Counting The Days
L
Some days after Christmas, she came back to The Old English Baron.
She had not opened it since December — since the library, the ladder, the inscription on the flyleaf — and she brought it down from the shelf with the intention of reading it properly now that she knew what it was.
He was already in the library when she came in, in the chair he had claimed since the second morning, and she settled onto the sofa with the book, and Falstaff arranged himself across both their feet with the impartiality that was his chief virtue.
She read for a while in silence. He read whatever he was reading. The fire popped occasionally.
Then she came to the armour scenes.
She had laughed at these alone in December — the portentous rattling, the clockwork of the haunting — and thought her father would have been insufferable about them. She laughed now, too, and this time he was six inches away.
“Listen to this,” she said, and read him a passage in which Edmund’s noble birth was signalled to the reader by a ghost, a portrait, and approximately forty pages of supernatural atmosphere, all of it deployed with absolute gravity.
He listened, and when she finished, he was quiet a moment before he said, “She means this.”
“She means every word of it,” Elizabeth said.
“That is what makes it so magnificent. My father would have read this aloud at breakfast. He would have done all the voices. We would have had to leave the room.” She turned the page.
“He never had this one, I think. I would have known. It has the feeling of a book he ought to have had. This was the one that was your mother’s. ”
He sat forward with renewed interest. “This one? She must have left it when she visited Auchengray. She was forever forgetting where she had laid her books, and probably had no idea where she left this one. I think she would have liked your father,” he said, after a moment.
“Or at least been able to laugh over the same books with him.”
“I think so too,” she said.
She went back to Edmund and read some minutes more. She looked up. He had not turned any of his own pages. She glanced sideways and found him still, his book lowered slightly, his gaze on her wrist.
On the handkerchief tucked into her sleeve — the white square with the small flower in the corner, visible above the edge of her cuff. The one he had pressed into her hand the night she wept over Lydia’s ruin.
“May I?” he asked.
She drew it out and put it in his hand.
He turned it over. He looked at the flower for a moment — the five petals, the stem, the small bloom in the corner — and something in his face went quiet in a way she had not seen before.
“Do you know,” he said, “that Mrs Reynolds has been putting that flower on the Pemberley linens since before I was born?”
“How should I know that?”
“She has. Every sheet. Every tablecloth. Every towel. It is the device of the house — has been for generations.” He turned the handkerchief in his hands. “It was said that my mother would put it beside her own name long before she had any business doing so.”
Elizabeth smiled and leaned closer into his shoulder. “What does that mean? Your mother set her cap for Pemberley?”
He gave a low laugh. “Not for the house but the man. She met my father when she was fifteen. He was twenty-two. She decided more or less on the spot that she intended to marry him. I imagine she was writing that flower beside her name from that day forward.” He glanced at the book in her lap.
“I would not be surprised if it is in the inscription.”
She opened the book to the flyleaf and held it out to him without a word.
He read it. She watched his face as his fingers trailed the old ink with a fond smile.
“And did he know?” Elizabeth asked.
“Not for some years. Her family knew from the outset and could not persuade her to look elsewhere. My father required a certain amount of time to arrive at the obvious conclusion. He came round eventually.”
“I see the inheritance is on both sides,” she said.
He only turned the handkerchief once more, then set it back in her palm.
“She only visited Auchengray once — this house, before she was married, a last journey while she was still a Fitzwilliam. The land was an inheritance from her mother, the countess, and so I suppose they came north to inspect it before the details were written into her settlement. She never came back, though, because her heart was at Pemberley, like my father’s.
” He closed her fingers around the handkerchief gently.
“You have been the mistress of Pemberley since the day you signed the settlement. I cannot give you the house just now.” His thumb moved once across the back of her hand.
“But it seems you have been carrying a piece of it since November.”
The newest letter from Webb arrived on a Tuesday.
He knew before he broke the seal that it was worse than the last. That one had come a fortnight after Christmas — cautious, the language chosen with care.
Both Harker and MacNeil had been cleared at the December assize.
Their ships were provisioned, and one had already cleared the Pool.
Foss alone remained under summons, and Webb had reason to suspect Foss’s interview within the month would be the last. Darcy had burned it over the library fire and told Elizabeth the shape of it, and she had pored over the figures for an hour afterward and arrived at the same walls he had been arriving at since April.
This letter was shorter, and the courtesy was gone. The body that had been recovered in April had been exhumed and re-examined. The identification had not held. A coroner’s amendment had been entered in November and only now reached Webb’s hands.
The warrant was no longer a formality maintained against a presumed-dead fugitive; it was an active warrant against a man believed to be living, and the Home Office had assigned men.
Webb had identified two of them. He was closing down his visible activities and moving his lodgings, and advised Darcy to prepare to do the same if the situation required it.
He did not define required. He did not need to.
Darcy burned this one faster than the first. He was still at the fire when Elizabeth came in.
She did not ask what he had burned. She had seen him burn the last letter, and she had asked then, and she understood now what the speed of burning meant. She came and stood beside him and watched the last of it turn to ash with him.
“How bad?”
“They have ruled the death suspicious. There is an active search.”
For a few seconds, she only stood there. Her hand closed on the back of the chair beside the fire, she grasped what active search meant before her face caught up to it, and she decided, by visible effort, not to put it on her face.
“Then what is the date on the coroner’s amendment? When did it actually go in?”
“November. Webb only had it this week.”
“And the men they have assigned. Have they been anywhere near here?”
“Webb does not think so yet. He has identified two of them in London. There will be others he has not identified.”
“How long, Fitzwilliam, before we know whether they are close?”
“Days. A week at most. If a stranger appears in the village asking after the laird’s habits, we will know within an hour. Beyond that… I do not know.”
She drew a slow breath and let it out. He had been watching her for the better part of a year, and she was working through it — pulling each piece of fear into a place she could set it down, putting her hands to whatever she could touch, finding her ground.
She turned and rested her palm on the mantel, looking at the fire and not at him.
“Then we should be thinking, not standing here being frightened at one another.”
“Elizabeth.”
“We are not entirely without resources. My uncle Gardiner — please do not say no until you have heard me. He keeps an entire warehouse of correspondents. He has men in Bristol, in Liverpool, in Hull, on the docks at every port that matters. They are honest merchants who carry one another’s letters for the price of a meal, and they are utterly outside any channel the Home Office knows how to watch.
If Webb cannot reach the clerk, my uncle’s people might at least find out where the clerk has gone, which is more than we have at present. ”
“And every man you bring in is another man the Home Office can find me through, Elizabeth. Webb has been doing this since before either of us was born; if Webb cannot put pressure on the clerk without exposing himself, your uncle’s friends will not be able to do it without being exposed in their turn.
And once one of them is, the line back to your uncle is not a long one, and the line back to your uncle does not stop at your uncle. ”
She closed her eyes briefly. “I know, Fitzwilliam. I am trying to think of anyone we have not already tried, because the list of people we have already tried is not yielding.”
He came over and put his hand at the small of her back. It was the most ordinary gesture he had developed since November and the one he reached for now without thinking. She did not turn into him, but her breathing slowed by degrees.
“Then what is left?”
“What was left yesterday. The clerk has to come forward. Sterling has to miscalculate somewhere. Webb has to find a new channel.” He paused. “And we have to be ready to move within an hour of any sign that this house is no longer safe. That is the part that is new.”
She did not answer at once. She took it in — the move within an hour — and decided not to ask, yet, what move looked like or where to.
“Sit down,” she said at last, and her voice was almost ordinary again. “Standing at the fire scowling does not improve the topology.”
“I am not scowling.”
“You are about to scowl. I am intervening. Sit down.”