By Degrees
XXXIX
Then he rose, gathered his clothes from the chair, and dressed near the corridor door where the floorboards had proved more forgiving.
When he was done, he crossed back to the bed, kissed her forehead, and laid his palm against her cheek — the gesture she had described back to him, with rather too much accuracy, not two hours ago.
She did not stir. The rasping from the back of her throat did not cease, and some portion of him that had been braced since he had uttered the name Lizzy came out of him eased.
He moved towards the corridor door, and in the dark, his foot came down nearly on Falstaff.
The dog had placed himself between the bed and the door and was awake, his chin up, his attention on Darcy and unwavering, making no sound.
He put his nose out and investigated Darcy’s hand, then made a sound low in his throat — not a bark, something considerably below that, a question without urgency — and scuffled his feet towards the door.
Darcy considered the door. He had meant to go out alone, had known since the whisper broke and her thumb continued unhurried over his palm that the mural chamber was not going to hold him tonight, and he had lain beside her until her breathing had gone beyond anything he could reasonably doubt, and the walk had been the shape of his intention the whole time.
He had not accounted for the dog.
“Come along, then.” Falstaff stood.
The kitchen passage was dark, the outer door stiff with cold, and the November wind came off the water the moment he cleared the threshold and did not trouble itself to be gradual about it.
Seven months, and the cold off the North Sea was still a matter between him and the wind that the two of them had not yet brought to terms. He put his head down and walked.
He had learned the headland path entirely in the dark by now — the point where the coastal grass gave way to exposed stone and the wind turned on him from the water side, the hollow where it dropped for twenty feet before rising again with renewed conviction.
Falstaff had no such concerns and ranged in no pattern Darcy could discern, disappearing into the dark and reappearing as a large grey shape against the larger grey of the winter sky, then lost again.
He had been calling her Lizzy in his head since Hertfordshire.
It had never been a choice, which was the root of the difficulty.
Her family called her Lizzy. He had pictured her laughing, the girl she was before her father's death, in the mural chamber in July, and the name had taken up residence in his private accounting of her, and he had not, since, found a way to dislodge it.
Tonight, with her mouth against his neck and the warmth of the dark and her voice naming his private gestures back to him one by one, the laugh had come from somewhere below his ribs before he could prevent it, and Lizzy had come with the laugh.
She had heard it.
He was not going to persuade himself otherwise.
Her thumb had continued its examination of his palm without any perceptible pause, and she had teased him once more and then quieted with her lips pressed against his skin.
The tranquility of it had been so complete that for three heartbeats, he had almost believed it was all harmless.
Elizabeth was anything but harmless. But he did not believe she knew, either, and this was the argument he had been making to himself since the corridor door, and he made it again now because the cold was clarifying and he had not yet finished with it.
A woman who believed the man she had married was one who had found her not worth crossing a room for would not have put her hands to his face tonight with that determined passion.
She would not have lain in his arms, given and taken pleasure, cried out for him in the dark, and then teased him so scandalously.
She was too honest. She could not perform warmth at that depth without feeling it, and had she been performing, he would have heard the strain by now — he knew every tone, every inflection, every catch of her breath and touch of her hand.
Beyond any power he had to doubt it, she had been real with him.
Therefore, she could not know.
But how long would it hold, given that she had Lizzy now, and whatever her hands had told her tonight and on countless nights about a face she had been mapping for seven weeks, and four months of accumulated evidence besides, and the kind of mind that could not be given a thread without following it?
Not long. Not long at all.
Falstaff appeared from the dark and fell in beside him without being invited, his shoulder at Darcy's knee, enormous and warm and entirely without opinion on the question.
She was closer than she had been yesterday. He had let something slip tonight that he had not meant to, and she was too clever to lose what she had caught.
The only course that left him any ground to recover from was to tell her himself before she arrived at it on her own. He had been reaching this conclusion since October and turning from it each time, and tonight on the headland it returned no less clear and no less impossible to act upon.
Telling her meant endangering her. Stripping away the only thing that would keep her innocent in the eyes of the court, if he were ever found.
But it also meant standing in the light as Fitzwilliam Darcy, the one she had found confusing and proud and not comfortable to be around — and asking her to reconcile that man with the one who had sworn his heart and given his body again and again.
He was not confident she could. He was not confident he deserved her to.
