LXVIII
In the Box
Webb was good in the box. He had given evidence in courtrooms before, in capacities Darcy was glad not to have enquired about, and he gave it now in the same calm, detached manner a senior clerk might use to deliver an account of a year’s bookkeeping.
He laid out the original instructions Darcy had given him in April of the previous year.
He laid out the progress of the investigation.
He laid out the customs records, the manifests, and the schedule of MacNeil’s debts and the timing of Sterling’s payments.
He did not editorialise. He let the documents do the work.
The prosecution’s counsel cross-examined him for the better part of an hour. The cross-examination was clever and got nowhere; Webb had been answering exactly such questions, in his own internal accounts, for a twelvemonth.
Hodges followed. The prosecution’s counsel rose to cross-examine before Pemberton had finished his own questioning, which was the first sign Darcy had had that the man across the room intended to make a meal of Hodges if he could.
The questioning was clever. “You were in your master’s employ at the time he received warning of the warrant against him?
You were with him at Rosings when the warning came?
You were privy to the arrangements by which he was thereafter reported dead?
You yourself helped to make those arrangements?
You accepted a retainer from him for that work? ”
Hodges answered each question in the affirmative.
He did not soften. He did not equivocate.
He named the dates. He named the sum of the retainer.
He acknowledged that he had been one of three persons in England in April of last year who had known Mr Darcy was not dead, and that he had concealed that fact from the household, from the staff, from his master’s solicitor in London, and from Mr Darcy’s sister.
He acknowledged that he had returned, in the months that followed, to the London house in Grosvenor Square on numerous occasions, by night, to retrieve correspondence and papers his master required, and that none of these visits had been entered in any log the house’s regular staff would have seen.
The prosecution’s counsel sat back with the small satisfied gesture of having worked his way to this point over some minutes and arrived.
“So, Mr Hodges. By your own admission, you assisted your master in faking his death, concealed his survival from his own solicitor and his own sister, secretly entered his London property under cover of night to remove documents, and accepted payment for the doing of all of it. Do you wish the court to believe that these were the actions of a confidential servant whose master was innocent of the charges against him?”
Hodges set his hands on the rail of the witness box. “My lord.”
He had addressed himself to the bench. The judge looked at him.
“I have answered every question put to me by my learned friend in the affirmative, and I have done so because every fact in his question was true. I should be grateful if the court would permit me to add one observation.”
The judge inclined his head.
“Sir. My master had been warned, by a person whose position I shall not name in this court but whose name the bench has been informed of, that a warrant was being prepared against him on a charge of high treason, and that the warrant had been procured by Mr Sterling, whose hand by that date had reached far enough into the Home Office.
My master made the determination that he would not permit any person in his household to be exposed to questioning.
If my master had remained alive on the public record, every person who had served him faithfully would have been called upon to swear before magistrates as to his whereabouts, his correspondence, his associates, and his intentions.
Each of those persons would have been required to lie or to be a party to his concealment.
“My master chose to spare them that choice by becoming a dead man on the public record, so that no servant of his could be compelled to commit perjury for him and no woman associated with him could be threatened on his account.
The arrangements I assisted with were arrangements made to shield other persons from the consequences of his danger, not to shield him from the consequences of his conduct.
“I accepted his retainer because I had been with him ten years, and I knew the manner of man he was, and I did not require to be paid to assist him, but he would not have it otherwise. Sir, I shall tell you what I shall tell any man who asks me. My master’s secrecy was not the secrecy of a guilty conscience.
It was the secrecy of a man who had calculated that a year of his own legal death was the lesser injury, by every measure he could weigh, than the injuries that would otherwise have fallen on persons innocent of any part in the case against him.
I should be ashamed to call myself a confidential servant of his if I did not say so to this court. ”
The prosecution’s counsel had been, Darcy thought, a man who had practised many years at the bar and had not, perhaps, been answered in precisely this manner before in any court room of the kingdom.
