Chapter 10 The Private Cipher #2
Anne and Sophie had not continued to Pemberley.
At Ashbourne, fifteen miles south, they had turned east toward Lambton, where a cottage had been prepared — a stone house at the edge of the village, small, clean, with a garden that would want attention in the spring and a kitchen that Mrs. Reynolds had stocked with provisions sufficient for a month.
The cottage had been let under the name Mrs. Allen, which was common enough to attract no curiosity and which Anne had accepted with the weariness of a woman for whom names had become garments, put on and taken off according to the weather.
She was Mrs. Allen now. She had been Mrs. Graves, and Anne Gravière, and, at a concert in Hanover Square that felt like a year ago, Mrs. Warren.
The accumulation of identities would have been comic in a woman with less cause.
In Anne, it was the record of a life lived in transit, and the Lambton cottage — with its stone walls and its garden and its distance from every coast — was the first fixed point she had occupied since leaving Boulogne.
Elizabeth visited on Thursdays. She took the small carriage, accompanied by one of the Pemberley footmen, and spent two hours drinking tea in Anne’s kitchen while Sophie played in the garden with Madame Lapin, whose blue dress had been laundered and whose ears had been restuffed by Georgiana with a seriousness of purpose more appropriate to the repair of a regimental standard.
The visits were domestic, deliberate, and necessary.
Anne was learning to be still. The learning was difficult for a woman whose survival had depended, for three years, on movement — on the next city, the next name, the next calculation of who could be trusted and for how long.
Stillness required a different set of skills, and Elizabeth provided what she could: regularity, presence, conversation that expected nothing in return.
On the last Thursday in March, Sophie met Elizabeth at the garden gate. She had been waiting — Anne confirmed this with a glance that held both apology and amusement — since half past nine.
“Madame Darcy,” Sophie said, with the formality of a child who had been coached in English address and had absorbed it as absolute law. “I have learned a new word.”
“Have you?”
“Window.” Sophie pointed at the cottage. “That is a window. And that is a window. And that —” she pointed at the sky — “is not a window.”
“That is the sky.”
“I know this,” Sophie said, with the forbearance of a person whose intelligence had been underestimated. “But in French it is also a word for —” She stopped. Frowned. Looked at her mother.
“Fenêtre,” Anne said, from the doorway. She leant against the frame with her arms folded, watching her daughter with an expression that was not quite a smile — a stillness around the eyes, a guarding of the mouth, the careful restraint of a woman who had spent three years not permitting herself the luxury of finding anything amusing and was relearning, slowly, how the muscles worked.
“Fenêtre,” Sophie repeated. “But window is better. It has more —” She searched for the word, her small face concentrated. “It has more w.”
Elizabeth looked at Anne. Anne looked at Elizabeth. Neither spoke. The observation was unanswerable on its own terms.
“You are quite right,” Elizabeth said. “It has a great deal of w. Shall we go inside? I believe your mother has made tea.”
“I do not drink tea.”
“No. But I do, and it would be kind to keep me company.”
Sophie considered this proposal with the gravity of a diplomat weighing a treaty, then took Elizabeth’s hand and led her up the path to the cottage door, narrating as they went: “That is a stone. That is a flower. That is mud. I know all the words.”
They did not speak of Gravière. He was in custody — Sir Henry had confirmed this in February, a brief note through the Flint channel that stated the fact without elaboration.
Anne had received the information with a nod and a silence that Elizabeth did not attempt to fill.
Whatever Anne felt about her husband’s imprisonment — relief, grief, the complicated residue of a marriage that had been both a trap and a life — she carried it with the privacy of a woman who understood that some reckonings were not improved by witness.
Sophie was learning English. She had acquired the language the way children acquire everything — by immersion, by imitation, by the cheerful refusal to acknowledge difficulty.
Her English was imperfect and fearless, delivered in a voice that carried the authority of a four-year-old who had crossed the Channel in a fishing boat and considered all subsequent challenges manageable by comparison.
