LVIII The Wife in the Tower #2
“It was not pleasant. Your uncle was as decent as a man of his rank could be in the asking. Pemberton was decent in his own way later. I bore both of them. They were the right questions, and someone had to ask them.”
He sighed. “Of course. I have known Pemberton’s work for years. He is the most exact counsel in London on this kind of matter, and a man Sterling has had occasion to dislike before. My uncle did well to retain him.”
“He said he had owed your uncle a favour since 1809.”
“He probably had. My uncle is a careful collector of such things.”
He almost smiled. It did not get further than the corner of his mouth, but she saw it begin, and saw him master it because the gaoler was at the wall, and the smile did not belong to a man under treason charge in the visiting room of the Tower.
Then he looked at her again, and the smile, what there had been of it, was gone.
“Thank you for bearing… all of it.”
She did not answer that. She turned her hand under his and held it back, and they sat a moment in the quiet.
Darcy looked at her with that long, grave attention which had undone her first in darkness and would, she suspected, continue to undo her under any variety of legal circumstance the Crown might devise.
“Elizabeth, this recent petition… it is a distraction, no more. The real danger — good God, I can hardly bear speaking it out loud. If the court finds against me —”
“They will not.”
He attempted a smile, but his face would not cooperate. “You are very certain.”
“No. I am very stubborn. The distinction is useful, and I recommend it to your notice.”
This time, the change in his expression was unmistakable. Not a smile; that would have been too easy, and they had not yet been given ease. But something in him reached towards her and stopped only because the room forbade the completion.
His thumb stroked the back of her hand. “You look tired.”
Of all the things he might have said, that was the most dangerous. She ought to have answered with some light contempt.
She heard herself say instead, “So do you.”
They held each other’s eyes over the table while the gaoler, who had the tact of a brick wall and perhaps more kindness than his office allowed him to display, examined nothing at the far side of the room.
“How are you kept? Your uncle commanded me explicitly to ask. I think he is looking for a chance to be offended by the court.”
“Better than I deserve, according to the newspapers, and worse than you would like, according to your face.” He glanced at the gaoler again. “I have books. Paper in limited quantities. A window. The society is poor but intermittent.”
“You omit to mention the view.”
“I was trying to spare you disappointment. It is chiefly stone and other men’s confinement.”
“Then London resembles itself more closely within the walls than without them.”
“It does. Without the better light.”
“You have candles, I hope?”
“Several more than I require, since my uncle’s solicitor sent in a stock that would furnish a small church.”
“Then you are better off than you were in November.”
He met her eyes, and the corner of his mouth lifted. “In November, I had a chamber, a fire that drew well, an agreeable supper companion, and a very soft bed. I shall not pretend to have improved my circumstances.”
Her fingers tightened in his. “Nor I. Matlock House, it turns out, is somewhat less appealing than a dark tower room in Scotland. But I expect we shall manage for the present.”
“You will manage. I cannot remember a single night I slept well in the bed in the mural chamber, and shall have none in any successor that is also six inches too short.”
“Then we are both wretchedly situated. Yours has a fireplace and a gaoler. Mine has the Countess’s lady’s-maid, who has formed strong views on the manner in which I wear my hair and is conducting the necessary corrections with a patience I find more frightening than any threat Sterling has yet produced. ”
His face warmed a little. “Is that so?”
“Oh, indeed. I am repaying the household in small ways. Your aunt has been induced to take her tea at the south window instead of by the fire. I gather no one has rearranged her tea-table in thirty years, and she is finding the experiment exhilarating. Your uncle has been heard to mutter on the subject, which Richard tells me he has not done in a decade. Georgiana has been encouraged to play something other than Haydn in the evenings, and the household is presently being entertained by every piece she was forbidden as a girl. The cook is being asked, gently, whether she might consider not boiling the carrots into submission. I am told the kitchen has not yet recovered. I take that for approbation.”
A laugh broke from him. “Heaven help Matlock House! You are the most exhausting woman in England, Lizzy.”
“I know. I have been working at it for some time.”
He looked as if he might laugh again, but just then the gaoler moved from the wall. “Time, ma’am.”
The half hour was over. She had not seen it pass. She had spent some of it laughing and some of it holding back tears, and now the gaoler was at her elbow, having given them every minute he was permitted, and unable to give one more.
Darcy’s hand tightened once upon hers and released.
He rose. So did she.
He stood across the table with his eyes on her, and what she had won from him in the last half hour was still there in him.
He was not stiff. He was not the prisoner who had come into the room.
He was grieved, and angry — not at her — and entirely present in his own face for the first time since the door had closed behind him, and she could not bear to leave him in this room with that face and no one to see it.
She came round the end of the table.
The gaoler did not stop her. She had been told before she entered that the Lieutenant of the Tower had permitted an embrace at parting. She had not yet decided how she meant to use the permission. She decided now.
She put her arms around her husband and lay her face against his throat, and she felt his arms come up and close around her — slowly at first, as a man who had been forbidding himself to do exactly this for the last half hour, then properly, and tightly, and with the entirety of what he had not been allowed to put into his voice.
He bent his face into her hair. She heard him draw a breath against the side of her head and let it out unsteadily.
She lifted her face and kissed him.
She had not warned him. She had not warned the gaoler.
She kissed him on the mouth, and Darcy, who had been holding her with the discipline of being under observation, lost the discipline entirely and kissed her back, and she held the kiss for several seconds longer than she had any business holding it.
The gaoler cleared his throat.
She did not let go. She kept kissing her husband for two seconds more, because she had decided in the moment that she would, and because she could not see, in any of the legal machinery being built around them, when she would next be permitted to do so.
The gaoler cleared his throat a second time, more pointedly.
She drew back at last, and put both of her gloved hands against Darcy’s face, and looked at him.
He was breathing as though he had been running.
“Elizabeth —” His voice had gone very low.
His hand had come up to cover hers against his cheek.
“Elizabeth. You must not come again. I am asking you. Please. Whatever the gaoler will tolerate, whatever Pemberton will arrange — do not come again. Not until this is decided. I can bear this place. I cannot bear seeing you in it.”
She set her jaw and stared at him, willing him to back down.
He was not dismissing her. He was begging her. He was trying, even with what was left of his command, to put himself between her and a danger the law had not yet decided how to use against her — and he was, for the first time in this room, asking rather than instructing.
She felt the pain of the asking. She felt the part of him that had spent four months at Auchengray buying her safety with his silence rise up in this room and try, one more time, to do the same work.
It was not enough. It had never been enough.
“I shall come every week, Fitzwilliam. You may take it up with the gaoler.”
He closed his eyes for the briefest moment. When he opened them, what was in them was the look she had been waiting for — not anger, not pride, but something darker and more helpless than either, made of love and the perfect impossibility of governing her from across a prison table.
He bowed. The slightest movement. Formal. Beautiful. Furious.
“As you please, Mrs Darcy.”
Then he let her go.
The gaoler took her elbow — not roughly, but firmly enough to remind her that the permission had been spent — and turned her towards the door. She did not look back. She had decided she would not look back. She heard Darcy not moving from where she had left him, and she did not look back.
She walked out under the gaoler’s eye, down the stone passage, back through the outer office, where Richard rose at once on seeing her face. “Well?”
She did not answer him until they were in the carriage. Only then did she put both gloved hands in her lap and discover that they were trembling.
Richard, who knew better than to offer comfort until invited, merely drew the blind half down against the winter glare and said, after a moment, “Did he attempt to send you away?”
She kept her eyes on her own hands. “Naturally.”
“And did it answer?”
At that, despite everything, she looked up.
“Not in the least.”