LIII The Earl
LIII
The Earl
The packet out of Aberdeen had not been built with any view to mercy. The moment the harbour fell behind them, the ship began to declare its opinions through every timber and bolt, and the January sea was in no hospitable temper. Richard had had the foresight to leave a bucket within reach.
By the time the first violent hour had passed, she had ceased to care whether the ship foundered, whether the Crown fell, whether Sterling hanged, or whether any civilised person ever again pronounced merchant packet in her hearing.
Richard came at intervals with water and fresh cloths, determined not to witness more of another person’s misery than kindness absolutely required.
Once, he looked at her with a concentration so marked that even in her present condition, she noticed it. He looked away. She was glad of it.
The crossing in July had been perfectly tolerable. She had not been ill once. This time, though —
Well, it was mostly the weather. She put the thought away.
The first day, she could not raise her head from the bunk.
The second, she managed broth and dry bread by the small bolted table and then immediately wished she had not.
By the third, she had begun to find a rhythm with the ship — she could walk three paces from her cabin to the companionway without disgracing herself, and she could keep down water and the hard ship-biscuit that seemed to be the only food the cook had any confidence in.
The third evening, Richard came and sat opposite her at the small bolted table and produced a pack of cards from some military pocket and dealt them with the solemnity of a magistrate opening proceedings.
They played badly. He did not press her into conversation.
From another man, that restraint might have felt distant; in him, it was consideration in the language he trusted.
The fourth day, the wind shifted, and the ship steadied, and she went up onto the deck for a quarter-hour wrapped in a borrowed cloak and watched the coast of England moving past at the speed of an idle walk.
Norfolk, Richard said when she asked. They would round into the Thames estuary by nightfall.
He took her arm at the rail and stood with her until the wind drove her below.
That evening, he came to her cabin with a tray and stood in the doorway a moment before he set it down.
“We will be in London by morning,” he said.
She looked at him. There was no use pretending either of them did not understand that by London he meant not merely arrival but another family, another house, another set of eyes into which she must carry this impossible account and stand by it.
“Very well,” she said.
He nodded once and went.
She slept at last in fragments. Each time she woke, the ship was still moving south through the dark, and Darcy was still absent, and the paper proving her marriage was inside her coat folded against her like a second body.
Matlock House in the London morning had the quality of large established houses in which dignity had become structural.
The footman who admitted them did not stare.
Richard gave his name. Something passed very quickly through the servant’s face at the sight of the woman beside him, but then it was gone.
They were shown into a library and left there while a message went up through the house.
Elizabeth stood very straight in the middle of the room and did not sit.
The next ten minutes would determine the form in which she was to exist within a powerful stranger’s house.
Widow, accessory, impostor, wife, complication, burden, ally — any of them were available.
She had no particular intention of accepting the least favourable.
Richard moved to the hearth and waited with the composure she was learning to recognise as the Fitzwilliam family manner under strain.
The earl entered without haste.
He was larger than his son, with the carriage of decades spent having rooms alter around him rather than the reverse.
The courtesy with which he stopped short on seeing her was less a genial habit than a discipline kept in excellent repair.
Shock crossed his face once and was gone.
The attention that replaced it told her at once what sort of man she had come to.
He looked at Richard, then at her, then at Richard again — this time as a statesman might look at a report that appears, at first glance, impossible and is therefore likely to be true.
Richard inclined his head, the smallest formal bow, and spoke as a colonel reporting in.
“Father. May I present to you the Baroness of Auchengray. Baroness, my father, the Earl of Matlock.”
The earl’s eyes did not leave Elizabeth’s face. He did not, for several seconds, do anything else. Then his attention returned, briefly, to his son.
“Leave us.”
“Father —”
“I would speak with the ‘baroness’ alone.”
Richard did not argue further. He glanced once at Elizabeth, not for permission and not in apology, only to make sure she understood that being left alone with the Earl of Matlock was not intended as abandonment. Then he went out and closed the door.
