Chapter 8 The Ghost
A letter from Mr. Bennet had arrived with the Thursday evening post, and Elizabeth read it at five o’clock on Friday morning, by candlelight, in the spare bedroom, having been awake since four and having exhausted every other occupation available to a woman on enforced bed rest whose mind would not be still.
My dear Lizzy,
Your mother writes to me daily — a practice I had thought confined to the early months of our marriage and which has, I regret to report, resumed with its original vigour and none of its original charm.
She informs me that you are ‘unwell’ and ‘confined’ and that I must write to you with fatherly advice, by which she means that I must instruct you to follow Dr. Forsyth’s recommendations to the letter, eat what you are told, rest when you are told, and generally behave as though you have not been managing perfectly well without fatherly advice for the better part of two years.
I shall do no such thing. You have always been the most sensible of my daughters, which is a distinction roughly equivalent to being the tallest man in a family of dwarves, and I have no doubt that you will manage your health with the same competence you bring to everything else.
Your mother’s anxieties are her own. You need not carry them in addition to whatever else you are carrying, both literally and — I suspect — otherwise.
I say ‘suspect’ advisedly. A father who has spent thirty years in a library is not blind to the world, merely selective in his engagement with it.
I observe that my second daughter left Pemberley in October with a speed that suggested something other than maternal longing for Gracechurch Street.
I observe that her husband rides to London and back with a frequency that exceeds the demands of any estate business I have ever encountered, and I have encountered a great deal of estate business, most of it tedious.
I observe that your letters, which were once full of opinions, observations, and the particular brand of impertinence I have always admired, have become careful.
The care is what alarms me. You were never careful before, and careful people are either ill or hiding something, and you are not ill.
I do not ask you to tell me what you are hiding.
I trust your judgement, which is more than I can say for most of the people in this house.
I ask only that you be safe, and that you know your father’s library is here if you need it — not for the books, which are indifferent, but for the quiet, which is genuine, and for the man in the armchair, who loves you more than he has ever been sufficiently articulate to say.
Your father, T. Bennet
P.S. — Jane’s boy is healthy. He has Bingley’s temperament and your mother’s lungs. I foresee a distinguished career in politics.
Elizabeth read the letter twice. She read the postscript three times.
Then she folded it and placed it beneath her pillow, where it lay against the linen like a hand pressed to a forehead — the touch of a man who had spent her childhood behind a closed door and who was now, at the far end of a corridor neither of them had known was so long, standing in the doorway and saying, in his own fashion, that the door had always been open.
She did not weep. She came close.
Colonel Fitzwilliam arrived at Gracechurch Street at seven o’clock on Friday morning, which was earlier than propriety permitted and later than Elizabeth had wanted.
He brought with him a sealed packet, a temper that had been assembled in haste and not improved by the ride from his lodgings, and the expression of a military man who has received intelligence he cannot act upon and must instead deliver to someone who can.
“You look terrible,” Elizabeth said, from the armchair Mrs. Gardiner had positioned by the window of the spare bedroom. The barley water stood on the table beside her, untouched. She had been awake since five.
“I have been awake since three. A message came from the Deptford yard — a man I know, a clerk in the port authority, not Admiralty. He owed me a favour from the Rosings business. I asked him for the Calcutta’s records.”
“You went around the Admiralty.”
“I went underneath it. The Admiralty keeps the commission logs and the sailing orders. The port authority keeps the provisioning records, the water manifests, the surgeon’s journal. Different office, different clerks, different building. Prideaux has no reach there.”
He set the packet on the bed. Elizabeth looked at it — a brown oilskin wrapper, tied with string, the kind of parcel that moved between government offices in the pockets of men whose names never appeared on the documents they carried.
She reached for it. The Colonel did not help her.
He had learned, over eight weeks, Elizabeth’s boundaries — where help was welcome and where it was not — and the reaching for documents fell on the side of the border she defended.
