LV Let Us Begin
LV
Let Us Begin
Elizabeth was in the library when she heard the carriage, and she did not go to the window because she had learned in three days at Matlock House that going to windows was a habit she needed to break.
Every carriage in the street below was not bringing Darcy, and the constant searching was costing her something she could not afford to spend.
She stayed where she was with the solicitor’s papers in her lap.
Then she heard the front door, and Richard’s voice in the hall, and a voice she knew better than any other voice she had heard in her life.
She was on her feet before she had decided to stand. The papers slid from her lap. She did not pick them up.
She rushed across the room and was at the library door when Richard opened it, and he stood aside without a word, and Jane was behind him.
Elizabeth stopped where she was. “Jane! How?”
The colonel removed his hat. “I collected your sister from your uncle’s home in Pentonville an hour ago.
Regrettably, it did not seem wise to tell her many particulars.
Forgive me, Lady Auchengray, for going round you.
I judged that you had earned a little of your own people, and that my father’s instruction not to send word to your family at large does not extend to a particular relative who is said to be a person of discretion. ”
“Whose discretion?”
“Your uncle was not hard to find, and I had prior evidence that he was a trustworthy man. He gave me his word, and vouched for your sister’s word, in his counting-house yesterday.
He is satisfied that Miss Bennet may know what is necessary and tell no one.
I am satisfied also. My father will be informed presently that I have done it.
” Richard’s mouth altered very slightly.
“He shall be cross with me, and at considerable length. He is, however, on balance a man who believes a woman in your present circumstance should be permitted the company of her sister for an afternoon.”
“Richard, I do not know how to thank —”
“There is one further detail you may wish to know.” He glanced at Jane, who had not yet been able to do anything but stare at Elizabeth.
“Your mother was informed that I was escorting Miss Bennet this morning on business of your uncle’s.
Your uncle was not, strictly speaking, untruthful in this.
Your mother accepted the account without question and was, I am told, somewhat preoccupied by my regimentals.
She was particularly approving of the facings. ”
“I am certain she was. You have my sympathies, Colonel.”
He bowed. “I shall be in the morning room if I am wanted. Take what time you need.” He went out, and the door closed behind him.
Elizabeth and Jane looked at each other across the rug.
Then Jane was across the room, and Elizabeth was in her arms, and Elizabeth had her face pressed against her sister’s shoulder and was not even trying to hold herself together.
Jane just held her and sobbed. She put her hand against the back of Elizabeth’s head the way she had done a hundred times in their childhood, and did not let go until Elizabeth had stopped shaking.
“Oh, Lizzy! Lizzy, how are you? Oh, you look as if you have not slept in a month! What has happened?”
“I am well. I am — Jane, oh, Jane!”
“Hush. Sit down.”
She sat, still trembling, and trying to dash hot tears from her face. Jane sat beside her on the sofa and kept one hand fast around Elizabeth’s.
“Lizzy, I have been waiting an hour to ask this, because the colonel made me promise not to begin in the carriage. I have nearly burst with it. Who is the colonel that he should know you, and why are you staying in the home of an earl? And where is your husband?”
“In London. He is in the Tower.”
Jane’s eyes rounded. “The Tower?
“Treason. He has been charged with treason. He is in the Tower.”
Jane paled and put her other hand over Elizabeth’s. “Lizzy! What…”
“He is alive. He is well. He is being defended by the best barrister in London. The earl is moving every piece available to a man of his standing. He is — Jane, he is not what we thought. None of it is what we thought.”
“You must tell me. Tell me anything. Tell me everything. I cannot — I have been imagining you in a draughty cottage somewhere on the moors with a reclusive man twice your age. I cannot comprehend what you have just said. Begin somewhere.”
Elizabeth held her sister’s hand and gathered herself. “He is the Baron of Auchengray, but his name is not Carlisle.”
“I — I do not understand.”
“He has been living under a false name since April of last year. He had been falsely accused of the charge for which he is now imprisoned, and the man who accused him had arranged matters such that the trial would have been a foregone conclusion. He took the only step available. He retreated to a property he held under another name, in Scotland, and prepared to defend the case from there. While he was there, certain news reached him concerning our family, and he —”
“Lizzy, you are shaking. Take a breath, for mercy’s sake! Has this man harmed you?”
