XLIV
Intelligence
The Harcourts kept a house on the good side of the town, above the harbor, with candles in the windows and a servant to take their cloaks. Elizabeth walked into it on her husband's arm and decided within the first ten steps that she had made a mistake.
It was not that the house was grand. It was not, particularly — a prosperous man's house, comfortable, sumptuous, a little over-furnished like Uncle Gardiner’s friends who liked to make an impression. That was the sort of home she had got used to, her last two years since leaving Longbourn.
The real trouble was that it was so vibrant, so full of voices and laughter and merriment that she had forgot how to join, and that everything in it — the carpet under her feet, the glass in the windows, the very air — belonged to a world she had not stood inside for so long she half believed it could not be real.
And now there was a footman drawing out her chair, and the firelight was catching in cut crystal on a white cloth, and she sat down in a gown that was so new, it still itched and felt raw on her arms.
Mrs Harcourt was lovely, and one might even call her kind.
She was a comfortable Englishwoman, perhaps five years Elizabeth’s senior, contentedly childless and delighted to have another of her countrywomen at her table so far from home.
She pressed Elizabeth's hand and exclaimed over the dreadfulness of their journey and saw to it that her glass was filled, and her plate was heaped.
Elizabeth smiled and answered all her questions like an exhibit at a gallery, and felt like a beggar who had got into the wrong house by climbing through a window.
Beef arrived on a silver dish. Soup in bone china, more wine than they could drink in crystal decanters and glasses, and linen so pure and white spread under it all that it might have been made from a cloud.
This was the thing she had let herself forget out on the road, where hunger and fear had made them equals, where a husband was worth what he could carry, and a wife worth what she could save, and nothing else signified.
But this was Darcy's world. Not the rocky plains or the high mountain pass or the swollen, fever-infested river.
Not the mule they had gone hungry to keep sound, or the barn lofts where straw was shared with rodents to keep warm.
This — the crystal, the candles, the servant at the sideboard, the easy prosperous talk — this was the water he swam in, the life he had been born to and would return to the moment they set foot in England, and she had let the road persuade her, night by cold night, that the distance between them had somehow closed.
Here, in the candlelight, she could see exactly what she was — a dead gentleman’s daughter, a tradesman's niece, a girl whose whole dowry and interest could not have furnished this one comfortable dining room.
She was only sitting at a fine table by an accident of war, pretending to be a gentleman's wife while her own sun-darkened complexion declared that she was too coarse, too rough to be anything but a laughingstock in his world.
She lifted her crystal glass, which was worth more than the mule, and drank, and did not taste the wine.
Darcy caught her eye across the table. He had been watching her — he watched her a great deal, she had learnt, more than she had ever known in England — and something in his face asked her, silently, whether she was well.
She gave him the smallest possible nod and looked away, because she could not look at him just now, groomed and barbered and restored to something like himself, in the new coat he had bought and had tailored to him only that morning.
Harcourt, at the head of his table, was in excellent voice.
He was, she conceded, an easy man to underestimate and a difficult one to dislike.
He talked a great deal, and a good third of it was in praise of his own cellar and his own judgment and his own foresight in settling at Santander when others had thought him mad.
But under the noise there was a shrewdness, and a genuine breadth of knowledge, and — as the dinner went on and the talk turned, inevitably, to the war and its ending and the vast unsettled business it had left behind — a real and easy familiarity with a world Elizabeth had only ever glimpsed from the outside.
He spoke of ministers by their Christian names.
He spoke of the peace, and what he wanted to see done, now that Bonaparte was disposed of, and the reordering of trade, and the claims — the “thousands upon thousands of claims,” he said — that would come flooding out of Spain now the fighting was done.
Every merchant and every landowner and every government contractor with a grievance and a paper, all of them bound for London, all of them wanting satisfaction of a Crown that had no money and a government that had no appetite.
He knew how it worked. That was plain. He knew the offices and the men and the maddening machinery of them, and when Darcy asked him a question or two about how such a claim was truly pressed, Harcourt expanded on it with the pleasure of a man riding his favourite horse.
It was surreal past describing, sitting there.
Elizabeth held her crystal and listened to this comfortable, florid man discourse on the Foreign Office over a joint of beef, and thought of Darcy in a burned intendancy in Estella begging a clerk for a stamp; thought of the sealed packet handed over a counter in Vitoria and gone north out of their reach.
All of that blood and hunger and fear was, to Harcourt, a dinner-table topic, a diverting professional puzzle to be turned over between the beef and the pudding.
She did not blame him for it. He could not know.
But the gap between his easy talk and the thing itself, as she had lived it, was so wide that she felt almost dizzy looking across it, as though she had brought the mountain into the warm, bright room with her, and no one else could see it.
And then, her uncle came up.
She was not sure, afterward, how they had got to it — some turning of the talk about the claims, about who in Spain had suffered and how, and Darcy had mentioned, because it was natural to mention and because he was still, she saw, quietly working Harcourt for everything the man knew, that the whole affair had begun with her uncle, a London merchant taken for ransom in the south, still held, the recovering of whom had distressed Mrs Darcy and caused them to trek many hopeless miles in the wrong direction that had, in the end, availed nothing.
Harcourt set down his glass. “Taken for ransom? A British subject? Still held?” He leaned forward, and all the easy pleasure went keen. “My dear Darcy, why did you not say so at once? This is precisely the sort of thing I know something about. Who has the handling of it? What is being done?”
