LIII The Earl #3
She did not answer at once. She had assumed, in the abstract, that this question would arise; she had not anticipated arriving at it within the first hour of meeting her husband’s uncle, and she discovered that the abstract preparation had been entirely inadequate to the moment.
She held his eye. He was good enough not to look away.
“It was, my lord.”
“And without coercion of any kind on either side?”
She stiffened. “Of course not!”
“Good.” He made a small mark in his ledger. “And once consummated, was the marriage maintained as such with any regularity?”
She had not anticipated this one, either. The blood went up her throat and into her face in a way she could not prevent, and she looked down at the carpet because she could not, for the moment, look at him.
The earl waited. After a few seconds, he said, more quietly than he had spoken to her yet, “I am sorry to put it to you. Pemberton will need the answer. It speaks to whether you continued in the marriage by choice once you had sufficient information with which to refuse, which is the point upon which the annulment question will turn.”
“Yes.” She made herself say it to the air between them rather than to her own lap. “Regularly, my lord. From… from the first… well, with very few exceptions.”
“Thank you.” He took up the pen again. The ledger received another small mark. He did not look at her face, which was the only kindness of the kind he had to give, and which she received with relief.
“Pemberton will ask you the same questions in writing this afternoon, and you will answer him in the same terms. The consummation establishes the marriage in fact as well as in form, and renders the petition for annulment considerably more difficult to maintain. The longer the period of consummation post-recognition, the stronger our position.”
He paused. He looked at her with the same arranged neutrality, a courtesy now rather than an indifference.
“Which brings me to the next question, which I dislike still more than the previous. Is there any possibility, Mrs Darcy, that you are with child?”
Elizabeth’s hand went to the back of the chair beside her without her consulting it.
She had told no one in this house yet. She had not told the colonel.
She had not, in any explicit terms, told Darcy, though she had given him enough information to make the assumption of the fact.
To put it now, in this room, into the air, to a man she had met a quarter-hour ago — she found she resented being made to.
She also understood, by the time she had finished resenting it, that he was right to ask.
“Yes, my lord. There is more than a possibility. I have not yet been examined by a physician, but my own reckoning puts it past the point of doubt.”
He did not, for several seconds, do anything at all. Then he set down his pen with considerable care, as though the pen had become an object of unexpected significance, and he sat back in his chair.
“That alters a great deal.”
“He imagined that it would, as well.”
“It alters what we may demand of the Crown in the way of consideration for your person, and it alters, very considerably, what Sterling can and cannot do with you in a courtroom. A pregnant wife is a witness no English court will compel against her husband in a treason case. The judicial dislike of even being seen to have caused distress to a pregnant woman sufficient to imperil her child, is older than the Tudors and has not weakened. You have, by the simple fact of your present condition, just doubled the strength of my nephew’s position. ”
He picked the pen back up. “It also raises a question of timing, which I shall not insult you by spelling out. Pemberton will need the dates. He will know what to do with them.”
“Of course, my lord.”
“And it means that you do not leave this house. Not for any errand. Not for any visit. Not under any name. Until Pemberton has filed his counter-petition and we have a ruling, you are here, and you are seen by no one outside this household unless and until we determine that your marriage must be made public.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Good.” He wrote again for a moment, then said without looking up, “My nephew’s wife will be addressed in this house as Lady Auchengray. If any member of the staff proves too stupid to understand the instruction, they may seek employment elsewhere.”
That settled something in her at once. Not trust — trust took longer — but footing. “Thank you.”
“Do not thank me. I have not done anything yet but issue nomenclature and summon a barrister.”
The resemblance, she thought, did not run only through the jaw and the eyes.
The door opened. Richard came in without waiting to be invited, which told Elizabeth more about the urgency of the interruption than any amount of apologetic speech would have done.
The earl looked up. “I said a moment.”
“You have had one.” Richard shut the door behind him. “Georgiana is waiting for you.”
Something changed in the older man’s face — the sudden recollection that grief, which he had been treating for nine months as accomplished fact, had all at once become something unfinished and dangerous.
“His sister does not know?” Elizabeth asked.
“No,” Richard answered. “She does not.”