LIV Elizabeth Darcy #2
The Gaoler took up the warrant from the lieutenant who had brought him and unfolded it with care.
He read it aloud in a flat administrative voice; he had read a thousand such warrants and meant to read a thousand more.
“Fitzwilliam Darcy, of Pemberley in the County of Derby, gentleman, charged on the King’s information with the crime of high treason against His Majesty’s Crown and dignity, to be held in close custody within His Majesty’s Tower of London pending trial before commissioners of oyer and terminer at such time as His Majesty’s pleasure shall direct. ”
The Gaoler folded the warrant again. He looked up. “Do you confirm your identity as the person named within?”
Darcy had been turning this question over since Aberdeen. He had not arrived at an answer that was both safe and honest. He settled instead for the answer that was merely honest.
“I do.”
“Thank you. The clerk will record it.”
The clerk, who had not been visible until that moment, wrote in a ledger at the side of the desk. Darcy did not see what he wrote. A small portion of himself closed behind the confirmation — the last useful possession he had under that name, surrendered into the record.
“Your effects, Mr Darcy.”
He produced what he had on his person, which was little.
A purse with the remainder of the coin he had not given Richard.
A pocket-watch that had been his father’s.
A handkerchief, folded small, marked with a device he had no wish to explain to the Gaoler and which the Gaoler did not ask him to explain.
He held it in his palm a moment, the marked corner up, the small, careful needlework his wife had been carrying since November and which he had taken from her that night at the inn when Richard awakened him, for no better reason than that he had wanted something of hers to keep.
He turned it once between his fingers and put it back.
The Gaoler watched him hesitate. He did not press for it. Handkerchiefs were hardly forbidden.
“Anything further, Mr Darcy?”
“Nothing further.”
“Very well.” The Gaoler made a small mark in the ledger.
“Your accommodation has been determined. You will be lodged in the Bell Tower, in a single room on the upper floor. The room has a fireplace, a chair, a table, a narrow bed, and a window of which the bars permit a view of the inner ward but not of the river. You will be permitted, on payment of the customary fees, to receive your meals from a private source, to have candles, fuel, books, and writing materials, and to instruct a servant to attend upon you within the bounds of the Tower. The fees are listed and may be settled by your solicitor or by such person as you may designate. You will not be permitted to receive visitors except at my discretion. Have you any questions?”
“My family have been informed?”
“They will be. The Earl of Matlock shall be advised directly. Once his lordship’s solicitor has left his card, he shall be admitted at my convenience.”
“Thank you.”
“You may also, if you wish, send out a single line by the next post acknowledging your safe arrival. The communication will be read.”
“I shall send it.”
“Very well.” The Gaoler stood. “Mr Darcy. You will forgive me for saying so, but I have had men of your standing in this office before, and the manner in which a gentleman conducts himself in the first hour of his confinement is generally a sound predictor of the manner in which he conducts himself in the months that follow. You have conducted yourself well. I shall hope to have no occasion to think otherwise of you.”
Darcy only inclined his head.
“This way, Mr Darcy.”
They took him up the stairs to the Bell Tower in the grey dawn light.
The room was as the Gaoler had described it.
A fire had been laid in the grate but not lit.
The chair was at the table, and the table was beneath the window.
The bed was narrow, and the blanket on it was clean.
The door closed behind him. The lock turned.
He stood for some seconds in the middle of the room without moving. Then he sat down on the bed, because there was no longer any reason to stand. He put his face in his hands.
He had left her asleep. That was the part that would not leave him.
He had eased himself out from under her arm and not woken her, because to wake her would have been to give her the chance to follow him down the stair, and he could not afford to have her at his elbow when the soldiers came through the door.
He had stood up in the dark, found his coat by feel, kissed her temple once without pressure, and gone out.
The door had not quite caught behind him.
He had heard it not catch and chosen not to go back.
He hoped, with the part of his mind that was permitted to hope anything at this hour, that she had been moved to a softer bed by now.
That the inn at Inverurie was behind her.
That Richard had got her south by some route he could not be told.
That she was, or would be soon, somewhere with a fire that drew properly and a window with a curtain across it and a coverlet she could lay her hand on without remembering whose place beside her had been empty when she woke.
He hoped she was warm. He hoped, more than anything else he had hoped in his life, that someone had put a hot brick in the bed at her feet.
He had no way of knowing. He had only the picture he had made of it, which was the picture of her at Auchengray on the kind of January morning when the wind had come off the headland, and she had slept later than usual because the room had been cold, and he had stood at the slit in the mural chamber wall and watched her at the household accounts before she had known he was awake.
He wept, briefly, into his own palms.
When he had stopped, he sat up. He drew breath, slowly, and made himself stand and go to the chair where his coat lay.
The handkerchief was in the inner pocket where he had put it when the Gaoler had let him keep it.
He took it out and held it in his palm a moment, the Pemberley mark uppermost, and was on the point of returning it when his fingers caught on something behind the lining.
He stopped.
The pocket had a second fold inside it, deep against the seam, where the lining had been turned and stitched neatly closed.
He worked his fingers in. There was a paper folded very small, no larger than a calling card, slipped into the fold as though it had been put there with care and an eye to remaining undiscovered.
He tore at the light stitches that concealed it and drew it out.
He did not at first know what it was. The handwriting, when he had unfolded it twice and brought it to the grey light from the window, was Elizabeth’s.
He stood looking at it before he had read a word, working out the only way it could have arrived in his coat.
The coat had been with him since they left Auchengray.
The pocket had been against his chest for five days.
She must have put the note in his clothing while he was elsewhere about the house — packing, perhaps, or speaking with Mrs MacLeod about what was to be left behind — and she had said nothing of it, and she had stitched the lining over it with her own hand, and she had sent him south wearing it without his knowing.
My dearest husband,
If you are reading this, then we are in worse straits than I had hoped, and you are alive, which is better than I had feared. I shall take what victories are on offer.
I am writing this on the afternoon before we leave Auchengray.
You are in the yard with Angus, and the colonel is saddling the horses.
I have perhaps ten minutes before you come in, which is just time enough to write a note I hope you will never read and find a place to hide it where you will not be forced to surrender it.
Come back to me, Fitzwilliam. I love you past sense and beyond any reason I can command. I shall be unbearable until I have you again, and I shall be insupportable when I do, and you have only yourself to thank for either.
Your most impatient and besotted
Lizzy
He read it a second time. He read it a third, and stood there a long moment with his head bent. He did not weep again. He had not the room left in him for it.
After a while, he refolded the paper along its existing creases and put it back where she had put it, deep against the seam, inside the lining of the coat.
He smoothed the cloth over it. He took up the handkerchief, which had been on the table beside him while he stood, and put it back into the outer pocket above the note.
He put the coat on. He sat down in the chair beneath the window and looked out at what could be seen of the inner ward in the grey morning, and he made the picture of her again, with her hand on the seam of his coat the day before the road south, and held it.
He sat down at the table beneath the window, and he set himself to do the only useful thing that remained to him for the morning, which was to compose, in his head, the line he would send out by the post.