizabeth did not know which possibility troubled her more.
Darcy was still watching Georgiana with that grave, suppressed tenderness he believed he concealed. He had heard Lady Catherine's sentence. Of course he had. He could not have failed to hear it. Yet it had not struck him as it struck Elizabeth now. His attention did not turn to Anne.
But then, he had heard it all his life.
Anne would have been.
Anne could not.
Anne was better where she was.
Old family weather.
A person who had been rained upon since childhood might not remark the sound on the roof.
Elizabeth heard it.
The dinner moved on. Lady Catherine spoke of Rosings' music room, of a young lady she had once heard play with admirable steadiness and no expression worth mentioning, of the dangers of allowing feeling to outrun execution. Georgiana answered where she must. Kitty did not. Darcy attended to the edges of Lady Catherine's criticism whenever they approached his sister. Mrs. Annesley kept her peace.
Anne ate almost nothing.
When at last the dishes had been removed and the conversation began to loosen toward the inevitable separation of the ladies, Elizabeth made her mistake.
She knew afterward that it was a mistake. At the moment, it wore all the features of kindness.
Lady Catherine had returned, with undiminished interest, to the subject of the harp.
"If Miss Bennet is to continue, there must be regularity. A quarter of an hour when she remembers it will not do. Georgiana, you must not allow fondness to make you careless. Girls are very apt to praise one another into indolence."
"Kitty has not been indolent," Georgiana said, so quietly that it was almost lost under the movement of a servant.
Lady Catherine heard it. "Then she may prove it after dinner."
Kitty looked as if she had been offered a great honor and a great punishment in the same sentence.
Elizabeth saw Georgiana's courage stretched nearly as far as it could go, and Anne still and pale beyond Mrs. Jenkinson's anxious shoulder, and had one clear, generous thought: the evening need not belong entirely to Lady Catherine.
There were other ways for young women to be together. Not inspected. Not paraded. Not examined for consequence or usefulness. Georgiana and Kitty had found it already in small measures — the harp, the worktable, walks too short to become exercise and too aimless to become improving, the sort of conversation that did not require brilliance because it was not being weighed.
Perhaps Anne might have that too.
Perhaps that was what Pemberley could give.
"If Miss de Bourgh is not too tired," Elizabeth said, "perhaps the younger ladies might sit together a little after dinner. Georgiana could show Kitty the passage she has been practicing, and Miss de Bourgh might find it a quieter amusement than cards."
It sounded, to Elizabeth's own ear, considerate. Not too pressing. Not too lively. No demand that Miss de Bourgh perform, or talk, or be cheerful. Only an opening. A place among them.
Miss de Bourgh looked at her.
The look was direct enough to make Elizabeth feel, for a second, that she had been addressed.
"I had rather be quiet," Miss de Bourgh said.
The words were low. They did not travel far, but the table heard them because the table had already learned, in ways Elizabeth was only beginning to understand, to pause when Miss de Bourgh spoke — not to receive the answer, but to wait for its correction.
Lady Catherine put down her glass.
"There, Mrs. Darcy. Anne is fatigued. She never bears much company after a journey."
Mrs. Jenkinson leaned toward Miss de Bourgh with visible relief at having the matter named. "Indeed, my lady, it is safest not to try her. A little quiet above stairs will be best. Miss de Bourgh often feels the effects of travel more in the evening, whether she is sensible of it at once or not."
"I am sensible of it," Miss de Bourgh said.
Mrs. Jenkinson patted the air near her sleeve, not quite touching her. "Yes, my dear, of course."
But that had not been what Miss de Bourgh meant.
Elizabeth knew it with a certainty so sudden that she almost answered. She almost said, Miss de Bourgh asked for quiet, not management.
She almost said Anne's name, though she had no right to it.
Then she saw Mrs. Annesley.
Mrs. Annesley was not looking at Anne. She was not looking at Lady Catherine. She was looking at Elizabeth.
Only attention. The same calm with which she had restrained Kitty: a composure that did not command, but made a person aware of the choice before them.
Elizabeth felt the whole table at once.
