Chapter 6 The Sister’s Gambit #3
“I nearly lost her once,” he said. The words were quiet, stripped of performance, delivered to the grate rather than to his wife.
“Ramsgate. She was fifteen. I arrived two days before Wickham would have taken her, and those two days were the margin between her life and its destruction. I have spent three years ensuring that margin never narrows again.”
“I know.”
“You are asking me to send her into a room where Wickham’s methods are still in use. Where Wickham’s architecture still operates. The man who nearly destroyed her is the ghost behind this network, and you are asking me to place her inside it.”
Elizabeth did not flinch from the accusation, because it was accurate. She was asking precisely that. She was asking a man to risk the person he had spent his adult life protecting, on the judgment of a woman confined to an armchair with a blanket on her knees.
“I am asking you to trust her,” Elizabeth said. “Not to trust the situation. The situation is dangerous. Trust her.”
The Colonel arrived at four o’clock, summoned by a note Elizabeth had dispatched through Briggs.
He entered the drawing room in uniform — he had come from a meeting at the Horse Guards, his boots carrying the particular mud of Whitehall — and assessed the room in the way military men assessed rooms: occupants, exits, the emotional temperature that told him whether he was walking into a briefing or a battle.
“The salon,” he said, before anyone spoke.
“Georgiana told you.”
“She told me three days ago. I have been considering it since.” He looked at Darcy. “I do not like it. I also cannot propose a better alternative.”
“You could attend yourself,” Darcy said.
“I could. And every officer in the room would know me, and every conversation would adjust to my presence, and I would leave with nothing except the knowledge that Mrs. Drummond serves excellent claret. An unknown young lady at a pianoforte collects what a known colonel cannot.”
Darcy looked at his cousin. The look contained a question that was not about intelligence or operations or the merits of the proposal.
It was the question of a man who needed to know whether the people asking him to do this thing understood what it cost him, and whether the cost had been weighed against the gain, and whether the scales had been held by hands he could trust.
“I will be outside,” the Colonel said. “Briggs as well. Two of my men in the street. If anything deviates from the plan — if she signals, if she is late, if the evening extends beyond the expected duration — I enter the house.”
“The signal,” Elizabeth said. “Georgiana, come in.”
Georgiana had been waiting in the passage.
She entered and stood beside the Colonel, and the positioning was not accidental — she stood with the officer rather than with her brother, aligning herself with the working side of the conversation.
Darcy registered the alignment. His expression did not change.
“Mr. Gardiner returned this morning from Folkestone,” Georgiana said.
“Before he left, he showed me a device he uses at the docks — a hearing tube, a small brass instrument, the kind that elderly gentlemen carry. He has modified it to amplify sound through a wall or a screen. It is small enough to be carried in a reticule.”
“A hearing tube,” Darcy said.
“It was Mr. Gardiner’s suggestion. He said it would allow me to hear conversations from a greater distance than my natural hearing permits. He also said it would give me a reason to position myself near walls and doorways without appearing to loiter.”
Darcy looked at Elizabeth. “Mr. Gardiner has been preparing this.”
“Mr. Gardiner has been preparing for the possibility. I did not authorise the preparation.” This was true.
Mr. Gardiner, whose practical intelligence operated several steps ahead of the decisions that were supposed to precede it, had clearly anticipated the salon operation and equipped Georgiana before Elizabeth had given her consent.
Elizabeth found this simultaneously irritating and reassuring — irritating because it presumed the outcome, reassuring because it meant the preparation was in competent hands.
“The salon is Thursday,” Georgiana said.
“Lady Mercer has agreed to recommend me to Mrs. Drummond. I will arrive at eight, play at nine, and leave by half past ten. The Colonel will be in the square. I will carry Mr. Gardiner’s instrument in my reticule.
If I hear anything of significance, I will transcribe it after I leave.
If I feel unsafe at any moment, I will request my carriage and depart. ”
The plan was laid out with a clarity that did not sound rehearsed because it had been rehearsed so thoroughly that the rehearsal had disappeared into competence.
