XXIX
The Warrant
The Aberdeen packet arrived at mid-morning with a single letter in it. Webb’s hand on the outer fold.
He opened it.
I am writing this on the understanding that speed matters more than my customary care. What I have to tell you, I have confirmed through two channels before committing it to paper, and I would not write it if I were not certain.
A formal proceeding has been opened by the Home Office into the circumstances of your death.
The inquiry has been initiated by persons I have not yet been able to identify; I have my suspicions and will pursue them; the proceeding itself is real and is moving.
The question under examination is whether the carriage accident of April last was a genuine accident or a deliberate disappearance arranged to evade a warrant.
They have the Dover road testimony. They have the inn records.
They have not found the coachman; he was your own man and is well hidden.
But they have spoken to the innkeeper at the staging house where the carriage was held the days before its journey, and his account has raised questions I will not detail here.
The consequence of this proceeding, should it find against you, is as follows.
The warrant issued in April, which was suspended upon your apparent death, will be formally reinstated.
Your estate, currently in the care of your solicitors and administered under the assumption of your death until Miss Darcy’s majority, will become subject to seizure pending resolution of the original charge.
Your solicitors are at present defending a dead man.
If that man is found to be alive, they will be defending a fugitive, which is a position I do not believe Mr Trevelyan is prepared to occupy.
The colonel has been brought in, as you instructed.
He has the outline; he has been given the freedom of London, such as I can provide him; he has accepted the constraint of remaining in London for the present.
He has not yet been told of today’s development.
I will tell him before this letter leaves my hand.
He will hear of the proceeding through his own channels regardless, and I would rather he hear it from me.
I await your instruction with some urgency.
W.
The sound that came out of him was not a word. It came from somewhere below deliberate thought, loud in the small room, and he shut it off with both hands hard against the table and his head down between his shoulders.
Pemberley.
Not the life. Not Elizabeth, not Georgiana, not forty years of anything.
Just the word. The house. His father’s desk and his mother’s window seat.
The lake in the morning light. The east wood going gold in October.
The forty thousand acres generations of Darcys had held, and his father had kept, and Darcy had been overseeing since he was two-and-twenty, carefully, because careful was what it required.
His. His name on every document, his name in the living memory of every tenant farmer and every neighbouring family for thirty miles.
Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley. That was the only answer he had ever had when the question was asked.
The Crown was going to take it.
All of it. The fields and the lake and the library and his mother’s window seat.
The home farm. The village. Mr and Mrs Reynolds, who had been at Pemberley before he was born.
The graves on the chapel side, his father, his mother, two infant brothers buried in 1791 and 1793.
Forfeit to the Crown the property of one found to be alive when he had been declared dead, which was the legal language for what he had spent six months becoming.
The thought brought him out of his chair.
He stood with both hands fisted on the table and could not breathe in any rhythm for some time.
The room did not move. The grey light kept coming through the window without changing.
He was being unbuilt at the level of the foundation, and the only sound in the room was the rasp of his own breath being forced back into evenness.
He had married Elizabeth on the assumption that the situation would resolve. He had drawn up a Scots-law contract in her favour, because that was his way of saying I cannot tell you yet, but I will keep you safe. The contract had been drafted on the assumption that he had something to give her.
If the proceeding found against him, there was nothing to give. The estate would be seized. The contract would be a piece of paper executed by a baron of a barony that did not legally belong to him, by a name that was not legally his. He had married her on credit he did not have.
He pressed his forehead against the cold glass of the window.
There might not be a way back.
He knocked at the usual hour.
She drew the bolt and stepped aside. He came in out of the passage, and from the hearth rug came the scrape of Falstaff settling, a long exhale, and then the room was quiet. The supper was laid. Elizabeth found her chair and reached for her glass.
He did not eat.
She knew this was a different sort of dejection before the first quarter hour had passed.
On easier evenings, she could tempt him, if not into carelessness, then at least into resistance worth having; tonight every answer arrived like something copied out by a tired clerk.
The glass went down once and was not lifted again.
The plate was barely touched. She tried the headland, the factor’s question regarding the east field, then Paley.
Each thing she set before him came back correct and bloodless.
“You have not eaten anything.”
His glass touched the table. “I am not hungry.”
She waited. Nothing came.
Then, without preface, he put a question. “You must have your regrets.”
“As to what?” she responded.
The words came rough, none of the usual discipline in them. “This — all of it. A house in Scotland you did not choose. No family near. No society. Everything you were accustomed to, all the ordinary pleasures of your life, given up for an arrangement that cannot give back what it took.”
She considered that honestly before she answered.
“I have regrets. I will not pretend otherwise. But the ledger does not read as badly as you seem to think. You have not misused me. You have seen to every practical thing and several I had not thought to ask for. There are women in far more respectable-looking marriages who would find my situation quite tolerable.”
“It is still lacking.” No rise in it. Just sorrow. That was worse. “Whatever you have been given, there are things this cannot provide.”
“Yes. There are.”
“What do you miss most?” he asked. “Of what you left.”
“Jane.” She did not have to consider that one.
“Naturally. But beyond your sister.”
She thought. “My father’s book room in the evenings.
The fire and the quiet of it — a household quiet, not like here.
Walking Longbourn in the autumn. Hill’s cooking.
” Her voice altered on the next words. “The sound of people moving about downstairs when I was in bed. Lydia and Kitty fussing about which ribbons belonged to whom. Knowing the house was occupied. It sounds foolish.”
“It does not.”
“Now you,” she said. “What do you miss?”
He drank the rest of his wine. She heard the faint slip as the final drops passed his lips and the glass was drained.
“Come,” she said, keeping her voice easy. “It is only fair. I have confessed to Hill’s cooking, which I assure you is not a small humiliation.”
He was quiet for nearly a minute. Elizabeth shifted in her chair and determined not to help him. Not to even breathe in a loud way, lest he think she had lost interest in his response.
“Music.”
One word, with everything he had not said underneath. She heard it all.
“What kind?”
She heard him breathe and not answer.
“I used to play,” she said. “Not well, but with a great deal of feeling and very little restraint, which my sister Jane said made up for the technical deficiencies. Handel was one composer I tormented with regularity, as well as Clementi, whose work my aunt assures me is just glorified scales. I missed it when we left Longbourn. I still miss it now. There is no pianoforte here.”
“There was none to be had… Perhaps in Aberdeenshire…”
“Oh, no. You shall not evade my question by giving me more gifts. What sort, then? The opera? The symphony? Is there something you used to play yourself — or heard played — that you miss more than the rest of it?”
She heard it then. Low, involuntary, cut off almost before it began — untold months of not thinking about something breaking open all at once because she had asked the wrong question and he had answered it honestly, and there was no putting it back.
It was a sob. Muffled behind a hand, but that gasp, that sniff, that deep, voiceless moan in his chest.
The man was shattering.
She pushed her chair back and rose. She knew the table by now — its corners and its length, the distance between her chair and his — and she came around it with one hand trailing the edge and stopped beside him and put her hand on his shoulder.
He went still beneath her palm — not recoil but its opposite, a stillness that told her the hand had found exactly where the day had been pressing.
The shoulder under her palm was rigid, every muscle in it braced, and she kept her hand there.
She had no speech for this. She had only the steadiness of her hand and the dark and the patience to leave it there and wait.
The rigidity eased, his head dropping only a little, and she brought her other hand up and cupped his face between her palms. His jaw was rougher than the last time her hands had been here — two days at least, possibly more, the careful daily shave neglected.
He made a sound that had nothing to do with the whisper.