LXXI
In the Dark
The earl’s clerk arrived at twenty minutes past four with the word that closing arguments had finished. The jury were preparing to hear the judge’s charge. There would be no further news for some hours.
Elizabeth had been in the small drawing room with Georgiana and Jane since the morning.
She had been told by Mrs Hatchett at ten o’clock that she would be made to eat breakfast. She had agreed and had not touched the plate.
A second plate had been brought at one. She had pushed the food about and let Mrs Hatchett take it away again.
Tea had been refused, accepted, refused, accepted.
The day had moved through her without seeming to take root.
Georgiana had been at the window since noon. Every quarter-hour she rose from the seat, went to the door, listened, returned to the window, and sat again. Elizabeth had stopped counting her circuits at three. Jane had her sewing in her lap and had not added a stitch in over an hour.
At seven, Richard came in.
He had been at the courthouse all day. His coat was creased at the back where he had been sitting against a chair for hours.
He had not shaved that morning, and the day had told on him; the shadow at his jaw and the small grey hollows under his eyes had not been there yesterday.
He came into the drawing room, and Elizabeth was on her feet before she had quite knew that she had risen.
“Richard? Tell me…”
“Nothing yet, Elizabeth.”
“They have retired?”
“Half past six. The judge took two hours with the charge. They have been out perhaps thirty minutes.”
“And?”
“And nothing. They will be hours. They may go all night.”
“Richard —”
She had meant to ask him whether his face meant what she thought it meant.
She could not, in the moment, find the words for the question.
He had been her cousin-in-law for nine months and her friend for longer, and she knew the small alteration about his mouth that meant he had not had the news he had hoped to bring.
He did not soften it for her. He never had.
“I will come back the moment we have word. I cannot stay, Elizabeth. My father is at the chamber, and Pemberton is with him, and I am to be in the corridor for any clerk that comes out of the jury room. You will know within half an hour of the verdict. You have my word. Eat something.”
She tried to snort, but it came out as a sob. “I cannot.”
“Eat something anyway.” He looked at Jane. Jane nodded once. He took Elizabeth’s hand briefly and pressed it, and went out.
The door closed.
Georgiana made a small sound against the back of her hand and turned her face into the curtain at the window.
Elizabeth went to her. She put her arms around her sister-in-law, and Georgiana held on with the desperate grip of a sixteen-year-old who had been told, with no softening, that she might lose her brother in the next eight hours, and the brittle composure she had been holding since the morning gave way.
She wept against Elizabeth’s shoulder. Elizabeth held her.
Then Elizabeth, against every intention she had brought into the room, found that she was weeping too. The two of them stood at the window holding to each other and crying with no attempt at composure for what was perhaps a quarter of an hour. Elizabeth did not know how long.
“Lizzy. Georgiana.”
Jane was at her elbow.
“Come away from the window. Both of you. Come here.”
“Jane —”
“Now, Lizzy. You will exhaust yourself, and Georgiana will exhaust herself, and there is nothing either of you can do at this hour that crying at the window will improve. Georgiana, my love, come and sit by the fire. Mrs Hatchett shall bring you something hot. Lizzy, you shall come upstairs with me.”
“Jane, I cannot —”
“You shall. I will not argue with you about it. I have been watching you all week, and you have not slept since the night before last, and you have eaten nothing since yesterday morning, and you can hardly sit up straight. You will come upstairs and lie down, and if word comes, I will wake you within the second. Come.”
Elizabeth let go of Georgiana, who was caught by Mrs Hatchett at the door before Elizabeth had realised that Mrs Hatchett had come in. Jane took Elizabeth’s arm.
“Jane.”
“Hush.”
“He may already —”
“Hush. We do not know. We shall not know for hours yet. Richard said so. Come.”
She fairly dragged Elizabeth up the stairs.
Elizabeth permitted herself to be undressed by Mrs Hatchett’s woman, who was efficient and silent and did not look at her face while she worked.
She was put into a chemise and a shawl. Her hair was unpinned, brushed out, and braided loosely down her back.