The earl moved to the window and looked down for a moment at the indifferent city below. “My son,” he said at last, “has been lying to me.”
The sentence was delivered without temper, which made it rather more formidable.
“I imagine he has,” Elizabeth said.
“For how long?”
“Since October, I believe. Before that, he did not know himself. Neither I, nor did anyone who matters, it seems, until the discovery could not be helped.”
He turned from the window. The scrutiny she met then was unsoftened by any pretence of domestic ease.
“And you have known since?”
“Late November. I suspected him earlier, but from the first moment I arrived at Auchengray until… until I knew… he came to me only in the dark and spoke in a whisper I could not recognise. It was a long while before I suspected I could have married a man who was supposed to be dead.”
“And you said nothing?”
“To whom?” she asked, because the truth of the thing admitted no more ornamental answer than that.
“I was in Aberdeenshire. I knew no one of his family. I had only occasional letters from my own. I knew only that my husband was in danger and that the fewer people who knew he was alive, the longer he was likely to remain so.”
A faint movement touched his face. Not approval. Something more useful than approval. Recognition. “So, he is alive?”
“He was when I last saw him. He was arrested at a coaching inn outside Inverurie four days ago. The officers had followed us from Craighead. Colonel Fitzwilliam believes Auchengray had been watched for at least a week.”
He crossed at once to the desk and sat, not with the heaviness of receiving bad news but with the directness of beginning work. He pulled a sheet of paper towards him. The pen in his hand remained suspended above it.
“Nine months,” he said. The pen lowered. He set it down without writing. “He has been alive for nine months and chose not to inform me. Not to tell his own sister that —”
“He was given few options, my lord.”
The earl’s jaw tightened once. It was a gesture she had seen in Darcy a hundred times.
“Forgive me,” he said — not requesting pardon so much as buying himself one measured instant to put emotion away where it could not interfere with policy. “I have had a considerable quantity of information put into my hands in a very short span.”
“So have I, for some weeks now,” Elizabeth said before she could help herself.
The corner of his mouth altered. It was the first sign she had yet seen that the conversation might end with both of them on the same side of it. He looked at her more directly.
“When did you gain this title, Baroness, and by what name may I call you?”
“We were married on the twenty-third of July. My name before that was Elizabeth Bennet, but you may call me Elizabeth Darcy, if it pleases you.”
His brow arched. “Well, ‘Mrs Darcy,’ we shall see first if the name pleases you. My nephew married you under a false name in Scotland, without informing any member of his family, and you tell me you did not know his name or see his face until approximately a month and a half ago. Have I understood you correctly?”
“You have, my lord. He took considerable pains to ensure I did not, for reasons I am now in some position to appreciate. The deception was not the work of a man indifferent to honour. It was the work of a man who had concluded that his life was forfeit and that mine would be safer in proportion to my ignorance of him.”
The earl wrote something on his paper. “And you have come to me now because that calculation has failed?”
“It has failed because the Home Office has come for him in person, and because I am no longer ignorant of anything that matters. I have come to you, my lord, because I have run out of better options, and because Colonel Fitzwilliam was of the opinion that you would prefer to be asked rather than informed.”
Elizabeth stopped there. She had no desire to improve her case with pleading. In her experience, pleading only encouraged powerful men to think they had granted what in fact they had merely ceased to obstruct.
The earl crossed his arms over his chest and sighed as he scrutinised her. His mouth had fallen into a scowl that was thoughtful rather than fearsome, and one stray finger tapped on the opposite forearm.
At last, he said, “He chose well.”
The tone was so dry, so entirely tactical, that she nearly laughed. “I would not have expected you to approve of me on so short an acquaintance.”
“Make no mistake, Mrs Darcy, it is not your person of whom I approve — my opinion on that point hardly matters now — but my nephew’s choices.
A woman who married under ignorance of both name and person is difficult to prosecute as a knowing accessory.
A woman whose attachment formed before the discovery is more difficult still. ”
“I believe that was among his motives.”