The House Broken Open #2
Elizabeth saw, with a clarity almost cruel in it, the double pull of him — sister, house, history, name, the whole life he had been denied for nine months by his own design and by Sterling’s malice; and against it the harder fact that if he moved towards any of those now, all of them were lost.
“But this… it is temporary,” he said at last. “A few months…” He glanced at Elizabeth, then back to his cousin. “America is so far. Surely, the ship might put in at… Perhaps Orkney. We would be safe enough in Kirkwall.”
The colonel shook his head. “If I were you, Darcy, I would not show my face anywhere the English Navy sails.”
“But if I go to America, all is lost. I am too far away. If I am in Orkney, or perhaps the Hebrides or even Dublin, I can come back and fight in court once Foss can be persuaded to testify. We can still clear my name.”
“With what luck? Foss has been told what will happen to him if he speaks against Sterling, and the assurances he requires before he will speak against Sterling are not assurances I have been authorised to give. He is a captain. He wants to remain a captain. He wants to know that the Alicia Jane will not be condemned, that his name will not be ruined in the trade, that he will draw breath after his testimony as a free man with his ship and his living intact. A Crown immunity will not satisfy him on its own. He has watched too many men hang with a King’s pardon in their pocket.
I have not the authority to offer Foss more than the law obliges.
And I shall need the spring, or the others ashore, before I can put the case together properly. It is the best I have.”
No one spoke.
Falstaff, tired of human incompetence, sighed heavily against Fitzwilliam’s leg and resettled his feet.
Darcy picked up the packet paper at last, looked at none of it, and set it down again.
Then he went to the window.
He stood there with his back to them, one hand braced against the stone of the embrasure, looking out over the headland and the winter sea as if the coast itself might contain an answer not available indoors. Elizabeth did not move. The room had become too narrow for movement.
When he turned back, his face was composed. That composure frightened her more than agitation would have done. “How long before they reach the house?”
“If the roads hold, by tomorrow night. If they do not, then the following morning.” Fitzwilliam’s mouth flattened. “There is no we in what follows. You and Elizabeth go north. I see you onto the packet. I turn south again before the tide has cleared the harbour. Bristol cannot wait on sentiment.”
The sentence fell between them with the heavy plainness of law.
Elizabeth heard it whole. North. Sea. Separation.
Perhaps six weeks of ocean and weather and absence so complete it had no visible shore.
It came to her at once, and she kept her face still because there was nothing in the world she disliked so much as wasting the first useful moment on visible dismay.
Darcy looked at her then.
“Very well.”
They left the house in less than an hour.
Less time than it had once taken on a quiet evening to decide between the blue shawl and the grey. The absurdity of that might have made her laugh on another day.
Mrs MacLeod stood with both hands on the table when Elizabeth crossed the kitchen, her mouth set hard. Angus had the horses ready before he was asked. Fitzwilliam had become all efficiency — maps, distance, weather, spare pistols. The whole house had altered around him.
Elizabeth moved through her rooms quickly. She took linen, money, the stronger of her boots, the handkerchief she had been carrying since November, the Rasselas, the letters from Jane, the little red volume with Anne Fitzwilliam’s name inside. She left half of what she touched exactly where it lay.
When she came down again, the library fire was still burning. One of the chairs remained drawn half towards the other from the morning. Upon the sofa arm lay the book she had abandoned at the knock.
She passed her bedroom doorway and stopped.
The long table. The chair where she had first sat rigid with terror.
The chair opposite where she had learned the shape of a man without his face.
The flint he had set to her left from the first evening, trusting her with the power to destroy his concealment before she had given him a reason in the world to do so.
“Elizabeth.”
She turned.
Darcy stood a few paces behind her. The folded document in his hand was one she knew at once by its shape.
She took it without speaking.
“Keep it on you,” he said. “If Richard brings me… brings us back with the case intact, it is yours and the… the date upon it might prove important. If he does not—”
He stopped. He forced the rest through.
“If it begins to endanger you, burn it. If they question you before you have burned it, show it to them and tell them the truth as it stood in July. You married a man using a false name. You did not know, and the letters you wrote to your sister prove that. That ignorance was real, and it may yet shield you.”
She looked at the paper between them, at the seal, at the whole weight of law and choice and survival compressed into something that would fit inside her coat.
“Promise me,” he said.
She raised her head.
“No.”
His face changed, very little and very entirely.
“Elizabeth—”
“I will consider it if there is no other way. That is the furthest I will go.” Her fingers closed around the document. “Do not ask me to promise beforehand that I will erase you. I will not promise that of my own husband in his mother’s house.”
He stepped to her then and took her face in both hands. His thumb passed once across her cheek. She caught the cuff of his coat in her fingers and held it.
“And do not put me in the next month already, Fitzwilliam. I am coming with you. Wherever it is we are going, we are going there together, and I shall thank you not to plan around your absence before I have given anyone permission to be absent.”
“I am not planning around my absence.”
“You are. You are six contingencies ahead of the carriage, and three of them have me in different rooms from you. I have noticed.”
He almost laughed. She felt his breath on her forehead. “Elizabeth —”
“I have noticed, and I am declining. We are leaving together. We shall stay together. If anything in the next fortnight requires us to be apart, you may bring it to me then, and I shall consider it on its merits. I shall hear you out. I shall weigh it. And then I shall decline to go.”
This time he did laugh — a single rough sound against her hair — and then he bent and kissed her, hard and brief, with the controlled urgency of a kiss he could not allow to run longer if he meant to leave on time. He stepped back. He let her go.
“Put it in your coat. And let it be seen only when it will benefit you.”
She put it in her coat.
From the yard, Fitzwilliam called. “Darcy, the ship will not wait.”
The word went through the house like a bell.
Darcy sighed and pulled her close to his chest for one more embrace. “I love you.”
Elizabeth let herself fall, just a little. She closed her eyes and hoped he would not notice the tear stain she was leaving on his coat.