Lady Catherine, ready to be opposed and eager to call opposition impropriety. Mrs. Jenkinson, anxious and loyal to the only system by which she knew how to care. Darcy, still alert to Georgiana, only now turning toward the other end of the conversation. Georgiana and Kitty, both subdued by the effort of surviving dinner. Miss de Bourgh, who had asked for quiet and now sat inside an explanation of why she must have it.
If Elizabeth fought here, Anne would become the subject of a scene.
If she yielded, Anne's answer would be swallowed.
There were choices, Elizabeth was learning, in which every road began badly.
She turned back to Lady Catherine.
"Of course," she said. "You are right."
Lady Catherine accepted this as her due. "Mrs. Jenkinson will know what is proper."
Mrs. Jenkinson bowed her head. "Yes, my lady."
Miss de Bourgh did not move.
That was dinner.
Or rather, that was the part of dinner Elizabeth would remember later, though other things still occurred. Lady Catherine asked whether the drawing room fire had been kept up. Darcy replied. Georgiana was spared immediate performance because Lady Catherine preferred to hear the harp after tea and with full attention. Kitty endured the reprieve with the gratitude of a criminal whose sentence had been postponed. A servant came; a chair shifted; candles were adjusted; the old forms resumed themselves with such smoothness that Elizabeth might have believed nothing had happened if she had not felt Mrs. Annesley's glance somehow still on her.
At last Lady Catherine rose.
The ladies rose with her.
It was done as everything at Pemberley was done: properly, quietly, without confusion. Darcy came around his chair. Elizabeth moved from the foot of the table. Georgiana joined Kitty. Mrs. Annesley gathered her gloves. Lady Catherine accepted the opening of the door as if doors, like nephews, existed to recognize precedence.
For one moment the company divided in the ordinary way.
Lady Catherine proceeded toward the drawing room.
Georgiana and Kitty followed, Kitty with her hands folded and her face still arranged into that astonishing silence. Mrs. Annesley walked near them. Elizabeth turned with them too, because she was hostess, because Lady Catherine must be attended, because the drawing room fire had indeed been kept up, because the harp stood waiting in the music room and the evening had not yet released anyone.
Miss de Bourgh did not turn that way.
Mrs. Jenkinson was already beside her. A shawl had appeared; Elizabeth had not seen from where. The stairs waited across the hall, broad and shallow and perfectly lit.
Miss de Bourgh went toward them.
She did not look toward the drawing room, or the harp she would have played had her health allowed it, or Georgiana and Kitty moving together into the young-women's evening Elizabeth had imagined for her.
She looked as if none of it had surprised her.
Mrs. Jenkinson murmured something Elizabeth could not hear. Miss de Bourgh inclined her head. Together they began to ascend.
Lady Catherine's voice sounded from the drawing room.
"Mrs. Darcy?"
Elizabeth turned.
Behind her, on the stairs, Miss de Bourgh made no sound at all.
Chapter Four — A Better Night
Anne woke, and found she was alone.
That was the first oddity.
At Rosings, waking was not a private act. It belonged to curtains, fires, footsteps, Mrs. Jenkinson's soft entrance, the question of whether the night had been tolerable, the still more important question of whether it had been tolerable in the correct way, and her mother's eventual report upon the whole. A bad night proved one thing. A good night proved another. Neither belonged entirely to Anne.
But here, for several minutes, there was only the room.
The blue bed curtains held the morning light without brightening. The fire was low, but not dead. A gray shawl had been laid over the chair beside the hearth. A pale line of light lay across the sober rug, stopping just before the bed as if it had been instructed not to advance too far. Somewhere beyond the window, rainwater dropped from a branch at intervals: one sound, then another, then enough silence between them for the mind to set them in order.
Anne did not move.
She had slept.
She had not lain tracing the crack above the wardrobe at Rosings — the one that began near the cornice and wandered, after years of steady growth, almost to the window. She had not counted the pulse behind her eyes until it became the only thing in the room.
She had slept. Not well. Well was a word other people carried downstairs and used. But she had slept better. She lay still and examined the fact as she would have examined a strange insect under glass, had anyone ever permitted her to have strange insects under glass. The fact had legs. It moved if approached too quickly.
Her head was not clear, precisely. But the pressure had edges this morning. It did not fill the whole skull. Thoughts could pass around it.
