XXXI #2
The walk back up the road brought a cart pulling out of the courtyard — two men on the bench, a tarpaulin lashed over the bed, half a forge’s worth of black iron underneath by the look of it.
The driver touched his hat. The cart moved off.
Falstaff regarded it with mild official interest as it went, then turned his attention to the kitchen door.
Asking Mrs MacLeod about the cart was pointless. The housekeeper would tell her nothing she had not been instructed to tell her, and pressing would put them both in a position of being unable to answer civilly. The library was a better option. The afternoon was a long one.
By the time the light had gone, she had nearly forgotten the cart.
The stair was cold under her hand. She climbed slowly, expecting the room she had been entering for three months — the laid fire waiting for the flint, the slow ten minutes of the kindling taking. The latch lifted. The door swung in.
Heat met her at the threshold.
Not the gradual warming of a room with a fire newly lit.
Real heat — air that had been holding heat for hours, that pressed against her face the moment the door opened, that drew the cold out of her hands at once.
She stepped in and could not, at first, identify what was wrong with the room, because what was wrong was that nothing was wrong with it.
Along the wall, behind a black iron front, hooded and shut, a fire she could not see was throwing the whole of its heat into the chamber from inside an enclosure designed to show no light at all.
A blackout grate. The kind of thing that took a man with money and an idea and a craftsman willing to come from Aberdeen on short notice to construct.
The iron cast such heat against her palm that she could not touch it. Her face was still cold. The two facts together did something to her she had not been prepared for — a small foolish sting behind her eyes that she chased back at once, because she was not going to cry over a fireplace.
The bed met the back of her knees, and she sat down on it.
She had not known a room could be like this. Could be present with the fire, could be in possession of the heat without sacrificing the dark.
She had not decided what she was going to say to him about it by the time he knocked.
She lifted the latch. The hinges were quiet — Angus had oiled them in September, and they had been quiet ever since.
The corridor was not lit, precisely, but there was a lantern round the bend somewhere; she could see the shape of him for the half-second before he stepped past the line of the lamp into her dark.
She caught his hands as he came in.
Both of them. He had not been expecting it. He stopped where he was, half a step inside the room, and before he could speak, she lifted his hands and put them against her face.
She heard the small intake of his breath.
“Feel,” she said. “I am warm. The whole of me. I have been warm since I came up the stairs.”
He did not answer at once. His palms had gone still against her cheeks and then, very slightly, moved — fingertips at her temple, the heel of his hand at the line of her jaw, a half-second longer than was permitted by the recent unspoken agreement about what might pass between them.
His hands were cold from the stair, and her face was warm from the grate, and the difference was its own evidence.
“Thank you,” she said into his palms.
“You are welcome.” The whisper was not what it usually was.
“I do not say it lightly.”
“I heard you the first time.” His thumb moved once at her temple. He took his hands back. “Sit down before the supper goes cold.”
She found her chair. He found his.
She had been planning to lead up to it more elegantly than this. “When?”
“The night we — the night I stayed — I noticed it then. I should have noticed sooner.”
Several seconds passed before she could answer. He had named, with no fuss, the night neither of them had named since.
“Thank you,” she said.
“The cold was intolerable. You should not have been asked to bear it. There is nothing here to thank me for.”
“I will thank you for it anyway.”
“Then thank me and let it pass.”
Her shawl stayed folded on the back of her chair, where she had set it down on entering the room, because she did not need it. Falstaff slept by the hearth rug as he always did. Neither of them mentioned the grate again.
The squint gave him the same narrow slice it always did — the shelves, the window, the desk where she sometimes wrote.
She was at the window this morning, her back to him, a book open in her hands, turning pages slowly.
Falstaff slept under the desk. The fire was built high, higher than he had seen it through this slit before, the kind of fire a person built after being cold a long time and finally deciding to remedy it.
The shawl she had worn at every supper this past week was gone from her shoulders, and she stood in the firelight without it, and he thought about the cold evenings across the table and did not let himself think further.
She looked well, exactly as she always looked, which told him nothing. She had gone on living through these months — the walks, the letters, the books, the dog, the suppers in the dark — and she was not the kind of woman who broke.
He went back to his room.
Twenty-two days since… Twenty-three this morning, by the time the light came grey through the ventilation slit. He had no present way of knowing how it stood with her.
And he was not going to ask Mrs MacLeod.
To ask was to know, and knowing required him to reckon with what he had no answer for yet. No name, no house, no future he could lay against it. If she were carrying, there was a strong chance the child would arrive before he could make himself real to her and alive to the world again.
Nor could he ask Elizabeth. That conversation required him to acknowledge that what had passed between them had consequences neither of them had spoken of — and he did not know how to begin it from behind a wall of dark.
So, he did not. He counted instead.
A month was the usual interval; he knew the general principle and nothing more exact — not her constitution, not whether worry or cold might alter it. He did not know whether she was counting too.
In the small hours, he had found himself running the other calculation — not from desire but from necessity, the way one mapped the exits when the room began to fill with smoke.
If she were with child, the reckoning came forward.
He could no longer wait for the investigation to resolve in its own time.
He would have to act, and the only action available to him that did not require him to be alive in English law was to leave English law behind entirely.
Switzerland, perhaps. The Italian states. Somewhere the warrant had no reach, and Fitzwilliam Darcy’s death could stand as a fact without anyone looking too closely at what had replaced him. He could be George Carlisle openly, in daylight, in a country indifferent to English legal proceedings.
The Geneva accounts were not what they had been, but there was enough to begin on, and if there was not, he would work — he had a fine hand and an even finer education, and would do it with joy, because she would see his face.
He would see hers. They would be a married couple in the full sense of the word.
If she were already carrying, the child would have two parents it could see, a name, a life he could actually provide.
Then he thought about Pemberley.
His father had sat at that desk for twenty years before him.
His mother had planted the kitchen garden the year before she died, and he had kept it as she left it.
Georgiana had taken her first steps on the east lawn.
The tenants had been on the land for three generations, families whose names stood in the estate records before his grandfather's time, with no reason to expect the man who held it to decide his own convenience outweighed the obligation.
And Sterling, still free. The forgeries still on the books. The warrant still unsatisfied. A man who had walked away from all of that had not escaped — he had merely chosen to let it stand, and everything it had taken to get this far would count for nothing.
And all of it waited on a count he could not finish.