I Will Remember You
LXVI
Jane brought her up to the small drawing room a little after eight in the evening.
Elizabeth had asked Mrs Hatchett to set the room with the fire built up, two extra candles at the writing-table, and tea things laid for three.
Not for a crowd. She had decided that Mrs Marsh should arrive in a room prepared for her and for her alone, and that the earl and the colonel and Mrs Gardiner, who had come to lend moral support, could be sent for later.
The first half-hour would be Mrs Marsh, Elizabeth, and Jane.
She rose from her chair when the door opened. She did it without putting her hand against the arm of the chair, because the woman coming through the door had been brought across half of London under conditions she had not chosen, and the least Elizabeth could do was be on her feet to receive her.
“Mrs Marsh. Welcome to Matlock House. Will you come and sit by the fire?”
Mrs Marsh stopped a step inside the door.
She was perhaps thirty-five. She had dark hair, hastily pinned, and the exhausted dignity of having been frightened for so long that she had stopped expending any part of herself on appearing less frightened than she was.
Her gown had been mended at the cuff. Her hands were clasped at her front in a way Elizabeth recognised from her own first afternoon at this house — the clasp of having decided, in advance, not to permit her hands to tremble where the room could see them.
Jane was beside her with one hand at her elbow, neither steering her nor leaving her unattended.
Jane’s pelisse and bonnet had been taken in the hall.
Mrs Marsh’s had not. The bonnet was still tied.
The pelisse was still buttoned. She had come up under the assumption that she would be back in the carriage within the quarter-hour.
“Jane,” Elizabeth said, “would you sit with Mrs Marsh by the fire? I shall ring for tea.”
Jane drew Mrs Marsh forward gently. She had spent the carriage ride doing the work she was best at, which was making frightened people less frightened by the constant fact of her being beside them.
Mrs Marsh allowed herself to be led to the chair Elizabeth had set nearest the fire.
She did not sit at once. Her eyes moved over the chair, the fire, the room, the two extra candles, and the absence of any man.
“There is no one else, ma’am?”
“There is no one else. The colonel handed you out of the carriage in the courtyard and will be in the drawing room with his mother and my aunt. My husband’s uncle is in the library at the other end of the house and will not come up unless I send for him.
My sister is here because I asked her to be here, but we may have her go down if you would prefer to speak with me alone.
There are no officers. There is no solicitor.
There is no clerk taking down what is said in this room.
There is myself and the bell-pull and my sister, and Mrs Hatchett bringing tea, and that is all there is. ”
Mrs Marsh did not move at once. “You are Mrs Darcy?”
“I am.”
“Your sister told me in the carriage what was wanted of me. She said also I was not required to come, and that I might go back to my children at any point, and that the carriage would wait for me as long as I needed it. She told me three times. She told me again on the doorstep. I came up because I believed her.”
“Then make yourself comfortable, Mrs Marsh. I shall not test your patience or abuse your trust.”
Mrs Marsh sat. She did not, at once, untie her bonnet. Jane sat on the small sofa nearest the fire, within reach. Elizabeth crossed to her own chair and sat opposite Mrs Marsh and folded her hands over the rise of her gown that the heavier dress had not been able to disguise.
Mrs Marsh’s eyes stopped on Elizabeth’s stomach and held there. Then they came up to Elizabeth’s face. “You are with child.”
“I am almost five months gone. It is, I am told, a matter of public record, by the kindness of the man your husband once worked for.”
“He did that?”
“He filed a petition for my arrest, which my condition complicated. So, I am confined to this house pending the outcome of my husband’s trial.
I am sorry I could not leave Matlock House to call on you in Wapping, which is why I have asked you to come to me.
Nor can I offer you a promise that does not pass through three other hands before it reaches you, because the man whose protection I should otherwise be offering is in the Tower of London and has been since January. ”
“Then how —”
“What I can offer you now is the protection of the man who has been carrying my husband’s interest since the day he was taken.
The Earl of Matlock, whose house this is.
Whose word is, in this city, equal to any word you have ever been threatened with by anyone working for Mr Sterling.