The packet contained three items. The first was a copy of the Calcutta’s surgeon’s journal, covering the period from departure at Portsmouth on the fourteenth of March, 1803, to the arrival at the Cape of Good Hope on the twenty-ninth of June.
The journal was written in a physician’s hand — dense, abbreviated, the letters compressed by the motion of a ship and the haste of a man whose patients outnumbered his hours.
Elizabeth skimmed it. Scurvy among the convicts by April.
A fever in the marine detachment in May.
Two deaths — one convict of dysentery, one marine of a fall from the rigging.
No mention of George Wickham by name. The convicts were listed by number.
Prisoner 47 appeared on the surgeon’s roll for the first five weeks: a healthy male, no complaints, cooperative during inspections.
On the twenty-first of April — five weeks and three days out of Portsmouth, somewhere in the Atlantic south of the Azores — Prisoner 47 disappeared from the journal.
No death recorded. No transfer. No notation of any kind.
The entry for the twenty-second of April listed forty-six convicts in the hold.
The entry for the twenty-first had listed forty-seven.
The second item was a provisioning record from the Cape. The Calcutta had taken on water and supplies at Table Bay. The record listed the number of souls aboard: officers, marines, crew, and convicts. The convict count was forty-six.
The third item was a letter. It was not from the Deptford clerk.
It was from Sir Henry Bretherton, written in the ELIZABETH cipher, routed through the bookseller on Cheapside to the Gardiners’ house.
The Colonel had intercepted it in the hall on his way upstairs.
Elizabeth broke the seal and reached for the almanac she kept in the drawer of the bedside table.
The decipherment took six minutes. The Colonel waited.
Darcy, who had come in from the passage at the sound of voices, stood by the door and watched the pencil move.
The letter read:
E — Your instinct is confirmed. I have obtained through separate channels the following: HMS Calcutta was shadowed from Portsmouth by an unidentified vessel, believed to be a French privateer operating under Boulogne licence.
The privateer was sighted twice by the escort frigate HMS Perseverance — once south of Ushant, once off the Portuguese coast — but was not engaged, the Perseverance having received orders to maintain convoy discipline and not pursue.
The privateer was lost to observation south of Lisbon.
Three days later, the Calcutta reported a disturbance in the convict hold — one prisoner unaccounted for, believed to have gone overboard in the night.
The captain logged the loss. No search was conducted.
The sea state was moderate. A man who went overboard in moderate seas, without assistance, would drown within the hour.
A man who went overboard with a boat waiting would not.
I have made enquiries in Lisbon through our consul.
A man matching W’s description arrived in Lisbon in late April 1803, travelling under the name Georges Villiers, carrying French papers.
He remained in Lisbon for three weeks before departing for Paris.
The trail goes cold in Paris. It resurfaces eleven months later in Boulogne, where the same name appears in a harbourmaster’s register as the lessee of a warehouse on the Quai Gambetta.
The warehouse was used, according to local intelligence, as a receiving point for goods and correspondence from England.
Le Ma?tre is Wickham. The evidence is not conclusive in the legal sense but it is sufficient in the operational sense. Act accordingly. — H.
Elizabeth set the deciphered text on the bed beside the surgeon’s journal and the provisioning record.
Three documents. Three angles of the same truth, converging on a point she had suspected since Tuesday evening and feared since Georgiana had placed a folded paper on the coverlet and said, You must read this.
“He went over the side,” Elizabeth said. “Somewhere south of Portugal. A French boat was waiting.”
“Arranged before he sailed,” the Colonel said.
He had not read the letter — he had watched Elizabeth’s face while she deciphered it, and the face had told him enough.
“The privateer shadowed the Calcutta from Portsmouth. That means someone in France knew the sailing date, the route, and the position of the escort. Someone coordinated the extraction before Wickham was even aboard.”
“His network was supposed to have been dismantled.”
“It was dismantled in England. The French end was never ours to dismantle. Wickham’s contacts in Boulogne, in Paris — those belonged to French intelligence. We arrested the English agents. We could not touch their handlers across the Channel.”
“And the handlers arranged his rescue.”