The bed had been turned down. The fire had been built up.
Jane stood at the foot of the bed with her arms crossed.
“In.”
“Jane, I cannot —”
“In, Lizzy.”
She got in.
The sheets were cold at first, and then the warmth of her own body began to come back to them.
She lay on her side because she could no longer lie comfortably on her back, and her front was no longer available to her.
The child was kicking. The child had been kicking all afternoon.
The kicks were small and sharp and located, just at this hour, against the underside of her ribs on the left side, where they had been for the last three days because the child had taken some private decision about the geography of her abdomen that she could not dispute.
Her back ached. Her hips ached. Her ribs ached on the side the child was not on, from holding the side the child was on at the angle that prevented the kicks from being worse.
She had not cried herself out at the window. She had only paused. The crying began again when she was alone in the bed with Jane gone out in the hall.
She did not try to stop it. She had nothing left with which to try. She turned her face into the pillow and wept for some considerable time, and Jane sat in the chair without speaking and put her hand briefly against Elizabeth’s shoulder when the worst of it came and did not otherwise intrude.
What she wanted — what she wanted and had been required to do without it for too long — was her husband.
She wanted him at her back. She wanted the long warmth of him curled against her in the bed and his arm coming over her waist and his hand spreading flat against the curve where the child was, the way it had done in November at Auchengray when he had comforted her in the pain of her courses, when he had put his hand there in gentle acknowledgment.
She wanted his breath against her hair. She wanted the low, contented sound he made when he settled into a bed she was already in.
She wanted the smell of his skin against her neck.
She wanted the warmth she had taken for granted at Auchengray and which she had not had for one hundred and twelve nights and was not, at this hour, certain she would ever have again.
She wept for that as much as for any of it.
She wept because the pain in her back and the pain in her hips and the pain in her ribs and the kicking under them were the pains a husband would have eased, in his presence, by no act greater than lying down beside her, and her husband was sitting at this hour in a cell beneath a court she could not reach, waiting for a verdict that might prevent him from ever lying beside her again.
She wept until she had no further capacity to weep.
She did not, then, sleep.
She lay on her side with her pillow soaked and her hand against the curve at the front of her, and she let her eyes close, and her body did what it could once her will had been spent.
It surrendered. It went into the dull, motionless stupor that was not sleep and was not waking and was the only mercy available to her at this hour.
The child ceased kicking. Her back, by some small slackening of the muscles, eased a fraction.
The candle burned low on the table beside her.
Something touched her in the dark.
She came up out of the stupor with the small animal jerk of a body that had been holding itself in suspension for hours and had been brought out of it without warning. The candle had gone. The room was black.
But there was someone standing beside the bed.
“Lizzy?”
For half a breath, she did not move. She knew that whisper.
She would have known it through any door of any house in England, in any condition of waking, and it tore through her with a force that took her whole body before her mind had caught up to what its presence in her bedroom in the small hours of the morning had to mean.
The hand that took hers in the dark closed around her fingers with the familiar pressure she had not felt in one hundred and twelve nights.
Then her mind caught up.
“Fitzwilliam!”
“It is me, my love. I am here. Hush, hush — Lizzy —”
She made a sound she could not afterward have described, half breath and half sob, and she was off the pillow before she had thought to move.
Her arms went round his neck. She kissed his mouth and his cheek and the side of his throat and his mouth again, and his jaw and his temple and his mouth once more, with the wild and disorderly passion of a woman who had been kept from his face for one hundred and twelve nights and was not going to be careful with the first five minutes of having it back.
He laughed against her mouth — an unsteady sound that came out half a sob of his own — and put his arms around her and held her.
“My love — let me — let me breathe a moment —”
“Not yet! Not until I have felt that you are whole and well and here.”
She kissed him again and did not let him answer for some considerable interval.
Her hands were on either side of his face, and his mouth was against hers, and she was crying, she discovered, into the kissing — not the wretched, soaked weeping of the earlier hours but the overflowing of a body that had been kept too long from what it had been wanting and was discovering that it had not, after all, lost the capacity for joy.