LXII Misprision
LXII
Misprision
The earl sent for her at eleven o’clock on a Friday morning. Whitford brought the message himself, which was the first signal she had that the call was of a different character from the others.
She found the earl alone in the library. He was at his usual desk, but his pen was set down, and his hands were folded over a piece of paper which had plainly been waiting for her to enter the room before being explained. He gestured to the chair across from him without speaking. She sat.
“I have a matter to put to you, Mrs Darcy, which I should rather have put a week ago. I have been holding it until I had something better to put with it. I now have the something better, and the original matter has not improved by the keeping. I shall give you both at once.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Sterling’s solicitor filed a petition on Monday before last asking the Court of King’s Bench to charge you with misprision of treason.”
She did not, at once, register the words.
“I do not know what that means, my lord.”
“It means he has petitioned the court to charge you with the offence of knowing of your husband’s treason and actively concealing it. He has failed to make a case to dissolve your marriage, as we knew he would. His next tactic is to tie your hands and incriminate you along with your husband.”
Elizabeth swallowed. “I… he knew that was a possibility.”
“You may now consider it a reality. The good news is that Sterling cannot make a case of aiding and abetting because the marriage articles and the conditions of your concealment will not support it. He has fallen back to misprision because misprision requires less to prove and does much of the same work. You are now a liability rather than an asset to Darcy, and at considerable risk yourself.”
She stiffened in alarm. “He wishes to have me arrested?”
“He wishes to have you removed. Arrest is the means by which he proposes to remove you. Yes.”
She put her hand on the arm of the chair. She did not trust her voice. “Newgate?”
“No. Not Newgate. Not any prison. You will forgive me for not saying sooner that I have had this matter in my hands for five days already, and I have spent them working that point through Pemberton and through three private channels which I shall not detail to you. The Crown will not commit a pregnant gentlewoman of your standing on this charge. There would be a riot in the press and a worse one in the City within forty-eight hours, and the Solicitor-General has informed me, quietly, that he is aware of it. You will not be taken to Newgate.”
“Then —”
“You will be restrained. That is the deal I have made, and it is the best deal that was available. You will be confined to this house pending the resolution of the matter. You will receive no visitor not approved in writing. Your correspondence will be examined before it leaves the house and on its arrival. You may not visit your husband at the Tower again before the trial. You may not attend at Mrs Gardiner’s, nor at any other house, nor at any place of public assembly, including the church the Gardiners attend.
You will not be permitted, on any pretext, to leave Matlock House until the order is lifted, which it will not be until the trial is concluded. ”
She could not have said, in the moment, whether her body had registered what he was saying. Some part of her had heard the word Newgate and stopped at it, and another part had heard not the Tower again and was attempting, unsuccessfully, to translate the phrase into a thing she could survive.
“My lord —”
“Hear me through. The order will be entered tomorrow morning. Pemberton has filed the counter-petition we drafted three weeks ago, which holds the worst at bay and reduces what they wanted to what I have just described. The worst would have been close arrest in a private house under the Crown’s seal, which is to say a guard at every door of a room you would not have been allowed to leave.
We have prevented that. We were not able to prevent this. ”
Elizabeth could not bear to look at the earl, so she switched her gaze to the window and stared at it, refusing to blink back the sheen that blurred her vision.
“You will hear me say that I am sorry, Mrs Darcy, which is a thing I do not say in this room more than once or twice in a calendar year. I am sorry. It is a poor word, and it does not answer.”
She still could not speak.
The earl waited. He had been at this work long enough to know when a person had to be permitted the silence in which to receive a piece of news, and he gave her, for the first time since she had come into his house, more than thirty seconds of an uninterrupted quiet.
“How long?”
“The trial is set for the third week in April.”
“And until then I — what? What can I do for him?”
“You shall do such work as may be done within these walls, which is not nothing, but is considerably less than what we had hoped of you. Mrs Gardiner will come to you. Hodges will continue with you, and we shall arrange the documentary work so that nothing is lost on that front. The City campaign is, however, broken. I shall not pretend otherwise. We have done what we could. We did not have time enough.”
She drew in a breath. It did not come cleanly.
“My husband, my lord. I cannot — I cannot tell him in person. He will know within the day. He will hear of the petition before he hears of the order, and he will think — he will not know whether I am —”
“You may write to him today. Pemberton will carry it personally with the privilege of counsel, so no gaoler will read this one. The letter will go out before the order is entered, which will at least spare Darcy the kind of report from the Tower gaolers that would otherwise reach him first. You shall have an hour, in my library, to write what you wish to write. I shall instruct Pemberton to read the letter only insofar as is required by the conditions Sterling’s people have demanded.
He will not read it for any other purpose.
You may consider it as private as a letter from your hand to your husband’s hand can be in the present circumstances. ”
“Thank you, my lord.”
“You should not thank me. I have failed you in the matter of your visits, and I do not yet know how I am going to make my nephew understand that the failure was not entirely mine to prevent.”
“It was not your failure.”
“I know it was not. I am also responsible for it, which is a thing the Earls of Matlock have learned to bear. You will learn it also, in due course. There is rather more of it in this family than I have been able to spare you.”
She looked at her hands in her lap. She had been holding them very still. She unfolded them. “My lord, I should like to ask one thing.”
“Ask.”
“At the trial. May I be present at the trial?”
He looked at her a moment. Then he set down the paper he had been holding for the whole of the interview and folded his hands on the desk.
“I shall fight for it. I shall not promise. The order as it presently stands does not contemplate the question, and Sterling’s people will press hard to exclude you on grounds of your condition, your charge, and the disorder your presence may be alleged to cause.
Pemberton is preparing arguments. I think we shall have a fair chance of having you in the public gallery, perhaps behind a screen, perhaps not.
I do not yet know. I shall fight for it. That is what I can promise.”
“That is sufficient, my lord.”
“It is not. But I cannot offer better.”
She rose. She did not, at first, take a step. Her legs had gone, briefly, less steady than she had been requiring of them, and she put her hand against the back of the chair until they obliged her again.
The earl rose with her, but did not come round the desk.
“Mrs Darcy, you have done what was asked of you and somewhat more. The work you have done in the City over the last five weeks will outlast the silencing of it. Such reputation as a wife may construct for her husband in this season has been constructed. The breaking of the campaign is not the undoing of what was built. I should like you to remember that as you write to your husband. He should know it also.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Go and write. You have until three.”