There had been mornings at Rosings after a dry wind, or after two days spent mostly in the little south walk, or once, years ago, after her mother had gone to Tunbridge Wells for ten days and Jenkinson had forgotten to have the bedchamber fire built quite so high. Mornings when thought came more easily.
They had never been allowed to matter.
A breath in the corridor. A touch on the door handle.
Anne closed her eyes.
"My dear," Mrs. Jenkinson whispered. "Are you awake?"
Anne opened her eyes.
Mrs. Jenkinson hurried in with the expression of a person prepared to be useful in several directions at once. Behind her, a maid hovered with kindling and a coal-box, both held as if they were items in an argument not yet spoken.
"I did not like to disturb you earlier," Mrs. Jenkinson said. "You have had a very necessary rest."
Anne sat up. Her breaths, too, were easier than usual.
"The fire wants mending, I think, and I have asked whether a little breakfast might be sent up. Nothing heavy. Tea, weak, and a little white bread. Perhaps an egg, if you should feel equal to it later."
Anne pushed the bed curtain aside and looked toward the window.
Raining, October, dim.
"I will go down," she said.
Jenkinson's face changed by not changing. The maid looked at the coal-box.
"Down, my dear?"
"To breakfast."
"It is very early yet to try yourself. Or rather" — Jenkinson glanced toward the maid and lowered her voice further, which did not make the sentence less public — "not early, exactly; but early after such a journey, and after last evening. Lady Catherine particularly wished that you should not be hurried. I am sure Mrs. Darcy would not expect it."
Anne turned to set her feet on the floor.
The room shifted once, then settled. Not faintness. Only the ordinary correction of blood and air after lying still. At Rosings it would have been observed, named, and prevented next time by two pillows and a warmer fire.
"I slept," she said.
Jenkinson warmed at once. "Yes, my dear, I am very glad of it. That is why we must be careful. A heavy sleep after travel often leaves one more susceptible than before. You may not feel it at once."
"I feel it now."
The words were not loud. They did not need to be. The maid's eyes had dropped politely to the coal-box.
Jenkinson stood between the bed and the hearth, not moving. She drew a breath that did not become a sentence.
Anne stepped toward the clothes press.
Jenkinson's mouth drew together in anxious capitulation. "Very well," she said. "If you are determined. But the shawl, at least. The passages are often cooler in the morning, and after rain—"
Rain. So it had rained.
Anne looked again toward the window. The thread of air at the imperfect sill carried a fresh, clean scent: stone and wet grass. It was not the smell of Rosings after rain. No damp. No sourness.
"The cream, I think," Anne said.
Jenkinson blinked.
"The gray one is too warm."
For a moment nothing happened. Then Jenkinson went to the drawer.
The maid still held the coal-box.
"Not yet," Anne said to the fire.
Jenkinson turned back.
Anne had not meant to say it aloud. The room had made the sentence easy. That was dangerous in a different way.
"The fire is low," Mrs. Jenkinson said.
"Yes."
"My dear—"
"I am not cold."
Jenkinson looked at the maid, at the hearth, at Anne, and at last at the curtain, as if one of them might be persuaded to support her. None did. The maid, who had perhaps been better trained by Pemberley than by Rosings, waited without expression.
"At least," Mrs. Jenkinson said, "we shall wear the merino."
That, Anne thought, was not a victory.
It was also not nothing.
❦
The breakfast-room at Pemberley had nearly finished with breakfast by the time Anne reached it. This was useful. A room that had nearly finished with a thing required less from a person entering it.
Miss Darcy and Miss Bennet were at the door with Mrs. Annesley, their morning already gathered around them. Miss Darcy curtsied with shy exactness. Miss Bennet curtsied a moment later, less exactly, but with an expression of such strenuous propriety that Anne saw Mrs. Annesley's hand in it. That lady's curtsey was smaller than theirs and more complete.
No one spoke.
Anne liked them better for it.
They passed into the hall, carrying with them a suggestion of youth, toast, and plans that did not need to be announced in order to exist. The sound of Miss Bennet's step changed just beyond the door, quickening by half a beat before Mrs. Annesley's softer tread restored the pace.
As Anne entered, a spoon touched china near the fire.