She called Elizabeth “Madame Darcy” and Georgiana “the tall one,” distinctions that Georgiana accepted with better grace than might have been expected from a woman who was five feet six and sensitive about it.
A letter had arrived that morning. Elizabeth had read it at the breakfast table while Darcy reviewed the steward’s quarterly report and Georgiana annotated a Mozart sonata she intended to perform at her first London engagement.
The letter bore Sir Henry’s seal and was written in the ELIZABETH cipher, which Elizabeth decoded in four minutes with the almanac open on her knee and a pencil behind her ear.
The household had absorbed this ritual without comment.
Mrs. Reynolds, who had served the Darcy family for thirty years and had adapted to circumstances ranging from the late Mr. Darcy’s melancholy to the current Mr. Darcy’s marriage to a woman who decoded government correspondence at the breakfast table, delivered the post and withdrew with the equanimity of a woman who had decided that the limits of her understanding were not the limits of her service.
Sir Henry’s letter was brief.
E — Colonel F. confirmed to the rank of full colonel, effective the first of April.
He has earned it. The Portsmouth tribunal concluded on the twenty-third of March.
Duclos transported. Mrs. Pike and the two clerks sentenced.
Mrs. Drummond arrested on the fourteenth — her cooperation has been moderate and her information less useful than anticipated.
The Prideaux and Stanhope matters are in hand.
The Channel is watched. The Boulogne network is, as far as present intelligence can determine, inoperative.
On the other matter: W. has been sighted in Lisbon.
Our consul confirms a man matching the description, travelling under a Portuguese name, arrived in late February.
He is in contact with French agents at the port.
He is rebuilding. I do not tell you this to alarm you.
I tell you because you have earned the right to know, and because I suspect you would prefer the truth to a comfortable silence.
The war continues. So, I trust, does Mrs. Darcy.
Your servant — H.
Elizabeth had read the letter twice. Then she had folded it and placed it in the pocket of her morning dress and eaten her toast and drunk her tea and discussed with Darcy the question of whether the north pasture fence required replacement or repair, a question to which she contributed nothing of value and which served no purpose other than to fill the space between reading a letter about an enemy at large and responding to it, a space that required filling the way a wound required dressing — not because the dressing healed anything but because it prevented the wound from governing the day.
Wickham was in Lisbon. He was alive. He was free.
He was doing what he had always done — finding the next opportunity, the next structure, the next person whose trust could be acquired and whose position could be exploited.
The network Elizabeth had broken was broken.
The man who had built it was not. The distinction, which she had understood since Portsmouth, had not changed in its essential character. It had merely acquired an address.
She did not tell Darcy. She would tell him this evening, after dinner, when Georgiana had gone to the music room and the house was quiet and the information could be received in privacy.
Not because Darcy could not bear it in public — he could bear most things in public with a composure that verged on the geological — but because the bearing of it was a private act, and Elizabeth respected the privacy of his fears the way she respected the privacy of her own.
The morning post had also brought a parcel from Kent.
It was wrapped in brown paper and sealed with the de Bourgh crest and accompanied by a letter in Lady Catherine’s hand — a hand that commanded the page with the same authority its owner commanded a room, the letters large, the lines straight, the margins generous in the manner of a woman who did not economise on paper or opinion.
Mrs. Darcy —
I am informed that you are to be confined in April.
This intelligence was communicated to me by my nephew, who wrote with an economy of detail that I attribute to the deficiencies of masculine correspondence rather than to any deliberate slight.
I am sending the enclosed. It was given to my daughter Anne at her christening by Lady Mountstuart, who received it from her mother, who received it from a person of no consequence whose name I have forgotten.
It is Georgian silver, hall-marked, and has been in the family for three generations.
I see no reason for it to remain in a cabinet at Rosings when it might be of use in Derbyshire.
I will not pretend that the circumstances of your marriage have ceased to displease me. They have not. But the child is a Darcy, and a Fitzwilliam, and I do not punish children for the decisions of their parents.
I trust you will have the good sense to engage a competent nurse and not rely upon the modern fashion for maternal attendance, which I regard as sentimental and injurious to recovery.