LXX #2
“Elizabeth.” He cut her off with a sharp sigh.
He almost never called her by her first name, and he employed it now intentionally, but not unkindly.
“You went white in the gallery. If you had gone down on the stair, I should have been carrying you to the carriage in front of the entire press of London, and the papers tomorrow would have carried your collapse instead of my cousin’s defence.
You will not do it again. I shall not be the one to permit it. ”
Elizabeth set her cup of beef tea down on the table beside her. Her hand still shook a little. “He will want me there for the verdict.”
“He would not.”
“Richard, he would —”
“Mrs Darcy,” the earl interrupted. “My nephew would never forgive me, nor would he forgive his cousin, if either of us permitted you to make yourself ill in his service on the day his case is closed. He would consider it a piece of conduct so far beneath the office of his uncle and his cousin that no apology either of us could construct would cover the ground. I am not in any doubt as to what he would say to me, in private, on the matter of your appearance tomorrow if I were to permit it. I have no desire to receive that lecture from him at any future hour. You will remain at this house. I shall send Pemberton’s clerk to you every hour during the deliberations with such word as we have.
You will be the first person in this household to know the verdict, by such margin as a fast horse may produce. ”
She did not, for some seconds, answer.
“When will the verdict come?”
“I do not know. The closings will not finish before late afternoon. The judge’s charge will go an hour at least, and the jury will retire in the evening.
They will not, in a case of this complexity, return within the hour.
They may deliberate through the night. They may deliberate into the day following. We shall know when we know.”
“And if it comes —”
“If it comes, I shall send Richard ahead of the carriage. Darcy… well. We shall see. You will not be required to do anything except wait.”
She closed her eyes briefly. She had not, until that moment, realised how tired she was.
“I should like to go to bed now, my lord.”
“I think that wise.” He had stood. He bent — which she had not seen him do for any person in any room of Matlock House since her arrival — and kissed her once, very briefly, on the forehead.
“You have done your part, Mrs Darcy. Permit the rest of us to do ours.”
He went out. Richard followed him, and Jane came in.
Elizabeth permitted herself, for the first time since she had come down from the gallery, to be helped to her feet without trying to hide that she required the help.
He sat on the bench against the cold stone with his back unsupported and his hands on his knees, because if he sank back against the wall, he would not have the strength to come upright when the guard came for him.
It had been hours. He could not have said how many.
The court had reconvened at nine. He had been brought back to the dock.
He had not been allowed to sit in the dock at any point of the day, and by the time the jury had risen from the box and filed out in their slow line — perhaps four in the afternoon, perhaps five — he had been on his feet long enough that his knees, when he had been brought down the stair to the cell, had nearly given way at the second turning.
Some hours had passed in this room since.
The piece of bread on the table in front of him had not been touched. He had looked at it twice. He could not.
His mouth was dry. His face was hot. His hands shook with a tremor he had given up trying to govern hours ago.
He had not slept the night before. He had eaten almost nothing.
He had stood in the dock for the better part of a day listening to a counsel he had never met describe him, in perfectly reasonable tones, as a man whose hanging would be a public benefit.
The Crown’s counsel had been very good, and Darcy had not been prepared for how good.
The man had not raised his voice. He had not appealed to any low sentiment.
He had merely stood and walked the jury through every act of Darcy’s last twelve months, reframing each in turn with such plausibility that Darcy had begun to hear his own life as the prosecution had assembled it. And the assembly held.
Every honourable act of his year had been turned, in the counsel’s hands, into the small private cruelty of having calculated all along — every protection of those he loved made the cowardice of saving himself, every act of restraint made the cunning of hiding something worse, every sacrifice he had paid for in coin and conscience and the months of his wife’s life named back to him as evidence of the very guilt he had paid them to disprove.
Pemberton had answered each in turn an hour later, and answered them well. But the counsel’s version had been heard first, and was the one a tired juror would remember in the deliberation room.
He sat now in the cell and put his hands over his face.
He had been grateful, through every minute of the counsel’s closing, that Elizabeth was not in the gallery.
She would have heard her own marriage described as a fraud upon her.
She would have heard her statement described as a piece of inducement procured by his uncle’s solicitor.
She would have heard her own absence from the gallery — the absence the earl had forced upon her against her will — used by the prosecution as evidence that the defence was staging her appearances.
Or if she had been there, she would have heard that her presence was an obvious attempt to garner sympathy against her own misprision case, which was also at issue.
She would have heard all of it from behind the screen, where she would not have been able to weep, would not have been able to stand, would not have been able to do anything but sit with her hand at her mouth for two hours while her husband was being prepared for the scaffold in measured prose.
She had been spared that. The earl, who had sent her home the night before against her protests, had given her, by that one act, the only mercy of the day.
The shaking in his hands moved up into his shoulders and would not stop.
He bent his head and let it come. He did not weep aloud.
He was a Darcy — he had lived as a Darcy and would die as one, if need be, and the guard at the door of the cell would not hear him surrender his dignity now.
But the tears came through his fingers, and he could not have stopped them if he had wished to, and he did not wish to.
When the worst of it had passed, he wiped his face on the handkerchief he had carried since Auchengray, the Pemberley mark turned against his mouth, and he drew breath.
Then he prayed.
He had not prayed properly in weeks. The recitations in the Tower had become a performance of the office and not the substance. He prayed now without form.
He prayed for Elizabeth, who had been confined to a house she had not chosen, carrying his child, waiting at this hour for word that might not come until the morning or might not come at all in any form she could survive.
He prayed for the child, that he might one day be granted the pleasure of holding it. Naming it. Seeing her hold the babe in her arms and — God help him — perhaps even carrying a second child of his one day.
He prayed for the Marshes, who had risked everything they had and would not be safe in any house in England if the jury came back the wrong way.
He prayed for his uncle and for Pemberton and for Richard and for Bingley.
He prayed for Hodges. He prayed for the Bennets and the Gardiners and for Angus and Mrs MacLeod and even Falstaff.
He did not pray for himself. He had nothing to ask for himself that he could put into words. He sat with his head bowed in the cell with the bread untouched on the table and the candle going low, and he waited.
The light at the window was gone.
The cell was cold. He drew the coat around himself. He still had not eaten. He still could not.
He sat a long while.
Footsteps came at last in the corridor. They stopped at his door, and the bolt drew. The guard stood in the doorway with a candle.
“The jury have returned, sir.”
Darcy stood. His legs were slow to take his weight.
“What hour is it?”
“It is just past three in the morning, sir.”
He drew a breath. “Very well. Let me hear it.”