I Am Coming First to You
LXVII
My dearest Elizabeth,
By the time you read this, the worst waiting of our marriage may be nearly over.
Or it may be preparing only to alter its shape.
I would spare you both possibilities if I could.
As I cannot, I must content myself with writing across the one night still left to us before the court attempts to arrange our lives according to its understanding.
Pemberton was here this afternoon. He is in a state of ferocity so well-bred it can only mean he is satisfied with the evidence.
Richard’s last note would have done me good even if it had contained less of you than it did.
My uncle, I am told, has reached that degree of calm which in him generally precedes devastation for his opponents. I am therefore almost easy.
I am not easy where you are concerned. I never shall be again, I think, not in the old sense.
A man who has seen his wife walk into danger carrying his child does not recover earlier simplicities of pulse.
Still less does he recover them when he knows she walked there partly because his own concealments first taught the world where to strike.
If tomorrow is kind, I shall come out to you altered.
Not in love for you; there I have been beyond amendment for some time.
Altered rather in my sense of what may be owed between two people who have borne one another through as much as we have borne.
There is no room left in me for any life that is not entirely yours in the keeping.
You must not spend the morning imagining how I look. I warn you in advance that prison has not improved me, and that if you continue to love me under daylight and in court dress, I shall be vain enough to consider it a permanent condition.
I have thought of writing something brave.
It would be out of place between us. The truth is better.
I want you. I want our child. I want the ordinary future from which we have been so long divided that it has begun to feel indecently luxurious.
I want to wake and know not only that you are in the bed beside me, but that there need be no law, no alias, no guard, no witness, and no fear between my hand and the finding of yours.
If they acquit me, I am coming first to you.
Yours,
Fitzwilliam
She read the last line twice and then lowered the page to her lap. Her own breathing had suddenly grown loud in her ears.
She pressed the heel of her hand below her ribs as though both the child and her own heart had leapt at once.
Jane came in softly some minutes later and found her still seated, the letter open on her knee. “Is he worried?”
Elizabeth looked up. There was no use pretending ignorance before Jane. “Yes.”
Jane crossed the room and sat beside her. “Will you sleep?”
Elizabeth considered the question honestly. “No.”
“Neither shall I,” Jane said. “But we may both lie down and preserve appearances.”
That was so exactly Jane’s philosophy of endurance that Elizabeth laughed and then, unexpectedly, laid the letter in her sister’s hand.
Jane read it without speaking. By the time she finished, her eyes were wet, though she had shed no tears. “He writes very well for a man in chains.”
“He does everything vexingly well.”
Jane handed the letter back. “Lizzy. Tomorrow, whatever happens, you must remember to breathe. Men in court forget women exist until a woman fails to breathe and then swoons, and then the entire court becomes alarmed at once.”
Elizabeth leaned her head briefly against Jane’s shoulder. “I shall try not to embarrass the law.”
“Do. It has enough embarrassments of its own.”
That night, she lay down and did not sleep.
The house went quiet around her by degrees.
Elizabeth turned first to one side, then the other, then onto her back with both hands clasped over the child as if the posture itself could hold her together.
The only way she could find to rest without some part of her going numb was to lie on her side and wedge herself against a mountain of pillows, which, on balance, was not nearly so supportive or warm as Darcy’s chest at her back and his arm around her middle.
The tears came at last, not violently but in a helpless, continual way that wet the pillow and offended her pride. She made no sound. When the fit had passed, she wiped her face, drew Darcy’s letter against her breast, and lay waiting for dawn.
The courtroom was already crowded when they arrived.
Pemberton had contrived a side entrance to spare Elizabeth the press at the front, yet not even that could protect her entirely from the collective turning of attention that met a visibly pregnant woman entering to hear her husband’s fate.
Curious. Hostile. Pitying. A few avid with the ugly hunger scandal always excites.
Elizabeth ignored them all.
She wore dark blue because Georgiana said the colour made her look sympathetic, and because Darcy had once, in December, told her it was his favourite shade.
Elizabeth was seated in the front row at the gallery’s far end, behind a panelled screen of the kind the court provided for women of standing in delicate health.
It cut her off from the direct view of the press benches and the public crowd at the rear of the gallery, but it had been set at such an angle as to leave her sightline clear to the bench, the counsel’s tables, the witness box, and the dock.
She could see the court entire. The court, if it troubled to look up, could see that Mrs Darcy was present.
The earl escorted Georgiana to her place and then took his own seat with grave, unconcerned hauteur, perfectly willing to let all of Westminster understand that if they mishandled his family, he would remember it for generations.
Richard stood until the last possible moment, speaking low with Pemberton and then with counsel.
Jane sat on Elizabeth’s other side with a handkerchief folded once in her lap and the calm face she wore when feeling too much to permit herself any performance of it.
Darcy was brought in under guard.
Even prepared, the sight struck her like a blow.
Court clothes had been contrived for him. Clean linen, proper coat, the whole decent fiction by which governments pretend that confinement and public judgement may coexist with gentlemanly forms. None of it altered the fact that she knew too well what rooms he had slept in to reach this one.
He took his place and looked up.
His gaze travelled the gallery once, found the screen at the far end, and stopped.
He did not visibly start. He did not allow his expression to alter for the benefit of anyone watching.