Darcy was not there. His place at the table had been used and abandoned; a folded newspaper lay to one side. Lady Catherine sat near the fire with the air of a person who had not chosen the chair but had accepted its inferiority. Mrs. Darcy was at the table with a note in her hand and several more beside her; the household's questions had already begun.
A servant was taking away a used dish. Another stood near the urn.
Lady Catherine glanced up.
"Anne," she said. "You should not have come down merely to oblige others."
The old kindness had been placed over the truth like a cover over a dish.
Anne stopped beside the nearest chair.
"I did not," she said.
Mrs. Jenkinson moved at once. "Miss de Bourgh slept heavily, my lady. I thought a little breakfast upstairs would be most prudent, but she wished—"
"A heavy sleep after travel is often exhaustion," Lady Catherine said. "It is not improvement. I hope, Mrs. Darcy, that the blue room is not cold in the mornings."
Mrs. Darcy set down her note.
"It was comfortable when I looked in yesterday," she said. "But Miss de Bourgh will know better than I."
Her expression was pleasant. Not bright. Not expectant. Merely present, as if she had set a chair in the middle of a sentence and left it empty.
Lady Catherine said, "Anne is not always sensible of cold when she first feels it."
As Anne sat down, Jenkinson took up the lighter shawl and rearranged it over her shoulders. "It is only a precaution, my dear. The room is not unpleasant, but one feels these changes after traveling. Some weak tea will be best."
Mrs. Darcy turned toward the urn.
"Will you take tea, Miss de Bourgh?"
Jenkinson's hand was already extended toward the pot.
Anne watched the hand. Then she watched Mrs. Darcy, who had not moved.
"Tea," Anne said.
Jenkinson smiled. "Weak, my dear."
"No," Anne said.
The servant at the urn became exceptionally interested in the silver tongs.
Lady Catherine's brows rose.
Anne heard the rain again, though there was none in the room. Only a branch somewhere outside, relinquishing water a drop at a time.
"Not weak," she said. "Thank you."
Jenkinson's hand fell back half an inch. It did not withdraw. It waited for correction.
Lady Catherine said, "Anne, you know strong tea does not agree with you in the morning."
"I did not say strong."
Mrs. Darcy took up the pot.
It was a small action. It should not have changed anything. Tea was poured every morning in every proper house in England, and no one sensible made a philosophy of it. The cup stood ready. The tea entered it, amber and ordinary, neither medicinal nor rebellious.
She added no water.
"Milk?" she asked.
Anne considered.
At Rosings, milk was sometimes advised when tea was judged too heating; sometimes forbidden when digestion was judged uncertain; sometimes added before Anne had remembered whether she wanted it.
"No, thank you."
The cup was placed before her.
Jenkinson looked at it as if it were a shallow pond into which Anne had stepped without proper footwear.
Lady Catherine's attention moved from the cup to Anne's face. "You are flushed."
Anne was not flushed. She could feel that she was not. Her face was cool. Only her thoughts had quickened.
"The stairs, perhaps," Jenkinson murmured.
Mrs. Darcy said nothing.
Anne lifted the cup.
The tea was only tea. It did not clear her head, cure her constitution, or restore the years in which other people had known what she required before she could be asked. It was a little too hot. It tasted faintly of china, tannin, and breakfast-room air.
It was not weak.
She drank.
Lady Catherine turned to Mrs. Darcy. "If Anne remains in that room another night, I must ask that the fire be made up earlier. These airy chambers are often deceptive. They appear wholesome because they are large."
"Of course," Mrs. Darcy said. "We can attend to the fire."
Anne set down the cup.
Mrs. Darcy looked at her. "If Miss de Bourgh wishes it."
There was the chair again. Empty. Waiting.
Anne looked toward the window. Beyond the glass the lawn held the dull shine of rain. A pale wet branch moved once and then stilled.
"The fire was sufficient," Anne said.
Jenkinson made a sound too small to be an objection and too anxious to be agreement.
"Then we will leave it as it was," Mrs. Darcy said.
Lady Catherine drew herself up, but a footman entered at that moment with another note for Mrs. Darcy, and the ordinary demands of Pemberley, which had never heard of delicacy, required the mistress of the house to receive it.
Anne drank her tea.