He did not, at once, frame his next question.
The judge waited. The jury, which had been watching Hodges with the small attention reserved for a servant put up by the defence to do flattering work, was now watching him with a different attention entirely.
Sterling’s counsel sat.
Pemberton declined to question, and Hodges stepped down.
Darcy watched him go. He had been holding the rail of the dock for the last three minutes without registering that he was holding it. He let it go. The wood was warm where his hand had been.
Bingley was called next.
Darcy had not known, before the morning, in what order Pemberton intended to put the character witnesses or even the names of everyone he got. He had told himself it did not matter. He had been wrong. He had not been prepared for Bingley.
Bingley came up from the witnesses’ bench. He had perhaps four paces between the bench and the box, and as he passed under the gallery, his eye lifted, by some instinct Darcy could not have named, towards the screen at the far end.
Darcy saw Bingley’s eye find Elizabeth behind the screen, and find Miss Bennet sitting beside her with her hand still in Elizabeth’s lap.
Bingley swallowed.
His face did not change for the public benches, because Bingley had been raised well enough to know what a courtroom required of him.
But Darcy, who had known him since they were boys at school, saw the small movement of his throat and the brief grief that travelled across his face before he mastered it.
Jane Bennet in the gallery, holding her sister’s hand, with her sister visibly carrying Darcy’s child, and Bingley about to testify in a treason trial — every part of which contained, in Bingley’s understanding of it, his own failure to have made Jane Bennet his wife a year ago when he might have done.
He took the box. He gave Darcy the small, awkward bow he had been giving him since they were eighteen. He took the oath.
He spoke of Darcy as he had known him since school.
He spoke of Darcy’s conduct at Pemberley, in town, at Netherfield.
He spoke of Darcy’s care for Georgiana after their father’s death.
He spoke of Darcy’s character in terms that were neither flattering nor defensive but even and a little stunned, telling the court the truth about the closest friend he had in the world.
When the Crown’s counsel rose to cross-examine, the questioning began civilly. “You are, sir, an old friend of Mr Darcy’s. You have been received in his house at Pemberley on a number of occasions. You consider yourself, perhaps, in a position to judge his character better than most.”
Bingley answered each in the affirmative.
“And you are also previously acquainted, sir, with Mrs Darcy and with her family from Hertfordshire.”
Bingley reddened, but said that he was. That he had leased an estate near the Bennet home, and knew the family well.
“Your acquaintance, sir, with the eldest Miss Bennet — Miss Jane Bennet, presently in the gallery — was understood, by your own circle and by hers, to have been of such a character as to give rise to a general expectation that an offer would be made.”
Bingley’s face altered.
Darcy saw it from the dock and understood, before Bingley had said a word, where counsel was going. He had not expected this line. He should have. He had not. Heat came up into his face, and he looked at the floor of the dock and did not look up.
Bingley said, after a moment, “I am — I am not certain that I can —”
“It is a question of fact, sir. The expectation existed. Yes or no?”
“It — yes. It existed. I had — I had formed an attachment. I do not believe my attentions were imprudent. I had reason to suppose them — that is —”
“And yet, sir, you did not make the lady an offer. You left Netherfield in the November of that year. You did not return.”
Bingley stared at his hands. “I did not return.”
“Will you tell the court, sir, the reason you did not return?”
Bingley did not answer.
The room had gone the small, hushed quiet Darcy had come to recognise as the prelude to evidence the bench would mark.
“Mr Bingley. The court is waiting for your answer.”
Bingley looked at the floor of the witness box.
Then he looked at Pemberton. Pemberton did not move, did not give him a signal, did not relieve him.
Pemberton had decided, Darcy understood, that this question would have to be answered honestly and that any attempt to shield Bingley from it would only confirm in the jury’s mind that what they were now being told to suspect was some devastating truth.
Bingley spoke at last, very quietly.
“I had been — I had been given to understand that the lady’s affections were not engaged. That my attentions were unwelcome. That a continued pursuit on my part would distress her and do me no credit, and that I should be doing better by all parties to withdraw.”
