LXX
Let Me Hear It
By the time Elizabeth’s sworn statement was read aloud, Darcy had been in the dock for seven hours.
Pemberton had saved it for last on purpose, and Darcy, as counsel rose with the document in his hand, knew why.
The prosecution had opened on Darcy’s character — the false name, the staged death, the whole pattern they called the conduct of a guilty man.
Pemberton had taken the day to dismantle the Crown’s substantive case by witnesses to the treason itself.
He had now reached the close, and the close was the wife.
Pemberton could not call her. A wife was not a legally competent witness in her husband’s criminal trial; she could neither testify against him nor for him, by the rule that had stood in English law for two centuries.
The statement was the way round it. Taken before a magistrate prior to trial, sworn, and admitted as evidence of Mr Darcy’s character on the defence’s discretion, it was the closest thing Elizabeth could have to a voice in the court that was deciding whether her husband would hang and, in consequence, whether she herself would stand arraignment within the hour.
The prosecution could not effectively rebut.
They had already opened on Mr Darcy’s conduct towards her in their case-in-chief; the rule against repeated argument would not permit them to call rebuttal witnesses on the same ground.
They might, in theory, attempt to dispute the matter of the prior arrangement, but to do so at this hour, in this room, with the wife visible in the gallery and her condition equally so, would have been to expose themselves to a piece of theatre no jury in London would forget.
Sterling’s counsel had visibly reached the calculation, some minutes before Pemberton rose, that he would not attempt it.
The statement would be read. The defence would rest. Whatever the jury was going to carry into its deliberations the following day, the last evidence to reach them in the case would be Mrs Darcy’s account of her marriage, in her own measured words, read aloud by counsel, with her sitting in the gallery in front of them.
Pemberton read it himself. He read it slowly, because the document had been prepared with weeks of care, refusing any phrase she could not stand by.
He read of the prior arrangement with Selby — without naming him, because the statement did not require it — and of the conduct of the man to whom she had been promised, and of the danger from which Mr Darcy of Pemberley had removed her at considerable cost to himself.
He read of the conditions of the marriage.
He read of Darcy’s restraint and honour during the months of concealment, and of the moment at which Darcy had told her the truth, and of her continued residence in his house thereafter under her own free choice.
He read of the marriage articles, entered as a separate exhibit, which the bench inspected with the close attention reserved for documents that would, in any other case, have been the centre of the evidence rather than its supporting margin.
Darcy did not look at Elizabeth while the statement was being read.
He could not.
He looked at the floor of the dock, which had been polished sometime that morning and had a small fleck of what might have been wax near the rail.
He listened to his wife’s words being read aloud in a court of treason.
There were parts of his own conduct over the last fourteen months that he had not yet forgiven himself for, and hearing Elizabeth name them — evenly, in writing, in her own voice — did not absolve him of them.
He had let her live in his house for four months, not knowing whose house it was.
He had compromised her safety by every act of concealment.
He had allowed her to be brought to London and confined to his uncle’s house and threatened with arrest, and to carry his child visibly through a city of strangers who had been told that she was a fraud upon them.
And despite all that, her account was generous. Far more generous than he deserved.
His eyes had filled, and he forced the tears down with the discipline he had been practising since the cutter, because he was not going to weep in the dock of a court in front of two hundred people, and he was not going to weep in front of his wife, who had not wept in any of the proceedings of the day so far as he could see, and who was sitting there now calm, having carried him since the twenty-third of July and ready to carry him through one more afternoon.
When Pemberton finished reading the statement, he laid it on the table and rested.
The bench called the adjournment for the day, closing arguments to be held tomorrow.
Darcy was led out of the dock.
He looked up at the gallery one last time on the way out.
Elizabeth was still looking at him. Her face had not altered through the whole day.
Only her hand had moved — it had come up to rest against the swell of her gown, where the child was.
In the second before he was taken through the door to the cell where he would be held until the verdict, Darcy knew what she was telling him — that she was here, that the child was here, that they were both here, that whatever the verdict was tomorrow they had both been with him today.
He went down to the cell and put his face against the cold stone of the wall and stood there a long while.
Elizabeth rose with the rest of the gallery. She had been on the bench for nearly eight hours with only a few moments of recess.
The blood went out of her head as she came to her feet, with the small unmistakable lurch of a body that had not been properly fed since the previous evening and had been required, since then, to sit upright and breathe shallowly behind a panelled screen through a day of testimony in which she had not been able to permit herself to weep, faint, or otherwise behave as a woman in her condition might reasonably have wished to behave.
Her back, which she had been carrying carefully since the noon recess, locked up entirely.
There were black spots in front of her eyes. The rail of the gallery doubled.
She tried to put her hand on the rail, and it seemed to be a slightly different distance from her than it had been a moment before. She missed it on the first attempt, found it on the second, and held to it with a grip she could not feel in her fingers.
“Lizzy!”
Jane was at her right elbow. Georgiana was at her left.
Between them, they could not, Elizabeth thought from a great distance, be quite strong enough to keep her upright if the floor decided to do what it appeared to be considering.
She did not say so. She did not, just at the moment, have the breath for it.
Richard was at her side before she had fully understood that she was sinking. That the floor had somehow rippled and was proceeding to swallow her.
He put his hand under her arm, as he had carried wounded brother officers off worse fields than a London courtroom, and he took her weight against his side without making any visible show of the fact that he was taking it.
He turned her towards the stair. Jane went ahead.
Georgiana followed behind. The rest of the gallery, which had been gathering its hats and its shawls and beginning the slow shuffle towards the door, made way for them with the respect of a public for a woman with child who had sat through a treason trial without complaint and was being assisted from the building because she had at last reached the end of what her body could do.
This was the worst possible thing she could have done in front of two hundred people if her object had been to be seen as steady.
It also occurred to her, half a second later, that this might be the most useful thing she had done in front of two hundred people in any other sense.
She did not have the breath to consider it further.
The earl came up to her in the small drawing room an hour after she had been brought home. He did not, when he entered, perform the usual courtesies. He came to the chair across from hers, sat down, and looked at her.
“You will not attend the court tomorrow.”
“My lord! I will — I mean to! I cannot fail to appear.”
“I am not putting it to you as a matter for discussion, Mrs Darcy. You will not attend. Pemberton has been informed. Richard has been informed. Mrs Hatchett has been informed. The carriage will not be brought round in the morning. I shall not have any servant in this house carry an instruction from you to the contrary. You will remain at Matlock House until I send for you.”
“His lordship’s reasons — ”
“His lordship’s reasons are that the woman who is presently sitting in front of him very nearly fainted in the public gallery of a Crown court an hour ago, and that the woman in question is five months gone with my nephew’s child, and that I shall not, having spent four months arranging that she should not be in Newgate, deliver her to a sickbed by my own carelessness on the second day.
That is the first reason. There are others.
They do not signify. The first is sufficient. ”
Richard, who had come in behind his father and remained standing by the door, spoke for the first time.
“My father is correct, Mrs Darcy. I shall not take you tomorrow. I should have refused to take you today had I known what the day would cost you.”
“You would not have refused. You know he needed to see me there. That everyone needed to see me there, that I needed to see him.”