“No! He intervened. When he heard what was arranged for me — arranged for us — he acted to save me, and you, too, but he was in such a precarious situation already that he kept his identity from me. He believed at the time that my safety required it. He believed I would be safer if I could honestly testify I did not know whom I had married.”
Jane’s eyes narrowed. “Lizzy, whom did you marry?”
“Mr Darcy.”
For a moment, Jane did not seem to have heard her.
Then her face changed.
It changed slowly. Elizabeth had been watching her sister’s face for twenty years and had never seen it do quite this.
The colour drained from it. Her lips parted.
Her grip on Elizabeth’s hand went so slack that Elizabeth thought for an instant Jane was about to faint and tightened her own hand instinctively to hold her.
“Mr Darcy? But I thought he died! Fitzwilliam Darcy. Of Pemberley?”
Elizabeth sucked in a breath. “The very same.”
“Mr Bingley’s friend, of ten thousand a year, the one who once called you merely tolerable and refused to stand up with you? That Mr Darcy?”
“That Mr Darcy.”
Jane drew in a long breath that did not quite catch.
She put her free hand to her mouth and looked at Elizabeth over her fingers, and Elizabeth saw her sister’s eyes fill in the slow shocked way they had filled when their father had died, and Jane swallowed it down and mastered it because Jane was Jane and would master anything required of her, but it took her several seconds, and her hand did not come down from her mouth.
“Oh, Lizzy! You said — you said you would never even dance with him!”
“I know what I said. I have been reminded of it more than once.”
“By whom?”
“By him. He was in excellent spirits about it whenever I let him be.”
Jane laughed once. It came out broken. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and laughed again, and then could not seem to stop, the laugh shattering her with the shake of someone who had been holding too much for too long and had just been given permission to let any of it go. “Oh, Lizzy! I can hardly credit it!”
“Stop laughing. None of this is funny.”
“I am not laughing. Or I am, but not as you imagine. And you said you did not even know it was him? How in the world did he keep that from you?”
Elizabeth sighed. “I am afraid the blindness does not reflect well on me. He had contrived what manner of concealment was available to him, but he spent rather more time in my company than such means could reasonably contain. Still, I did not put it together. The man never entered my mind for months, but once he did… why, it was impossible for me to set the notion aside. I am shocked at myself for how long it took me.”
“How long?”
“From October. I was nearly certain by November. I had it confirmed — you will laugh, because we laughed about it when we noted it — on the anniversary of the Netherfield Ball.”
Jane drew her hand down from her mouth slowly, looked at Elizabeth, and shook her head once, and her face went serious again.
“Why did you not write to me?”
“I could not. Truly. I could not even risk a hint of it on paper. He was not safe. I was not safe. I am sorry, Jane.”
“Do not be sorry to me.” Jane’s voice had thickened. “I am not — I am not angry. I am only — I am trying to make sense of this. Of you… secretly married to a man you claimed to dislike and finding yourself… Lizzy, do you care for him?”
The tears sprang into her eyes — unwonted, entirely unpreventable. “Oh, Jane! I love him so very dearly, my ribs ache when I try to breathe. I am listening at every moment for his voice, searching when I wake for his touch… I cannot think what I shall do if I lose him!”
“Lizzy…” Jane’s cheeks flushed, and she pressed her hand against her chest, briefly, and let it fall again. “You… you speak rather intimately of him.”
“With good cause. He is the best man I ever knew, Jane.”
Jane put her hand to Elizabeth’s cheek with a broken laugh. “Only you,” she said softly. “Only you could have contrived to become the wife to a ‘dead’ man and mistress of the finest estate in Derbyshire while under the impression that you had married a Scottish recluse.”
Elizabeth sniffed. “It seems I have a particular talent for the improbable.”
“Mama is going to be insupportable. She has been insupportable already, on the subject of your Scottish baron, and that was without knowing—”
“I know. Jane, you know I love Mama, but my husband’s situation… my situation as well… matters are too delicate for general gossip. She is to be told nothing for as long as we can manage it. Not even that I am in London. Please, please understand.”
