XLVI The Accounts
XLVI
The Accounts
She was at his desk by the second afternoon, the pen in her hand, and he stood at her shoulder.
He had laid it out for her across two days — the figures, what had been done with the money in those five days in London before he sailed, the Continental arrangements Webb had made, what remained liquid and what did not.
She had asked sharp questions, and then sharper, and he had answered every one.
He had not expected to find this so difficult to bear.
Not the figures. The figures were what they were — he had been living with them for eight months, and they had not improved with familiarity.
It was the light on the back of her neck, the way her hair curled at her nape where she had pinned it up, a few strands escaping against the pale skin, the morning light from the ventilation slit catching them.
He had not seen her hair in daylight in months, except what a starving man could glean through the squint. He had been breathing borrowed air, and now she sat three inches from his chest where he could look at her plainly, and it nearly undid him.
“Tell me about Pemberley’s household accounts. Surely that is something on a smaller scale —”
“Frozen like everything else. The income from Pemberley, the housekeeper’s budget, everything held in the main estate funds — inaccessible except for certain necessities, which the Home Office must currently authorise. A dead man cannot draw on them.”
“But Pemberley itself has not been seized.”
“The warrant died before conviction. There was no instrument for seizure. The property sits there intact, the staff dismissed and the house closed, and I cannot touch a penny of what it produces.”
She turned slightly, not enough to look at him fully, just enough that he could see the line of her jaw and the flush the cold room had put in her cheek. “And the Continental accounts?”
“Bills of exchange, mostly. Amsterdam and Geneva. Webb moved what he could in the five days before I sailed — enough to keep me, and any family I might have, in some comfort abroad, if I were forced to flee. It is not what it was. Add what the Auchengray accounts hold, which you have seen, and what eight months of running has cost, and you have the shape of it.”
“And if we cleared your name,” she said. “If the clerk could be reached and a proceeding brought — the English accounts would unfreeze.”
“In theory.”
“In theory,” she repeated, with a dryness he had apparently taught her without intending to. She turned the paper over and made a column of figures almost certainly more accurate than his own estimates. “And Sterling’s assets are intact.”
“Entirely.”
She was quiet a long stretch. Between her shoulder blades there was a slight furrow, where she was thinking hard about something she did not yet have words for.
Then she reached for a fresh sheet, wrote something across the top, and turned it to face him. “What about the customs records? The real manifests — the ones filed at the ports against Sterling’s forged versions. You said the paper trail breaks somewhere. Has anyone found where?”
His eyes went to the paper. “Webb identified three discrepancies. Two of them require Customs House records that are not publicly available without a formal proceeding — which requires me to be alive, which requires the proceeding to already be underway, which requires the clerk.” He took the pen from her hand and drew a line between two figures on the page.
“This is what I have been doing since April. Every road leads back to the clerk, and we cannot approach him until Webb has enough to force a confession, because if Sterling knows we are looking —”
“He moves him.” Her mouth tightened. “Or worse.”
“Or worse.” He tossed the pen back into the well. “I have drawn this map approximately forty times. The topology does not improve with repetition.”
She took the pen back out of the well, turned the paper over, and began again from a different point, and he stood at her shoulder.
“Who holds Pemberley’s rents now?”
“The estate solicitors, technically. Frozen with everything else.”
“And if a man were to die without a will, his estate would be administered by —”
“I have a will. Georgiana inherits.” He met her eye. “That is not a road.”
“I did not think it was. I was establishing the shape of the cage.” Her gaze went to the paper, then to her own hands, and the line of her shoulders gave away the moment she arrived at the same wall he had been staring at all along. The wall was real. It had not moved.
She turned to look at him, tilting her head back to do it, her face full in the morning light — and he made himself say the thing he had been circling for two days.
“I want you to go,” he said. “And the longer I consider it, the more I doubt it would suffice to send you to your uncle. The moment anyone learns you are my wife —”
“We have been over this. I am not going.”
“We have no choice, Elizabeth. You must go to Geneva. Webb has connexions there, the accounts are accessible, you would want for nothing, and English law cannot reach you across that water. I do not think Pentonville is far enough.”
“No.”
“Elizabeth —”
“No. I will not go.”
“You are no longer safe here. You were never entirely safe here, but a merciful court would not have convicted a wife who had never known her husband’s name or seen his face.
