LVII Us
LVII
Us
Three days after Miss Bingley’s unwelcome call, a footman appeared at the library door at eleven in the morning, with the request that Lady Auchengray attend Lord Matlock in the small morning room upstairs.
Elizabeth set down Pemberton’s memorandum and went at once.
The Earl stood at the window with a packet of papers in one hand. He turned when she came in, scarcely looked at her, and shut the door himself. “Please, make yourself comfortable.”
She sat in the chair opposite his desk.
“My solicitor assures me that Sterling’s marriage petition is exactly as nasty and as thin as we expected. He is proceeding on the theory that any court sufficiently shocked by my nephew’s conduct may be induced to forget the law. I have no intention of permitting that experiment to succeed.”
“I am glad to hear it.”
“You need not be glad. You need only be prepared.” He crossed the room and laid the papers on the table between them.
“The first conversation we had was about fact. This one is about use. Tell me,” he said, steepling his fingers, “everything you know that Pemberton does not. Not merely names and dates. Texture. Habits. What Webb thought he had and then lost. What Darcy said when he believed he was not saying anything. Which parts of the story have weight, and which parts are merely noise.”
So she told him everything she could think of.
She told him of Webb’s letters, read by the Auchengray fire, and of all that Darcy said they had assembled across the months — the clerk’s trail from Grosvenor Square to Bermondsey to Bristol, every secret lodging found out; the customs records set against the Mary Rose’s manifests, until the discrepancies no honest cargo could explain stood plain; MacNeil’s debts, and Sterling’s quiet payments to his creditors, stopped the day the captain sailed and leaving him ashore with writs and no means to answer them; Foss’s brother, and the Constant delayed for reasons that existed only on paper.
The earl wrote as she spoke. He filled a page, turned it, began another, and did not look up.
Then she told him things no memorandum could properly contain.
She told him how Darcy spoke of Sterling when he was tired enough to forget caution for half a sentence at a time.
She told him which names altered his breathing; which questions he answered too quickly; which gaps in the history were omissions of guilt, and which were omissions of pain.
She told him what fear had looked like in a man who spent most of his effort making fear useless.
She told him, lastly, the thing she had not meant to tell anyone because until speaking it aloud, she had not known it was knowledge.
“He did not believe Sterling would stop pursuing him. He believed only that Sterling could not move against him by the ordinary legal instruments so long as he remained, on the public record, dead. The concealment was not safety. It was time. He thought he required perhaps another few months. He had hoped to have his case fully assembled and lodged with counsel before the death was discovered to be a fiction, and then to surrender himself on his own terms. The discovery came sooner than he had reckoned.”
The earl had been listening without interruption. Now, for the first time, he leaned back.
“Yes,” he said. “That sounds exactly like him.” He glanced back over the page he had filled, and the one before it, and the one before that. “You are remarkably clear, Mrs Darcy.”
“I was married in the dark, my lord, not kept in it.”
That did produce a smile, brief and dry.
“No,” he said. “Plainly not. I do not say it as a compliment merely. I had expected a wife to bring me feeling, which would have been welcome but not, at this hour, of much use. You have brought me a memorandum. I find I have written, in the last quarter of an hour, three pages I do not believe I shall need to revise. That is rare for any source.”
“My husband does not deal in feeling when there is work to be done. I have learned from him.”
“Evidently.”
He set down the pen at last and folded his hands.
“So. A clerk located but beyond reach without unacceptable exposure; two captains months out of reach, and a third within it but afraid; a paper case all but complete, and no one yet to swear to it — and a wife who has spent six months in the house with the accused, and can give me a fuller account of his judgement than the man himself would, were he sitting in your chair. Your husband has not been idle.”
“He has not.”
The earl took up the pen again. “Which is to say a case no court could presently be made to credit, and only two means of waking it: a frightened captain made to swear, and a clerk kidnapped and made to talk. We are not where I should wish to be. We are also not without a hand to play.”
He drew one page from the packet and tapped it once with his finger.
“These are the men inside the Home Office who owe me favours. None of them can be seen to owe them. One can affect timing. One can affect access. One has no direct authority at all but is married to a woman who hosts two assistant under-secretaries every Thursday and has more practical power than both of them. I do not tell you this to impress you. I tell you it because if a door opens unexpectedly in the next six weeks, I would prefer you not mistake Providence for administration.”
“I shall try to remain appropriately irreligious about it.”
“Do.” He folded the paper again. “Pemberton can fight the petition in court. Richard can work the captain in taverns. Hodges can fetch paper from London cupboards. Webb can continue being nearly but not entirely dead. What I require to know is what you think cannot be delegated.”
The question pained her like a pin finding the exact point on a map. She had spent days inside a motion directed by others, and it was beginning to drive her mad.
“Seeing him,” she said.
The earl raised his brows.
“That cannot be delegated,” she said. “I have the right of a wife to see him in private, and you have not. And he must know what is being done. He may tell me something in silence that he would not tell a solicitor in speech. More than that, Sterling will want him isolated, and isolation is half the work in any prison, whether the walls are stone or paper. Every day my husband does not see me is a day Sterling’s account of the world becomes a little more plausible.
“And there is a further reason, my lord. My existence in this house is no longer a secret you can protect. I am Mrs Darcy. London knows it, and Sterling is already acting upon that knowledge. I see no reason to keep me confined to your drawing room. I should like permission to call at the Tower. Today, if it can be arranged. Tomorrow at the latest, for there may come a time when I cannot command such a privilege.”
“Yes,” he said after a moment. “Quite so.”
He rose and crossed to the bellpull. “Then you shall see him. Pemberton is attempting to establish the marriage to the satisfaction of the authorities. A wife who visits her husband in the Tower does improve appearances.”
The force with which relief moved through her was almost anger. She had not known, until that instant, how much of her present composure had been nothing but waiting for permission.
“You need not spare me the truth because I am his uncle. Find out how he has been treated. If you see something in him that alarms you, you will tell me. If you require something in this house that has not been offered, you will ask for it and assume the answer is yes until prevented.”
It was the nearest thing to familial protection anyone had ever put directly into her hands.
Elizabeth rose.
At the door, she turned.
He had already lowered his eyes to the page. His brow was drawn in concentration. He looked, she thought, very like Darcy when he was deciding how much of a blow could be met standing.
“My lord?”
He looked up.
“Thank you,” she said, because there are forms of gratitude too exact to be mistaken for dependence.
He gave a short inclination of the head. “You will help bring him back to us.”
The us stayed with her all afternoon.