XXXI
The Quiet Week
What they had came down to Foss. He had been ashore since August, beached when the Alicia Jane was impounded, questioned twice at the Customs House, and under summons for a third.
He was the first of the three captains to have grasped that he was named in something he could not afford to be named in, and the only one with the temperament to do something about it.
Harker would deny anything put to him until he died of old age.
MacNeil was Sterling’s man. Foss might turn — but he had been told a version of events in which a Mr Darcy of Derbyshire meant to let him take the full legal brunt of the thing, and had been hearing it for six weeks from men with the King’s seal on their papers.
He was watched, besides. Webb had a corner where the watchers lost their line for perhaps twenty seconds each afternoon, and a room neither of them owned. One conversation. That was what they had.
It was not enough. It would have to serve.
He had spent the night going over what else there was. Not the clerk — that route had been the cleanest, and after seven months, the man was either in Bristol or in the Thames, with no profit in imagining which. Beyond Foss, beyond the clerk, what else?
Subordinate officers. Foss’s own mate, whose name Webb had — a Mr Hoddle who had been with him through the whole 1810 run and would have signed the cargo books in his own hand.
Pursers. The man at Lloyd’s who had insured the false cargoes and whose paperwork ought, set against the manifests, to show what they had been altered to conceal.
Customs officers at the Pool of London — a chain of them, and one, paid less and less generously as the years went on, might be persuaded that turning intelligence against Sterling was the better arithmetic.
Rival merchants who had lost contracts to Sterling’s underbidding and might have kept the documents to prove it.
Any of them, alone, was thinner than the clerk; three of them together, perhaps not.
He wrote it all down. He gave Webb the names he had and the directions for finding the names he did not. The directions for Foss he wrote carefully, three times — what to ask, what not to ask, what to offer if he balked.
He sealed the letter and set it on the pile for Angus.
Then he sat at the table and listened to the house.
Below him, eventually, he heard the corridor door and Falstaff’s nails and Elizabeth’s voice saying something short and affectionate to the dog. He turned to the pile of papers on the table. He picked up the pen. He began, for the first time in four days, to work.
She had asked him, weeks ago, about the history of the barony. She had not thought he would have looked it up.
“The title dates to 1492,” he said. “A grant from James IV. The original holder was a border lord whose name appears as Carlisle in some documents and Carleill in others. Whether that was the original family name or a corruption of the spelling, no one seems to have established.”
“And between him and you?”
“Twelve generations. Several of them appear to have done very little of note.”
“Or a great deal of note,” she said, “and the records were suppressed.”
“That is a more interesting theory.”
“It is the one I prefer.” She reached for her glass. “Were any of them women?”
“The title is not entailed to male heirs.”
“That is not what I asked.”
She heard him weigh it — different from his refusing an answer, different from his deflecting. “The eighth baroness held the title for thirty years,” he said. “Her husband predeceased her. She held the estate alone until her grandson assumed it.”
“What was she like?”
“The records do not say.”
“Of course they do not.” The records never said. Twenty years of reading and not one of them had thought to write down what the woman was actually like. “There is always an estate. There is never a woman.”
His glass turned on the table — the small circular sound she had come to know as thinking rather than drinking. “There is a portrait,” he said. “In the solar. A woman with an expression that suggests she would not have found this conversation worth having.”
Elizabeth laughed. It came out before she could temper it, and she heard him go very still on the other side of the table — the stillness of one who had not expected to be given something and had been given it.
She returned to the headland cliff she had been making a point about — the fault line running below it, the geology she had read about that morning — and he listened, and asked a question, and she answered, and the evening went on. He reached for the salt. His hand found hers.
Both went still. His hand was warm over hers. He did not lift it. Neither of them moved. The dark was the same dark it always was, complete and total; she had not found it strange in weeks, and she found it strange now, because he had not touched her since… well, since.
“Forgive me,” he said, very low. He withdrew and found the salt.
She was in bed before she let herself think about it properly.
Forgive me. The question was whether he meant it for the accident — his hand not finding what it was reaching for.
Or whether he meant something larger — the three nights, Thursday itself, the whole arrangement of this marriage that left her sitting cold in the dark in October waiting to strike her own flint.
She did not know which one he was asking.
She thought he might not know either. She lay in the dark and gave the question long thought and arrived nowhere, which was where she had been arriving all week.
She thought about the eighth baroness, holding thirty years of this alone. She wondered if her room had been cold in October.
She went to the solar the next morning.
She had not been in the solar before. It was at the southwest corner of the one under the upper floor, just under the chamber she did not enter — Mrs MacLeod called it the laird’s study, and Elizabeth had never asked what was in it — and she had not previously had a reason to find the room.
Today, she had a reason. She climbed the small stair off the gallery and pushed the door.
It was a long chamber with high windows and a band of portraits along the inside wall.
Twelve of them, as he had said. The eighth was halfway along — a woman in a dark green gown, painted three-quarter-length, hands folded over a book that she was clearly not reading.
The expression was as he had said. It was not severe; it was bored, contained, and aware of being painted.
Elizabeth stood in front of it and laughed under her breath at the accuracy of his description.
She had been about to turn away when she caught the eyes properly in the morning light. Grey. Set wide. A look very nearly direct.
She squinted. Held still.
Is that… surely that is Colonel Fitzwilliam!
The thought arrived at once, and she dismissed it almost as quickly. She had seen the colonel often enough at Rosings, but Rosings was many months ago, and a great many things had happened since; she had a general sense of the eyes and the bearing and not much more.
The brow was wrong here. The cheeks were wrong.
The colouring was wrong. Eighteenth-century painting often gave women a uniformity of feature that resembled half the world, and a sixteenth-century border lord’s wife and a Regency colonel of horse were not the sort of relations one expected to hold across three centuries.
A quirk of the artist, or the luck of common features. It was not worth pursuing.
She walked along the rest of the line. None of the others struck her in any way at all.
She went down to the library.
Mrs Henderson’s hens had begun laying again — three eggs from the white one, two from each of the others, after a fortnight when the whole flock had stopped together with no apparent provocation.
Mrs Henderson, who had shared the difficulty with Elizabeth at length the previous Wednesday, had appeared at the village smithy with the eggs in a kerchief, plainly intending to find someone to tell.
Elizabeth had been the someone. They had spent twenty minutes on the question of what could possibly have moved a hen to resume.
Tam Pritchard had been behaving respectably, by the look of him, for a fortnight.
He had been outside the smithy when Elizabeth passed, hat in his hand, talking to one of the McKinnon men about a piece of harness.
Elizabeth had not stopped to greet him; one did not, with a young man whose recent past one knew.
But Mrs Henderson, walking back to her cottage, had remarked aloud to the air — and to Elizabeth, standing within hearing — that perhaps the hen had wandered off after all, the way hens did, and she had found the missing watch was at the back of a drawer, and perhaps a great deal had been laid at one man’s door that ought not to have been laid there.
Mrs Henderson had not looked at Tam when she said it.
Tam had not turned his head when she said it.
They had each known the other’s meaning entirely.
The McGregor girl was about to have her baby.
Mrs McGregor had told Elizabeth this without telling her, in the way of village women — a remark about how full the house had been getting and a long, careful look towards the road.
Elizabeth had given the long, careful look back and said she hoped Mrs McGregor’s daughter was finding the cold tolerable, and Mrs McGregor had said we are well prepared, my lady, and that had been the conversation.
She had been thinking all the way home about how she would tell him these things at supper. Elizabeth had been bringing him the village in fragments for weeks now; the more she brought, the more closely he listened, and she had begun to suspect that her accounts were rationed bread to him.