“His people in London,” Elizabeth said, before Darcy could answer.
She heard the rush and tense cadence in her own voice and could not help it.
Here, at last, after all these weeks, was someone who might actually know.
“My uncle keeps able men at his warehouse — a head clerk, correspondents, men of business who have served him twenty years. They will have had word by now of his being taken. Surely they will know the proper course — whom to apply to, what channels — surely such a thing is done through the ordinary offices, through —”
“Through his clerks.” Harcourt said flatly.
He gave a shake of his head, the wise counsellor correcting a charming amateur.
“My dear Mrs Darcy. Forgive me, but no. A merchant's clerks, however able, applying through the ordinary channels for the release of a merchant — do you know what becomes of such an application? It is received. It is filed. It is added to a heap of five hundred like it, every one of them a worthy clerk applying on behalf of a worthy master, and it sits in that heap, and it is never looked at, because there is nothing in it to make any man in a position to act trouble himself to act. That is not how these things are done. That is how these things are made to look as though they are being done, while nothing whatever happens.”
“Then, how…”
“By notice.” He said the word with relish.
“By making the matter impossible to put aside and forget.
A case is moved, Mrs Darcy, when someone of consequence makes it their case — when the right men are made to feel it, personally, at the right moment.
And nothing accomplishes that — nothing, in my experience, and I have watched a great deal of it — like the personal appearance of the right petitioner.
A lady, above all. A respectable, connected lady, standing up in her own person to make her plea — sworn, public, before the Foreign Office and such members as can be got to attend.
Particularly if she be the wife or the daughter or or some other close relation of the captive, putting a face and a name and a grief to the thing.
That, they cannot ignore. That shames them into motion where a thousand clerks' letters would not move them an inch.”
“But I am only —”
“You are not only anything. That is precisely my point.
You are the man's own niece, a blood connection to the captive, which gives you the standing to plead. And you are Mrs Darcy.” He said the name with a little flourish, as though laying down a trump.
“Do you imagine that is nothing? The Darcy name, the Pemberley connection, the Fitzwilliam blood behind it — an earl in the family — my dear lady, a claim that would gather dust for a decade under a clerk's hand will be attended to in a fortnight if it comes before the office in the person of Mrs Darcy of Pemberley, standing up to beg for her uncle. Your face makes it worth their notice. Your name makes it worth their trouble. That is how the thing is truly done, and I will tell you plainly it is the only way I have ever seen it done quickly, and quickly is what a man in a Spanish prison has not got the luxury to do without.”
The room had suddenly grown very hot. Elizabeth could not help the hasty, conscious glance she cast at Darcy, nor fail to see the intent way his gaze seemed to deepen on her. It was as if the floor had given way beneath her.
Harcourt was right. It only made sense that he was right — he spoke with the clear, unanswerable authority of a man describing his own trade, a man who had watched it done and not-done a hundred times, and every instinct she had trusted her whole life told her that a man who talked like that about a thing generally knew it.
Her own idea — the clerks, the channels, the ordinary course her uncle had begged her to depend upon — she had offered it and watched him take it apart in three sentences, and she had no ground to stand on to argue him, because what did she know of the Foreign Office?
She knew ledgers and exchange tables and how to frighten a Spanish functionary. She did not know London. He did.
And if he were right…
If her uncle — sweet, kindly, good-humoured Mr Gardiner, who had taken her in, who had given her the run of his library and his warehouse and his affection, who was in a Spanish prison at this moment — if her uncle's freedom depended on Mrs Darcy standing up in London and pleading for him, then there had to be a Mrs Darcy in London to do it.
Then the marriage could not quietly dissolve.
Then she could not, on English soil, become plain Miss Bennet again and let the Spanish rite sink out of sight and set Fitzwilliam Darcy free to marry his heiress and mend his fortune.
Because the moment she did that, she was no longer Mrs Darcy, no longer the connected lady whose face and name would shame the office into motion, no longer any use to her uncle at all.
She would be a nobody again. And a nobody's uncle rotted in his prison and was never looked at.
She could not leave him. She could deny herself Darcy — she had proved she could, night after cold night, she had made an art of it — but she could not deny her uncle his life.
Gardiner outweighed Darcy’s estate a hundred times over, and if the price of his freedom was that she must remain Mrs Darcy — truly, permanently, publicly Mrs Darcy, in England, before the whole world — then she would thank God she had the position to do it, and pray her husband did not suffer overmuch for her choosing him, and there was nothing whatever left to decide.
Harcourt was still talking, and she had missed some of it.
“— and I would be glad to give you letters, when you go, to one or two men who would see you properly attended to. It wants managing, a thing like that; it wants doing at the right moment and in the right quarter. But it can be done, and you are exactly the person to do it.” He sat back and lifted his refilled glass.
“There. You came to my table looking as though the world had used you cruelly, and I have given you the way to set at least one piece of it right. Mrs Harcourt will tell you I am insufferable when I am useful.”
“He is,” said Mrs Harcourt with a laugh.
“Thank you,” Elizabeth said. “Truly. You have given me a great deal to consider.”
She did not look at Darcy again. She could feel him across the table — feel the way his breath had shortened and his pulse had probably gone racing.
Feel that he had heard all of it too, that he was working through it as she was and arriving, perhaps, at the same place.
She kept her eyes on her crystal glass instead, because if she looked at him now, with the trap shut fast and the shameful gladness still warm in her chest, she did not know what her face would do, and there were too many clever, observant people at this table to let it do it here.