Darcy listened. The muscles in his face did the work his voice did not — the tightening at the temples, the line between the brows, the set of the mouth that she had learned to read as a sailor reads a barometer.
“If anything happens to you,” Darcy said. He did not finish the sentence. He did not need to. The sentence finished itself in the silence, completed by every person in the room in the privacy of their own understanding.
“Nothing will happen to me,” Georgiana said. “I will play the pianoforte. I will drink tea. I will come home.”
“You do not know that.”
“No. But I know that the alternative is to do nothing, and doing nothing has a cost as well.”
Darcy turned to the window. The December afternoon was fading, the light retreating from the street below with the unhurried withdrawal of a season that had no reason to linger.
He stood at the window for perhaps ten seconds.
When he turned, his face was composed and his voice was level, and the composure and the level voice were the most expensive things Elizabeth had ever watched him produce.
“Thursday,” he said. “Half past ten, and not a minute later.”
Georgiana crossed the room. She took her brother’s hand — briefly, the contact lasting no more than two seconds, the pressure visible in the whitening of her knuckles — and released it.
“Thank you,” she said.
She left the room. Her footsteps on the stairs carried the same quality Elizabeth had noted in Chapter Twenty — light, quick, purposeful. The footsteps of a young woman ascending toward a task she had chosen with open eyes.
The Colonel followed, pausing at the door to exchange a look with Darcy that communicated, in the compressed language of men who had shared a childhood and a war, an assurance and an acknowledgement and a promise. Then he was gone.
Elizabeth and Darcy were alone. The fire burned. The blanket lay across Elizabeth’s knees, resented but present. The portfolio of Wickham’s files sat on the table between them, its contents spread like a map of a country they had believed they had left behind.
“She is right,” Elizabeth said.
“I know she is right. That is not the same as being willing.”
“No.”
Darcy sat in the chair opposite her. He did not sit the way he usually sat — straight-backed, composed, prepared — but with the heaviness of a man who had given something he could not afford and was calculating the deficit.
He looked at the fire, and the fire lit the lines of his face with the same light that had lit them in the bedroom at two o’clock on the morning after the ball, and the lines were the same, and the cost behind them was the same, and the willingness to bear the cost was the thing that made him who he was.
“Mr. Gardiner,” Elizabeth said, after a moment. “What news from Folkestone?”
Darcy straightened. The practical question was a bridge back to solid ground, and he crossed it with visible relief.
“Holt sailed Thursday night as planned. The wind held. Mr. Gardiner waited at Folkestone through Friday. No word yet — the return crossing depends on conditions at Boulogne. He expects Holt by Sunday morning if the weather permits.”
“And the letter? The seal?”
“Anne’s letter was delivered with the seal intact. Mr. Gardiner watched Holt’s boat clear the harbour.”
Sophie. The child in Boulogne with a doll named Madame Lapin.
The extraction that was the human centre of the entire operation — the reason Anne had come to Pemberley, the reason Gravière had been kept alive rather than killed on the balcony, the reason Elizabeth had negotiated with a man who had poisoned wine rather than simply letting the Colonel’s men take him.
If Holt reached Boulogne and Marguerite obeyed the forged letter and the seal held and the wind did not turn and the French coastal patrols did not intercept a fishing boat in waters they controlled, then Sophie would be in England by Sunday.
If. The word contained an ocean.
“We wait,” Elizabeth said.
“We wait,” Darcy agreed. He reached across the table and moved the Wickham portfolio to one side and placed his hand where it had been, palm up, on the wood.
Elizabeth looked at the hand. It was an offer made without words — the same hand that had carried trays and delivered letters and held hers in the dark — and she placed her own hand in it, and his fingers closed, and they sat like that while the fire burned down and the light failed and the house settled around them into the quiet of a Saturday evening in Cheapside, and somewhere on the Channel a fishing boat carried a forged letter toward a woman and a child, and somewhere in Mayfair a hostess prepared her drawing room for Thursday.