The sky above the eastern water had begun to suggest, rather than announce, the possibility of morning.
He turned for home, and the dog turned with him.
The Auchengray tower rose dark against the paling dark ahead, and he walked towards it as he had been walking towards things since April — which was without confidence in the outcome, and because there was nowhere else to go.
Angus came at the usual hour. Darcy dealt with the fence timber, the winter stores, and the north field, and when Angus left, he broke the letter.
Webb’s hand throughout, close and unhurried, the fiction of estate correspondence maintained in every line.
I write to report progress in the matter of the estate’s outstanding accounts, and trust this finds the property in good order as the winter closes in.
Darcy had to decipher and summarise more carefully than usual to make sense of it.
The first account, I am pleased to report, has been located…
The clerk! Darcy read faster, translating Webb’s diversionary language into something that made sense as he went.
… after considerable difficulty, through channels I shall not specify in writing.
I have taken independent steps to confirm what I was told and am satisfied the information is sound.
The matter has not, as I had feared, been removed beyond reach entirely.
This is the most encouraging intelligence I have had occasion to send you in some months, and I do not wish to diminish it.
I must, however, set beside this the material difficulty that locating the account and recovering it are not the same undertaking.
The party through whom it is presently held has arranged matters with sufficient care that any direct approach on my part would be seen before it could be concluded, and would render the account unrecoverable in short order.
I have considered whether the connexions available to our mutual acquaintance might admit of an alternative and concluded they do not.
What is required is something I cannot yet provide — a sufficient inducement to the holder to act contrary to his present interests. I continue to seek one.
I turn now to a matter of a more personal nature, which bears upon our future correspondence.
I have lately become aware that certain enquiries have been made regarding my own affairs by persons I have not been able to identify.
A gentleman with whom I have had occasion to do business was approached some weeks ago and asked questions of a general character about my recent activities and associations.
He informed me promptly, for which I am grateful, though I cannot be certain he was the only one approached, nor that he recalled everything that passed.
I do not yet know the extent of these enquiries or how long they have been in progress.
I am taking what steps I can. I would ask that you reduce your communications through the present means, and proceed on the assumption that what passes through this channel may not remain private.
I am arranging a more suitable method and will advise you of it in due course.
With respect to the other outstanding accounts, I can report only that no material change has occurred.
I am asked by our mutual acquaintance to convey that Miss D. continues in tolerable health and is at present a guest of his father’s house. He did not elaborate, and I did not enquire.
The clerk was alive. Whatever else he was, he was alive.
The inducement Webb needed had not been found, which meant Sterling held him still, and what Darcy had bought with eight months and a portion of his estate’s reserves was the right to know he was alive and behind a wall — which was not nothing, and on certain mornings, he could almost persuade himself it was something.
But Webb was being traced. Sterling’s people working outward from what they had, asking careful questions about a man who did not officially exist, building the picture of how Darcy had contrived to vanish so completely. The questions would reach someone soon.
He put the letter in the grate.
In the passage, the squint gave him the library.
Elizabeth was at the writing table with what looked like the household accounts spread before her, her pen moving down a column of figures, the ring catching the grey December light.
She reached the bottom of the page, paused, ran the pen back up, found something that did not agree, and crossed it out with two short strokes.
Falstaff roused himself from the hearthrug and pushed his great head into her lap.
She put the pen down and scratched his ears without looking up from her figures; then looked up; then gave up on them entirely and pushed her chair back.
She crossed to the shelves, ran her thumb along the pages of a book, put it back, took another.
Then she moved past the edge of the squint and out of his sight, and a moment later, he heard the kitchen door, and a moment after that, faintly through the masonry, the dog being called and given permission to come.
She was humming.
Darcy stood in the cold of the passage and listened until the sound was gone past the corner of the house.
He did not know the tune. He knew, however, that she had not hummed once since she had come to Auchengray, and he was as certain as he could be of anything that mattered that she had not been humming yesterday.
Whatever her mind was settled on, he could not know — she was too clever by half, and what she had in her head this morning he had been losing sleep guessing at since the corridor door — but whatever its shape, it had not made her unhappy.
She had come down to her accounts. She had given the household its day's work. She had gone out humming.
And by the uneasy reckoning he could make from this side of his discipline, it would have to do.