But she saw the precise second at which the visible fact of her — fuller now, unmistakably carrying, present before the whole world as his wife — entered him and remained there.
She knew he could see her because the screen had been arranged so that he could.
Then he looked to Jane, to Georgiana, to the earl, to Richard.
The family was all present.
Whatever else the court meant to do today, it would not do it to an isolated man.
Darcy stood in the dock and did not look at his wife.
He had looked at her once, on entering, because failing to do so would itself have drawn attention; a man brought before the court for treason who refused to acknowledge his wife in the gallery would have suggested to the jury that there was something between them not to be acknowledged.
He had looked, and seen the dark blue gown and the screen at the gallery’s far end set just so, and seen her face — fuller, paler, fixed on him with the same calm she had worn into the Tower in February — and he had known within the second that if he looked again during the morning, he would not be able to keep his own face in the order the proceedings required.
So he looked instead at counsel, at the bench, at the floor of the dock, at his own hands when they could be trusted not to shake.
Anywhere except the gallery’s far end, where Elizabeth was sitting with her sister and his cousin and the earl, with the child she was carrying having been brought into the building as a piece of evidence Darcy could not bear to think on for longer than half a second at a time.
The Crown’s counsel rose first.
The man was good. Darcy was forced to confess it within the first minute. He had been ready for theatrics, and what he got instead was a quiet, well-considered opening that framed the case not as a prosecution for treason — not directly — but as an examination of character.
“We come to you, gentlemen of the jury, not to ask you to convict a man for what he has done in some particular instance, but to ask you to determine, on the evidence, what manner of man he is. For a man who behaves in the manner you shall hear described, in matter after matter, year after year, has by his very conduct established the kind of man he is, and a man of that kind is capable of the offences with which he stands charged, and indeed of others not yet brought to light.”
The first matter the counsel proposed to examine was the marriage.
Not the petition to annul it. That had been refused, and the counsel named the refusal in a tone that suggested the bench had been imposed upon. It was no longer before the court.
What was before the court was his conduct during the marriage.
His use of a false name in the contracting of it.
His concealment of his legal identity from a gentlewoman who had been brought to believe she was marrying a Scottish baron.
His prior and subsequent direction of household business, financial dealings, and correspondence under the assumed name.
His staging of his own death. His allowance of his family — his sister, at the time of life when she most required him — to mourn him publicly for the better part of a year.
“Was this, gentlemen, the conduct of an innocent man? Of a man whose course was merely interrupted by a wicked accusation, who had retreated, as he and his counsel will doubtless tell us, only so far as was necessary to prepare a proper defence? Or was this, gentlemen, the conduct of a man whose conscience was sufficiently uneasy that he was prepared to deceive his solicitor, his banker, his sister, his neighbours, his tenants, and ultimately the gentlewoman whose hand he sought, rather than face the charges then being made against him? You will form your own view. I shall only say that a man who is capable of arranging his own death to escape inquiry is a man whose protestations of innocence ought to be weighed with very particular care.”
The counsel sat down.
Darcy had not, until then, grasped what the prosecution intended to do.
They were not going to argue the case on its facts.
They could not; the documentary case was too strong now, and Sterling’s note had already been admitted on Pemberton’s preliminary motion.
They were going to argue that even if every individual fact were granted, the pattern of conduct over the previous year was that of a guilty man, and that a guilty man’s protestations of innocence on the underlying charge ought not to be believed.
It was an attack on his character that did not require them to dispute a single piece of his counsel’s evidence.
And every piece of the attack was, on its face, true.
Heat came up into his face for the first time that morning, and he forced it down with the discipline he had learned at the dock at Tower wharf.
He did not look at Elizabeth. He could not.
If he looked at her now, while a barrister he had never met was reciting in open court the most private acts of their marriage, he would not be able to hold the rest of the morning.
He looked instead at Pemberton, who was already on his feet.
“My learned friend has accurately described the conduct of my client in the period in question.
My client did indeed marry under an assumed name.
He did indeed conceal his identity from his wife for some months thereafter.
He did indeed arrange to be reported dead in April of last year. None of this is in dispute.
“What is in dispute, gentlemen of the jury, is the reason for which a man of my client’s standing, fortune, and unblemished prior reputation would have undertaken so extraordinary a course.
The Crown invites you to conclude that the reason was a guilty conscience.
The defence will demonstrate, by witnesses sworn and by documents admitted, that the reason was the precise opposite — that my client had become aware, in the spring of last year, that he was the target of a fraud being constructed against him by the very gentleman whose counsel has just spoken.
That my client, judging correctly that a man of Mr Sterling’s resources and influence could not be safely confronted in open process before the fraud was fully exposed, withdrew from London under conditions of concealment in order to spend the months necessary to assemble the evidence against Mr Sterling that is now before this court.
“We shall further demonstrate, gentlemen, that every act of my client’s during the period of his concealment — including his marriage to the lady presently in the gallery — was conducted with such honour as the conditions permitted, and that his conduct towards his wife in particular was that of a man who refused to compromise her safety even when the temptation to do so must, by the natural feelings of a husband, have been considerable. ”
The heat came into his face again at the mention of Elizabeth in open court.
He did not look up.
Pemberton sat.
The first witness was called.