XLIII #3
“I know,” he said, before he could stop himself, and then wished he had not, because it gave him away — that he had noticed, all those years ago, what she wore; that he had carried the memory of it through everything; that in a foreign shop with a hundred gowns, he had reached for the one that was her.
He looked away, out at the harbour going dark.
“That is — I only meant that… well, it seemed the sort of thing you would like.”
She did not answer for a moment. And when he made himself look back at her, she was smiling — small, and shy, a smile he had not seen from her in several days. “Thank you, Fitzwilliam. It is… it is very kind. It is exactly right.”
He let himself admire that smile for a moment, bask in whatever slight warmth she would let herself offer, before he ruined it with business.
“There is something else.” He rose and went to pour her the water that stood on the washstand, because he needed a thing to do with his hands.
“I went down to the harbour to ask after our passage. There is none to be had this week, or likely next.” He handed her the cup.
“But I encountered someone I had known a little at school — Harcourt; you will not have heard the name, there is no reason you should. He is settled here on some business, I know not all the details, but he is the sort of man who knows everyone and arranges everything, and he has asked us to dine with him tomorrow evening.”
Her face took on the shadow he had expected to see — the instinctive withdrawal, the marshalling of a refusal. A dinner. Strangers. Society, when she was worn to the bone and heartsore and had not even considered trying to be sociable.
“Fitzwilliam, I do not think —”
“Hear me first. Harcourt is not merely a garrulous fellow with a good table, though he is certainly both.
He has some place in the government's foreign business.
He has for years. He moves in exactly the world where our affairs will be decided — the claim, and your uncle's ransom, and the whole question of how a thing is truly pressed at the Foreign Office once it reaches London.
I do not know what happens to a claim once it goes into the channel, or what truly moves a captive's case, or whom one must reach, or how. I have been guessing, but here is a man who knows all of it, or at least some of it. Harcourt could tell us in one evening what I have failed to learn in a hundred anterooms.”
He saw the very spark of calculation he had expected.
The strategist in her, the merchant's niece, the woman who had frightened a bond-office into finding a lost record — she could no more resist a source of real intelligence than she could resist correcting a false sum.
The withdrawal in her face was giving way to something else, something sharper and more interested, and he pressed his advantage.
“For your uncle's sake alone, it is worth an evening,” he said.
“You have wanted, this whole way, to know how you might help him. Here is a man who can tell you. I mean to go, Elizabeth — with you or without you. We cannot afford to leave such a thing unlearned merely because I am poor company just now. So I shall go, and I will bring you back whatever I can make of it, but you would make more of it than I could. You always do. You hear the real structure under facing.”
It was, he knew even as he said it, not entirely fair.
He had wrapped a dare inside the grace of it, calling himself the one who was poor company just now.
And she, who had never in her life backed down from a challenge or let pride keep her from a useful thing, would pluck up her courage and prove she could sit an evening across a table from him.
He was not proud of the manoeuvre. He only wanted, badly, not to walk into that house alone; wanted her beside him one more time as his wife before England came and she began, in earnest, the work of ceasing to be Mrs Darcy.
If it took a small unfairness to get her there, he was willing to be a little unfair.
She narrowed her eyes at him. He could see her sorting the dare folded inside the reason, realising exactly what he had done, and he braced for her to call him on it.
She did not. Perhaps she was too tired. Perhaps the intelligence was bait she truly could not refuse. Perhaps — he did not let himself hope it — she wanted, as he did, one more evening of standing beside him before the end.
“I will come,” she said. She looked down at the green gown across her lap and smoothed it once more. “For my uncle. And for your claim. Not…” She closed her eyes, made a smiling sort of grimace, and then lifted her shoulders. “You know.”
“For your uncle,” he agreed. “And the claim.”
“I think the waist may serve,” she said, her hand caressing the fabric again. “It is not meant to be fitted tight over my stomach, anyway. But it is several inches too long, so if the woman of the house has a needle, perhaps I need not go looking as though I have borrowed Lydia's gown.”
He permitted the softest huff of amusement.
There she was. Somewhere under all that armour, his Elizabeth was still there.
“You will look…” he said, and stopped, because beautiful was not a word he had the right to spend just now, and like yourself was nearer the truth and more than he could say, “… very well,” he finished.