“Of course. As far as Mama can know, I was in town on business with Uncle today. Oh, I shall have to explain that handsome colonel to her, though.”
Elizabeth chuckled. “Colonel Fitzwilliam can speak for himself, I think.”
“Good.” Jane was quiet again. Then, she asked carefully, “Elizabeth. Are you well in yourself? Not the situation — you.”
Elizabeth studied her sister, the face she had known her entire life, and understood what Jane was asking.
Not whether she was frightened — she was frightened, they both knew that.
Not whether she was keeping herself in hand — that was visible.
Something narrower and harder to answer than either of those.
“I am not certain,” she said, which was the most honest answer available to her.
Jane frowned, and her eyes swept Elizabeth’s face… then fell to the hand that had fallen protectively over her stomach. Her brows arched.
“How long since your courses?”
Elizabeth had not wanted to air this so openly.
First, the earl, then Pemberton, and now it was to be general knowledge?
But this was Jane asking directly, and the question had already been answered by the bucket on the packet, and the continuing morning nausea and the altered way her stays had begun to sit at the end of the day.
“Since the middle of November.”
Jane drank in a slow breath, and she nodded. “Does he know?”
“He… we were counting. He knows nothing certain. I have not been certain until very recently.” After a breath, she added, “I will tell him when I am permitted to see him.”
Jane did not answer at once. She slipped her hand into Elizabeth’s and held it tight. “Let us pray you may see him soon. I think he could do with something cheerful where he is.”
Richard brought Hodges on the fourth day. He was a compact man of perhaps fifty in good plain clothes, and he took stock of her with the swift, discreet attention of a professional habit of decades. She returned the assessment. The formality did its work.
“Mrs Darcy,” he said. “I am very glad to know of your existence.”
“And I yours. He spoke of you.”
His expression did not change — no performance of feeling — but a deeper stillness came over him before he answered. “He is well, I hope. As well as circumstances allow.”
“He was, when I last saw him.” She gestured to the chair across from her. “Sit down, Mr Hodges. We have a great deal to discuss.”
He sat. Richard moved to the window without being asked, near enough to be present, far enough to allow it to be her conversation.
“Colonel Fitzwilliam tells me you have been the connexion between Mr Webb and the household since April,” she said.
“Since May, strictly speaking. April was — there was a period in which my instructions were not clear.” He chose his next words with care. “Once I understood the situation, I proceeded as Mr Darcy would have wished.”
“Which was?”
“To remain available and to ask no unnecessary questions.” He folded his hands on his knee.
“Mr Webb has included me in his correspondence to the degree that was useful. I have not commented beyond what was required.” He went on in the same tone.
“I have also been maintaining intelligence of Grosvenor Square. The staff were let go in April — unavoidable — but Mrs Broadwood has been keeping the house on a retainer arrangement. She does not know why she is doing so. She has not asked.”
The housekeeper tending rooms for a dead man, the holland covers on the furniture, the fires unlit. “He inspires that,” she said.
“He does,” Hodges agreed.
“I need you to be my eyes. The solicitor will need documents from Grosvenor Square — correspondence, business records, anything that establishes Mr Darcy’s relationship with Sterling before April that he did not manage to take with him when he first left for Scotland.
I cannot retrieve them myself without drawing attention to the house. Can Mrs Broadwood be trusted?”
“Completely.”
“Then we will need her. Beyond that, I need to know Mr Webb’s current capacity — not what it was in January, but now. Whether he can still receive correspondence safely. Whether there is any intelligence coming out of Sterling’s camp that bears on the trial. I am aware this is a considerable risk.”
Hodges took a little time before he answered.
When he spoke, his voice was level. “Mrs Darcy. I dressed that man every morning for ten years. I know how he holds himself when he is concealing what something has cost him.” His mouth closed once on the memory before he continued.
“In Fetter Lane, I packed his trunk and brought his coat and told him the carriage was ready. He shook my hand. Mrs Darcy, in ten years of service, he never once failed to thank me for the most mundane of matters.” He drew a breath.
“I am not especially concerned about the risk.”
Elizabeth permitted herself a faint smile — only for an instant. “Very well. Then let us begin.”