Chapter 4 The Cost #2
Elizabeth looked at him across the narrow room.
The candle stub was nearly gone, the light reduced to a yellow flicker that caught the angles of his face and left the rest in shadow.
He sat in the chair the way he stood in a drawing room — straight-backed, composed, prepared to remain as long as the situation required.
The situation, as he understood it, required him to sit in an uncomfortable chair in a cold room and watch his wife sleep, because she had spent the evening intercepting poison and capturing spies, and the only thing he could do now that was of any use was to be present, physically, in the room where she rested.
It was not strategy. It was not intelligence.
It was the blunt, intractable devotion of a man who had no operational role left to play and had found the only role that remained.
“Come to bed, Fitzwilliam,” Elizabeth said. “I’m not going anywhere tonight.”
He came. He lay beside her on top of the coverlet, fully clothed, his boots still on, which was a violation of every standard he maintained regarding the treatment of bedlinens and which told Elizabeth more about his state of mind than any words could have conveyed.
She did not comment on the boots. She turned on her side, facing him, and placed one hand on his arm, and the arm beneath her fingers was rigid with the tension of a man who was holding himself together through the application of will to muscle.
She slept. She did not know when. The transition between waking and sleep was not a line but a slope — she smelt coffee, and the cold ash of last night’s fire —, and she descended it without awareness, as one descends a hill in fog — the ground changing beneath her feet without announcement, the world narrowing until it contained only the warmth beside her and the weight of the coverlet and the distant, persistent sound of the bracket clock in the hall below, which marked the hours with the indifference of a mechanism that did not care who slept and who did not.
Morning came with light through thin curtains and the sound of the Gardiner household resuming operations — which meant, in practice, the sound of four children waging a campaign of determined existence against the conventions of silence and order.
The first assault came at seven o’clock: Henry, who had somehow evaded the nurse and descended two flights of stairs with the stealth of a five-year-old who had learned that bare feet on carpet were quieter than shoes on wood.
He appeared at the spare bedroom door — Elizabeth’s door — with a piece of paper in one hand and a crayon in the other.
“I have drawn you a picture,” he announced. “It is a horse.”
Elizabeth, who was lying on her side with a pillow wedged beneath her back in the configuration the physician had prescribed and which she had spent the night failing to maintain, looked at the picture.
It was not, by any standard of representational accuracy, a horse.
It was a collection of lines that suggested a horse in the same way that a cloud suggested a cathedral — if one were generous, and if one were five.
“It is a very fine horse,” she said.
“He is called Napoleon. Papa says Napoleon is a villain. I have drawn him as a horse because horses cannot be villains. They do not have the — the —” Henry paused, searching for a word he had overheard and not quite captured. “The inclination.”
“Your father is wise.”
“Can I sit on the bed?”
“You may not sit on the bed. Your cousin is unwell.”
This was Mrs. Gardiner, who had materialised in the doorway with the swift, unhurried efficiency of a mother who possessed a sixth sense for the location of her youngest child, particularly when that location was somewhere he had been told not to go.
She took Henry by the shoulder with a grip that was affectionate and non-negotiable.
“But I have given her the horse —”
“The horse is received. The horse is admired. The artist will now return to the nursery and eat his porridge before it congeals, which it is doing as we speak, and which Cook takes as a personal affront.”
Henry departed with the reluctance of a small diplomat recalled from a posting he had only just begun to enjoy. His bare feet slapped on the stairs. The nurse’s voice rose from above — a weary There you are that suggested this was not the morning’s first escape.
Mrs. Gardiner looked at Elizabeth. “He has been asking about you since Tuesday. The girls have written you a letter. It is in cipher. I have not been able to read it, but I suspect it concerns the cat.”
“The cat is a spy,” Elizabeth said.
“So I have been informed.” Mrs. Gardiner set a cup of tea on the bedside table. “The house is mad, Lizzy. It has been mad since you arrived, and it was mad before that, and it will continue to be mad after you leave, and I would not have it otherwise. Drink your tea.”
Elizabeth drank her tea. Through the floorboards, the sound of Henry’s porridge negotiations carried upward with the clarity that old houses imposed on all domestic proceedings.
