LXI The Arithmetic #2
He had not been able to answer her. He had only held her, with his hand where she had put it, and tried to register what could not yet be registered from outside her body.
She had felt the child move. She had felt it, and she had carried the knowledge across half of London into this room in order to give it to him first.
And now, he sat down to put his feelings to the page. Words he could frame with care, in hopes she would understand all that was kept back.
My dearest love,
I have reflected, since your visit, that our correspondence has until now been deficient in one particular: it has not sufficiently recorded my respect for the formidable alliance between you and my sister.
If you continue to conspire with her against the furniture of this family, I expect to come out of prison and find the entire house rearranged on principles from which there will be no appeal.
I should warn you, however, that if I find my study chair has been moved, I shall consider my consent to the larger campaign withdrawn.
A man must be permitted one room in which his wife has not improved him.
That is the last piece of nonsense I shall trouble you with in this letter. I do not entirely know how to begin the next part. I have written and discarded three openings and am running out of paper at a rate which is beginning to embarrass me.
What I should like to say is that since you left me yesterday, I have not been able to think of anything but you and what you brought me, and that I have been alone with the knowledge for an evening and a night and a morning and find that being alone with it is not an arrangement I shall ever consent to again.
Some things ought not to be borne by one person at a time, and that is one of them, and you have, characteristically, brought me my share of it across half a city and into a guarded room rather than let me be the last to know.
You will understand that I cannot put on a paper that other men will read what I am presently thinking.
There are sentences I have set down and crossed through twice already, because the gaoler is permitted to read what leaves this room, and I will not give him the things that belong to you.
Prison gives a man too much leisure in which to observe the injuries for which he cannot make immediate amends.
I think more often than is useful of all that should have fallen first on me and has instead been handed on to you — scrutiny, inconvenience, fear, and now this.
Forgive me the poverty of paper; it allows remorse even less room than tenderness.
I should like, before I run out of room, to record the following.
That I am thinking, as I write this, of the way you put your face against my throat in that room yesterday and held it there.
That I have not stopped feeling the place where my hand was when you placed it.
That I am attempting to picture you at this hour in a room with a fire that draws properly, a chair you have approved, and people about you who know your worth and have arranged themselves accordingly.
That I have not yet learned how to picture you anywhere without picturing my own hand in your hair, which has made the work of imagining you safe considerably harder than I had expected it to be.
That I have spent the evening remembering winter, and the exact turn by which you used to come to me when the fire had gone low.
I shall write again on Wednesday. By then, I shall have recovered the better part of my self-command and shall be able to send you a letter that is not three-quarters of it preamble.
Until then, my love, take care of what you have brought home with you. Take care of yourself. And do not let my sister move the study chair.
Yours,
F. D.
He read the letter once, sealed it, and sat a long time with the candle guttering lower beside him.
At length, he lay down fully dressed upon the narrow bed and stared into the dark. He had thought, when first arrested, that the worst part of imprisonment would be helplessness.
He had been wrong.
The worst part was knowledge.
March had taken shape not by weather but by fit.
Her gowns began to require strategy, particularly around the bust. Jane and Georgiana joined in with an earnestness Elizabeth found at once absurd and moving.
Tucks were altered. One set of stays retired from service with dignity and no hope of recall.
A dressmaker of diplomatic discretion arrived twice by the side entrance and left without asking a question that could not be answered by looking.
The change remained modest. A stranger would have seen only that Mrs Darcy’s colour was bright, her cheek soft, and her eyes weary. Anyone who loved her would have seen at once that the body was no longer wholly her own affair.
There were long stretches in which the case took up all available mind — Richard’s reports from Bristol and Portsmouth; MacNeil furious at being left to answer creditors Sterling had once paid off; Foss sullen, drinking too much, now at least drinking in the direction of talk; Harker slipping between fear and self-pity.
Pemberton winning small victories over Sterling’s petition and bringing home the news as if it offended him that justice should require so much labour to behave like justice.
Then, without warning, she would find herself standing by a cabinet in the blue salon with one hand at the small of her back and know that time had crossed some invisible boundary again.
The whole house, for all its kindness, was indecently full of people who were not him.
She wanted her husband, her lover — his hand, his voice, the difficult exactness of him, the right to turn in the night and find him.
There had been a time when she would rather have sat down for every set in an assembly than stand up with him once.
Now the thought of bringing his child into a world from which he might be withheld struck so hard that she had once or twice been obliged to sit down and master her face before the servants saw too much.
The third week of March brought Richard back to Matlock House, tired, wind-burned, and carrying a notebook so densely used it looked like a thing rescued from campaign rather than travel.
He arrived at eleven, ate two plates of cold beef in the library while reporting, and only then remembered to remove his gloves.
“MacNeil may break first,” he said. “Provided his ship comes to port in time, that is. I should have said Foss a fortnight ago, but MacNeil is angrier, and vanity moves quicker than grief. Sterling has cut him off too publicly. His wife knows it.”
Elizabeth looked up at once. “His wife?”
Richard, who was sawing through the second half of a heel of bread, nodded.
“There is a wife. Plain woman. Sharp eyes. Keeps the accounts because he cannot count past his own hand without assistance. She knows the debts are no longer being covered. I think she is the reason he has not bolted entirely.”
The sentence lodged in Elizabeth’s mind.
“And Marsh?” she asked.
Richard set down the bread.
“Still invisible. Webb was right about one thing. We do not get Marsh through pursuit. We get him when he believes his family can survive telling the truth, but buggar me if I can think how to convince him of that.”
The room altered around that word.
Family.
Until that instant, she had not felt the line in it with full force. A family was not an abstraction to a man like Marsh. It is a roof, a wife, children who must eat, a lodging that may be found or burned, a name that may still open a door at the baker’s if disgrace has not reached there first.
“Does he have a wife?” she asked.
Richard looked at her.
“Webb believes so. Not named in the papers because she was not thought relevant. I begin to suspect that was stupidity rather than economy.”
Jane, who had come in halfway through the report and now stood by the sideboard with the coffee pot in her hand, said quietly, “If there is a wife, it will not be your men who reach her first.”
Richard’s gaze shifted to her, then back to Elizabeth.
A silence followed in which three intelligent persons saw the same thing at once.
Elizabeth set down her cup.
“No,” she said. “It will not.”
Nothing more was decided that morning. It was too soon. They had only the outline of a possibility, not yet its address.
Yet when Elizabeth went upstairs later to change her gown, she paused before the glass and laid one hand lightly over the small visible rise beneath the fabric.
The body had indeed formed its own calendar.
So, it seemed, had the case.