“Given to understand by whom, sir?”
“By — by my friend.”
“By Mr Darcy?”
“Yes.”
A small movement went through the jury box.
Darcy did not look at it. He did not look at the gallery.
He could not, in that moment, have looked anywhere but the floor of the dock without losing what was left of his composure.
He had tried to make peace with that error, and what it had cost all concerned.
Elizabeth said once that the matter was forgiven, but she had not heard it spoken in a court of treason in the presence of two hundred strangers, with Jane Bennet sitting in the gallery beside the wife he had taken with such fierce difficulty after — partly because of — what he had done to Jane Bennet.
The prosecution’s counsel did not, mercifully, ask Bingley to elaborate on what Darcy had said. He had got what he needed. He moved instead to the inference.
“So, Mr Bingley. We have on your evidence that Mr Darcy, the defendant in this case, was a man who intervened in his closest friend’s romantic attachment to the sister of his own future wife, persuaded that friend that the lady’s affections were not engaged when in fact, as we may presume from the lady’s continued unmarried state and her present attendance at this court in support of her sister, they may well have been, and thereby prevented an honourable engagement between two persons who were, by your own admission and by the general expectation of two counties, on the verge of one.
Would you say, sir, that this is the conduct of a man who is uniformly honourable in his dealings with the persons closest to him? ”
Bingley raised his head.
Darcy looked up at last.
He had to. He could not have remained looking at the floor while Bingley answered that. He looked at his friend in the witness box, and Bingley looked at him for the briefest interval — not in apology, not in accusation, but in plain recognition — and then Bingley turned back to counsel.
“Sir. I will tell the court the truth as I understand it. Mr Darcy gave me his opinion. I accepted it. I was, at the time, less in possession of the lady’s true sentiments than I should have been, and I took my friend’s account in preference to the work of forming my own.
I have come to believe, in the months since, that my friend was mistaken, but not maliciously so.
He may have misled me. He may have permitted me to make a grave mistake. I do not seek to excuse him of it.”
A murmur went through the room. Counsel waited for it to settle.
“Then, sir, you concede —”
“I have not finished, sir.”
Counsel stopped.
“My friend gave me his opinion. He did not compel my conduct. I left Netherfield because I had business, a perfectly legitimate cause for a short absence. I did not return because I chose not to. The attachment I had formed, I might have pursued in defiance of any opinion he or any other man offered me, had I been confident enough in my own judgement to do so. I was not. The fault for that, sir, is mine and not his. A man, in the end, must be accountable for his own conduct. I shall not stand in this court and permit the prosecution to make my friend responsible for an act of cowardice that belonged to me.”
The murmur began again. The judge did not, at once, suppress it.
The Crown’s counsel attempted a recovery. “Yet you have admitted, sir, that Mr Darcy gave you the opinion that resulted in your withdrawal.”
“I have admitted it. I do not retract it. I have also told you that the withdrawal was mine. If the court wishes to malign a man’s character on the strength of his having given me bad counsel, the court should be putting every man in this room in the dock for some wrong or other.”
The prosecution’s counsel sat.
He did not redirect. He had got the murmur.
He had got the admission. He had not got what he had been working towards, which was Bingley conceding that Darcy was a man whose private conduct towards those closest to him was at variance with the gentlemanly character the defence had been working to establish.
Pemberton rose. He asked Bingley one question. “Mr Bingley, did Mr Darcy, at any time, ever lie to you?”
Bingley's face undertook an expression of horror. “Never once.”
“And did he ever ask you to lie on his behalf?”
“He did not. Darcy has always been excruciatingly honest.”
“Thank you.” Pemberton sat.
Bingley stepped down.
He did not look at the gallery as he passed it on the way back to the witnesses’ bench. Darcy understood why. If Bingley had looked at Jane Bennet again before sitting down, he would not have been able to sit down.