He is downstairs. He is waiting for me to send for him, which I shall do when you tell me to and not before. ”
Mrs Marsh’s gaze dropped to her hands. “Mrs Darcy. May I say something before you go further with this?”
“Say it.”
“I know what gentlemen promise at the door, and I know how much of it they remember the next morning. Three men have called on me this twelvemonth. None of them gave a name. Each of them offered me my husband’s safety in exchange for something, and when I gave them what they asked, it was never enough.
I am not saying you are one of them, Mrs Darcy.
I am saying I have learnt the lesson, and I would not be doing right by my children if I sat in your chair and did not say so. ”
“Name it. I want to know what you have been told. I want to know what has been threatened. I want to know what the last man to come to your door said to you.”
Mrs Marsh raised her eyes to Elizabeth and held them longer than any look before.
“You ask differently than the others did.”
“I ask because I have been a wife who had to keep her husband’s name out of a room.
I know how easily the nightmares come, how even your sweet moments are tarnished for his absence, how the word ‘tomorrow’ always carries unbalanced measures of hope and dread.
I should be ashamed to pretend that I do not. ”
“You —”
“I shall tell you the shape of it briefly, because we have not the evening for the long version. I was married in July to a man whose face I never saw. He went under another man’s name and gave me no other to call him by, and I did not learn his true name, or see him by daylight, until four months after the wedding.
I was, by every measure that mattered, the wife of a man I had to take on the strength of his word and his hand in the dark, and I took him because I had been given good reason to.
The cause of his concealment was the same cause that has put your husband into hiding.
The man who pursued mine is the same man who pursues yours.
I had been required to keep his true name out of every letter I wrote and every conversation I held.
I shall not pretend I bore it well. I only say that I have some idea what your eleven months have been like, and that I do not propose to ask you for anything I have not been asked, in my own way, to give. ”
Mrs Marsh let her shoulders down by a fraction of an inch. She had not, until then, let them down at all. “I had not been told of you. That there was a wife who suffered because of the affair.”
“My marriage, and the nature of it, has lately become public knowledge. A thing my husband will never forgive, for he likes his privacy better than most men, but if the exposure is the cost of telling the truth and being heard, Mrs Marsh, I will declare it from the rooftops.”
Mrs Marsh’s hand had risen, sometime in the last minute, to the ribbon under her chin. She untied it now and laid the bonnet on the small table beside her chair.
It was a small gesture. It meant she intended to remain in the room for longer than a quarter of an hour.
Jane, on the sofa, had not moved. She caught Elizabeth’s eye and turned back to the fire.
Elizabeth drew breath.
“Mrs Marsh, I do not want you to send him a message of any kind tonight. I want you to tell me, in your own time, what your husband has had to bear for eleven months, and what has been done to your household, and what you have understood, between you, of the nature of the man who has been requiring it of him. I want to know what you know. I want to know what he has told you and what he has not had to tell you because you worked it out for yourself. I should like to know all of it, and from you, not from any other source, because you are the person in London who knows it best and the one person whose telling I shall trust.”
“And if I do tell you?”
“Then I will tell you what we are willing to do for you and for your husband, and you shall decide whether it is sufficient to what you have been carrying. If you decide it is not, you shall leave this house tonight escorted by my sister and the colonel; you shall be returned safely to your door; you shall hear no more from us; and I shall not pursue the matter against you. If you decide it is sufficient, we shall begin tonight, and the first thing we shall do is remove you and your children from the lodgings where Mr Sterling’s men know to find you, to a house of the earl’s choosing where they do not.
Your husband may be sent for after, by whatever channel you use to reach him, when you have determined that it is safe to call him in. ”
Mrs Marsh’s eyes had filled. They did not spill. She was a woman who had decided some years ago not to weep in front of strangers, and she was holding to the decision.
“You would move my children tonight?”
“Tonight. Within two hours. The house is ready. A nurse is engaged. The colonel will arrange the carriage. You will not be required to set foot in Wapping again until you wish to.”
“And there will be no bill?”