XLV The Mural Chamber #3
“I never imagined,” he said, and his voice was not steady, “a world in which I could not prove my innocence. I have lived my whole life on the assumption that the truth could be shown if one were patient enough to show it. That assumption may not be available to me. And if it is not — if Sterling holds, if the clerk cannot be reached, if Webb is taken — then whatever happens to me, the people connected to me will not be safe. You will not be safe. Not in this house. Not in Aberdeen. Not, perhaps, in England.”
She had already begun to shake her head.
“I want you to go to your uncle. Mr Gardiner will take you. Pentonville is not Pemberley, but it is a respectable address, and it is far from any name connected with mine, and you can be lost into it without remark. Webb has people who can move you south quietly. I have been thinking through the night, and the route exists, and the funds exist, and the cover story exists, and the only thing required is your consent.”
“No.”
“Elizabeth—”
“No!” She had stood up again without meaning to, and the room tilted slightly, and she steadied herself on the back of the chair and did not let go of it.
“No. I will not. You will not put me on a coach south while you sit in Aberdeenshire waiting to find out whether the Home Office is coming for you. That is not a thing I am going to do.”
“It is the only thing—”
“It is not the only thing. It is the thing that is most convenient for you, because it lets you suffer alone, which is a thing you have considerable practice with. I am not interested in it.” Her voice was hoarse, and her head was hammering, and she did not care.
“I am married to you. I have been in your house for four and a half months. I have been in your bed. I have been in your confidence — not, I admit, by your design, but by my own arrangements, which appear to have been more thorough than yours. I am not going to Pentonville.”
“If they come—”
“Then they come. I have considered that possibility, too. At some length, as you say, for I began to suspect I was married to a fugitive months ago. Long before I suspected his name was Darcy. I do not suggest it would be pleasant. I suggest only that it would be no more pleasant for happening to me alone in Pentonville than it would be for happening to me here.”
“Elizabeth, you cannot know what you are saying.”
“I have made my choice. I made it last night when I struck the candle. I made it the moment I came up these stairs this morning. I am not going.”
His eyes stayed on her a long while. The morning light from the slit was on his face, and the toll of the night was entirely visible on him — the sleeplessness, the wine, the cost of having said all of this out loud — and beneath it the man she had been holding in the dark for four months, whose name she now had.
“I do not know how to argue with you,” he said.
“You are not capable of it. I should have thought you would have learned that by now.”
He almost smiled. He was the one who broke the quiet that followed. “You said you were not performing last night. That what you said…”
“I meant it.”
“But you also constructed the entire evening to get what you wanted from me.”
“That part is true, as well.”
He shook his head faintly and released a long sigh. “I do not know how to reconcile those things.”
“Nor I. I loved you, and I used it, Fitzwilliam. The first does not lessen the second. The second does not lessen the first. I was very deliberate about it, and I am not sorry to know the truth now, but I am sorry that I misled you to learn it.”
Something between bitter and fond crossed his face, and she could not read it. “You were very convincing.”
“I had excellent material to work with. And it was a rather enjoyable exploit, if I may say so.”
He made a sound. She thought it might become a laugh. It did not quite, but it was closer than anything she had heard from him since the candle caught, and the tightness in her chest gave a little.
“I deceived you for four months,” he said. You deceived me for one evening.”
She rolled her eyes up to the ceiling. “Somewhat longer, if you count all the times I tested you and did not let on what I had learned.”
He smiled in earnest this time. “We are not, perhaps, ideally suited to reproach each other.”
She shook her head — slowly, mindful of the shooting pain behind her eyes — and crossed the room to him.
She put her hand against his temple, where his own fingers had pressed a dozen times this morning.
“I should not have given you the last of that bottle,” she said.
“I am sorry your head is paying for it today.”
“I have had worse mornings.”
“You have not.”
“No,” he conceded. “I have not.”
She put her arms around him.
He drew breath unsteadily, a breath that had been held a long time and had finally let itself go, and his arms came around her without any of the distance he had been keeping from her this morning. She pressed her face against his throat. His arms tightened.
It was enough for now. It would have to be.