LVIII The Wife in the Tower
LVIII
The Wife in the Tower
The Tower was less gothic in reality than it had been in imagination. It was stone, gates, uniforms, lists, keys, and the unpitying ordinary business of confinement made procedural.
Richard had insisted on accompanying her as far as the outer office. He stood beside her while the gaoler examined Pemberton’s authorisation and the Earl’s note and the marriage paper itself, folded and unfolded by official fingers she would have liked to break one by one.
At length, the documents were returned.
“You may see him for half an hour,” the gaoler said. “No packages. No sealed papers. Conversation in my hearing.”
Elizabeth took back the marriage paper and put it inside her coat.
“If I were less certain that you had been raised among your own species,” she said, “I might suppose you had been hatched from regulations.”
The man’s face did not alter. Richard snorted behind her and was obliged to cover his mouth.
“This way, ma’am.”
The room to which she was brought had one narrow window, a table, three chairs, and the kind of scrubbed severity institutions mistake for virtue.
The gaoler stationed himself at the far wall, having seen every manner of human interview and valuing none of them.
Elizabeth stood by the table and waited for nearly a quarter of an hour.
Then the door on the inner side opened, and Darcy came in.
For a moment, she did not breathe.
He was himself at once — the same height, the same shoulders, the same contained force. Yet prison had laid some new brittleness over his face. He looked worn — not broken — worn in the way a blade is worn against something that does not yield.
He stopped when he saw her.
The door closed behind him. There was a gaoler in the room, a table between them, and half an hour allowed by the state.
For a moment, he did not move. His face blanched in horror — that she was here, in this room, in his sight, on the wrong side of a guarded door — but in the space of two seconds, he mastered every response that came up in him at once.
The hand that had begun to lift towards her stopped at his side.
The breath he had drawn was let out without sound.
His face, which had altered so plainly when he saw her that the gaoler glanced at him, was put back into the order observation required.
He crossed the small distance to the table and stood with his hand on the back of the chair, and what was in his eyes was not the look of having hoped for her. It was the look of having hoped she had been kept very far away from this place and discovering now that she had not been.
“Madam.”
He could not, she saw, bring himself to Mrs Darcy without knowing on what ground she was sitting in front of him.
He had been told only that he had a visitor.
He had probably walked the corridor from the Bell Tower assuming Pemberton.
If she had come on any other footing than openly as his wife, Mrs Darcy would betray her in front of the gaoler.
Madam was the most his prudence could manage until she had told him the rest.
“Mr Darcy, I am exercising the privilege of a wife to call upon her husband in his place of confinement. The Lieutenant of the Tower has been good enough to permit me the half hour. Will you sit down?”
It reached him in order — that she had named herself openly, that she had done so in front of the gaoler without apparent concern, and that this could only mean that the concealment under which he had married her had been abandoned, by someone, by some means he had not been able to control or even to be told of.
His hand on the back of the chair tightened until the knuckles whitened.
“Sit down, Fitzwilliam,” she pleaded more softly.
He sat.
It was not obedience. It was a man buying himself two seconds in which to do the work of not speaking.
She saw him close his teeth on three different sentences before any of them got into the air.
She saw him lay his forearms on the table because if he had not laid them somewhere they would have gone across it to her, and the gaoler would have written that in his report, and Sterling’s counsel would have made what use of it they could.
When he spoke, his voice was very low and very level. “You should not be here.”
“I am of the opposite opinion.”
“Elizabeth —”
“If you mean that it is dangerous to be seen as your wife, you are too late. Our marriage has been in every drawing room in London for the last three days. Miss Bingley called at Matlock House and made some rather impudent assumptions about my character before Georgiana. Your sister informed her, in defending me, that I am your wife. The rest… well. You can imagine how quickly word spread.”
His eyes lifted to her, and his hand twitched on the table — the fingers curling as if he held hers in them. “Georgiana?”
“She is well. We spend most of our hours together. She is the chief delight of my days just now.”