The coverlet beside her was smooth where Darcy had lain, the only evidence of his presence a crease in the pillow and the faint smell of smoke and beeswax.
She rose, dressed, checked the letters on the hall table — the Colonel’s was gone; Briggs had collected it — and went downstairs to find Mrs. Gardiner in the breakfast room, alone, pouring coffee as though she had been awake for some time and had used the interval to form several opinions she intended to share.
“Good morning, Lizzy.”
“Good morning, Aunt.”
“You returned at half past one. Your husband carried your coat. You went directly to the writing room and did not emerge for two and a half hours. Mr. Darcy went upstairs at two and did not come down again until a quarter past six, at which time he left by the front door with Sergeant Briggs and did not say where he was going.”
“You were awake for all of this.”
“I have four children under the age of ten. I am awake for everything.” Mrs. Gardiner poured a second cup and set it at Elizabeth’s place.
“Sit down. Eat something. Then tell me what happened, beginning with the parts your husband did not explain when he came through my hall at six o’clock this morning looking as though he had not slept and would not admit it. ”
Elizabeth sat. The coffee was strong and hot and made with the continental method Mrs. Gardiner preferred — boiled, not steeped, the grounds settled with a splash of cold water.
Elizabeth drank half the cup before she spoke.
The warmth entered her chest and spread outward, displacing the residual chill of a night spent writing in an unheated room.
She told her aunt. Not everything — Mrs. Gardiner did not require the operational details, the cipher protocols, the positioning of Colonel Fitzwilliam’s men — but the bones of it.
The poisoned wine. The interception. The balcony.
Gravière taken. Sophie still in Boulogne. The letters. The extraction.
Mrs. Gardiner listened the way she always listened — without interruption, without visible reaction, with the focused attention of a woman who had spent two decades married to a man who traded in goods by day and intelligence by night and who had learned that the most useful thing a person could do during a briefing was to be quiet until the briefing was complete.
When Elizabeth finished, Mrs. Gardiner set down her cup. “Mr. Gardiner received your letter at six-thirty. He has gone to the wharf to send word to Folkestone.”
“Already?”
“Your husband delivered the letter in person. Which is, I suspect, where he went at quarter past six.” Mrs. Gardiner paused.
“The fishing captain — Holt, his name is — has made the crossing four times this year. Twice with cargo, twice with persons. He knows the harbour at Boulogne. He knows the tides. He is not cheap, but he is reliable, and reliability is worth more than economy when the cargo is a woman and a child.”
“Can he sail within forty-eight hours?”
“If the weather holds. December crossings are unpredictable. A southwesterly gale could delay him by days. But the forecast — such as Mr. Gardiner’s pilot friends can read it — suggests a window on Thursday night.
High tide at Boulogne is eleven o’clock.
He would need to depart Folkestone by late afternoon to make the crossing in darkness. ”
Elizabeth calculated. Today was Wednesday, the twenty-ninth.
Thursday night meant the extraction would be attempted on the thirtieth — two days after Gravière’s arrest. Two days in which the news must not reach France.
Two days in which Gravière must remain invisible, his absence from society attributed to departure rather than capture, his network unaware that their commander was sitting in a Southwark cellar answering to Colonel Fitzwilliam.
“How long can we keep this quiet?” Elizabeth asked.
“The arrest? Mr. Darcy asked me the same question. I told him what I will tell you: in London, a secret has the lifespan of a mayfly. A day. Perhaps two. Every additional person who knows extends the circle, and every extension increases the probability of a leak.”
“The Colonel’s men. Briggs. The carriage driver. Darcy. You and Mr. Gardiner. Sir Henry, when my letter arrives. That is —” Elizabeth counted. “Nine people, if we include the men who took him in the square.”
“Eleven. The two men in the square, the driver, the Colonel, Briggs, you, Mr. Darcy, myself, Mr. Gardiner, Sir Henry, and the nurse in Bath who will handle the letter.”
“Eleven people and a secret that must hold for forty-eight hours.”
“Thirty-six, if Holt sails on Thursday. The news must hold until he lands at Boulogne and collects the child. After that, it does not matter.”