You could have claimed ignorance and been believed, because it was the truth.
” His eyes stayed on her face. “It is not the truth any longer. Your face would give you away now. Any magistrate who put you in a room and asked you questions would know within five minutes that you knew. That changes everything.”
“Then we had better see to it that no magistrate puts me in a room.”
“Elizabeth.” He reached past her and turned the paper over, the column of figures facing down. “I will not watch you hang for me.”
“I am not going to hang, and neither are you.”
“I may.”
“You are not.” She stood, which brought her very close to him, and she turned to face him fully in the narrow space between the desk and the wall, and she was not calm — her jaw was tight, her eyes bright — but she was also entirely, characteristically immovable.
“You are not going to hang, and I am not going to Geneva, and we are going to find a way through this together, because there is no other arrangement I will accept.”
He sighed and let his fingers trace her cheek.
“This is my fault. If I had not kept so much company with you, let you close enough to ask questions and form an attachment… Had I kept to my intentions, you would still not know my name and would think of me only as some ghost who lives on the upper floor and leaves you entirely alone.”
“And I would be miserable, and you would be on the brink of a mental collapse.” She cupped her hand lightly over his. “Do not think I did not hear your loneliness each night? A whisper does not hide that much.”
He shook his head. “But I have been in your bed. I never meant it to happen even once, but once the dam broke, I came back, and then again, and every night for weeks. You were like opium to me, and I knew the price, and I knew you would be the one to pay it.”
“I was hardly unwilling. And I am not ignorant of… certain potentials.”
“Then you understand the urgency. I knew — I knew what the interval was and I came anyway, every time, because I could not stay away from you and I am not able to excuse that.”
“You forget that I actually demanded you perform your marital duty on more than one occasion.”
He shook his head. “And when have you known another person’s demands to have the slightest influence on me?
But with you… If there are consequences from that, sending you away is not a choice I make for myself.
It is the only protection I can still give you.
You would face it alone, and that would be my fault, but you would be alive, and the child would be alive, and that is more than I can say for what happens if you stay and they find us. ”
She studied him gravely. Then something near a smile crossed her face.
“No court in England,” she said, “would condemn a pregnant wife.”
He stared at her.
“I am not arguing that I would be believed if I claimed ignorance. While I still had doubts about my husband’s name, I could be questioned and answer honestly.
I cannot now, and I ought not attempt it.
I am arguing the next thing — that the law has a particular dislike of hanging women who are visibly with child, and that judicial dislike will hold whether my ignorance is believed or not.
A knowing accomplice is one matter. A woman carrying her husband’s child is another matter altogether, and you know it as well as I do.
” She tilted her head slightly. “Your lack of self-governance where I am concerned may yet prove our salvation. It would be rather a fine irony, would it not?”
The breath had gone out of him. “Four months,” he murmured, “and all my scheming to steal a future for us… and I had not considered…”
Her chin came up. “Your argument for sending me away rather loses its force if we have already made that eventuality rather more likely than not, does it not?”
“That is not—” He stopped. “Elizabeth, that is not a stratagem.”
“Is it not?” She took a step towards him, and the morning light caught her face and her hair and the line of her throat.
“It is a reduction of risk. It does not save you with any certainty.”
“And…” She came near enough to slide her hands up his chest and looked up at him — those eyes he had loved since a rainy Hertfordshire morning when he had seen them so bright and full of herself.
“I could just as easily meet some dreadful fate in Geneva. Alone, possibly already with child. What odds do you give me?”
“Your sister could… Your uncle…”
“I want my husband.”
She was looking at him with the expression he had learned in the dark and could now see plainly for the first time — the one that meant she had made up her mind, and the rest of the world would have to arrange itself around the fact.
She reached up and took his face in her hands — his face, in the light, without flinching, as if there had never been anything in it to fear — and she kissed him.
For an instant, he could not answer it. The shock of being wanted in the light was different from being wanted in the dark. In the dark, he had always been able to imagine that some part of her desire belonged to mystery, to the facelessness of him, to all the things the room concealed.
But this was daylight, merciless and ordinary. Daylight showed the scars he had invented and the ones he had not, the whole of him, the human fact of him. And she had looked and come closer, and she kissed him as if none of those things had greater claim on her than he did.
Then he kissed her back.