His face lightened somewhat. “I am glad of it. How…” He swallowed, and his hand twitched again. “How stand other matters?”
“Mr Pemberton has been at work for better than a week, and the earl has put before him what information the colonel and I could give, which, I am told, is not inconsequential. My sister Jane has called at Matlock House twice and will call again tomorrow. There is a…” Elizabeth paused and glanced at the guard in the corner.
“Well, the records from your London house have been consulted and brought before counsel. The danger has, I regret to tell you, advanced beyond the point where my absence from this room would materially improve it.”
His eyes closed for a fraction of a second.
When he opened them again, she saw what she had been waiting for — not the prison face that he had brought into the room, but the man who had spent four months at Auchengray learning to keep his face out of his voice and was now applying every part of that practice to keep his voice out of his face.
“Then you are… not immune. Your connection to me has endangered you,” he whispered. “Just as I feared.”
“No!” She reached impulsively for his hand across the table.
The gaoler nearly stood in the corner of her vision. “Madam,” he said in a warning tone.
Elizabeth sighed and jerked her open hand into the air. “I am not passing him any packages! You never said I may not touch my husband, so I will take his hand if I please. You sit there and do your duty and be sure I do not stay one second above my time.”
The gaoler subsided, and Elizabeth relieved him of the glare with which she had pinned him. Darcy, when she looked back, was trying and failing to disguise a smile. “You look well, my love,” he murmured
“I am well.”
“Are you? You have not been overtaxed?”
She wove her fingers through his. “I am tired. I have been seasick. I have wept a great deal in private and not very much in public. I have eaten what I can keep down. I am being attended by your aunt’s own woman and by Mrs Hatchett.
I have not been alone in any room in which I might have been alone too long.
I am as well as a woman in my present situation can reasonably be. ”
His eyes flickered at seasick and situation, and the implication behind both, and the change that went across his face was one of full comprehension. He looked down at the table. He clenched his free hand on the wood. He did not lift it. He did not, for a long moment, lift his face, either.
When he did, what was in it was no longer mastered. It was, briefly, all of him. “Elizabeth. By heaven, Elizabeth! You should not have come here!”
“You said so already, Fitzwilliam. The choice was mine, and I made it while I still had liberty to do so.”
“I cannot — right now, in this place — I cannot —”
“I know. You do not have to. I know.”
She covered his fist with her other hand, and eventually, he turned his palm, slowly, until it lay open under hers on the table. He looked down a moment, then back at her. The feeling in his face was too guarded for the gaoler and too unguarded for anyone who knew him less.
“What do you make of my uncle?”
“Formidable. Offended. Entirely useful. He has summoned every favour in London — it seems everyone owes him one — and wishes me to tell him the truth whether he enjoys it or not.”
“That does sound like him.”
“There is something further you should know. Sterling has petitioned to nullify the marriage.”
He did not move. His hand on hers did not tighten or release. He stared at her, working through it with the speed of having thought of every weapon Sterling might use against him and not of this one.
“Has he?”
“It was filed yesterday. Pemberton had the papers within the hour, but he has been preparing the answer since my first interview with him last week.”
His jaw flexed, and he blinked at the wall. She followed each thought as it fell through his mind, for she had learned to read his face as well as his silences. Each time his eyes flared with the recognition of a new point, each crease of his brow as he dismissed it and thought of another.
“It will not succeed,” he said at last. “It cannot.” His voice had gone very quiet.
“The marriage was contracted with proper consent on your part — within your understanding of what you were consenting to — and ratified by… by our subsequent actions, and by your continued residence in my house under the name, and by — ”
He stopped. His eye dropped, briefly, to the drape of her gown at the table’s edge. He did not let himself look there for longer than a fraction of a second. He brought his eye back to her face.
“And by the evidence that Pemberton shall, I expect, present in due course.”
“That is Pemberton’s view as well.”
His jaw ticked. “Then he… already…?”
“He has been thorough in researching the facts.”
Darcy’s eyes closed, and his jaw shifted. “You ought not to have been put to that interview. The indelicacy of it —”