XLIX #2
She sucked air into her lungs — she suddenly had need of it — and eased it off her finger.
There was a faint green ring in her skin where it had sat.
Elizabeth flexed her fingers, made a fist, and studied her hand in the light.
There would be no hiding that. Not for some days, not without scrubbing with lye or lard or whatever took off brass stains from fingers.
Well, perhaps that was fitting. She could put off the trappings, hide the shining, obvious bits, but the truth lay underneath.
She belonged to Fitzwilliam Darcy and that cheap ring.
The marriage neither of them meant to endure had marked them both, and she could not find it in her to be sorry.
If her aunt saw it and asked questions… well, she would find an answer for them, too.
The cab turned into Gracechurch Street a little after one in the afternoon, and Elizabeth pressed her face near to the glass and watched the familiar houses come up one after another like faces in a half-forgotten dream.
She had not known, until she saw it, how afraid she had been that it would be changed — that some catastrophe would have swept over this street, too, while she was gone, that the world she had left in May could not possibly have gone on standing while hers was burned to the ground in Spain.
But it had gone on standing. There was the corn-chandler's on the corner, and the railings she knew, and the same soot on the same bricks, and a maid she half recognised beating a rug behind Mrs Smithson’s house, and it was all so exactly unchanged, so stubbornly ordinary, that it almost made Spain vanish from reality with every cobblestone.
Nothing here knew what had happened to her.
Nothing here had heard of Tudela, or Vitoria, or a priest in Burgos, or a copper bath in Santander.
And then came the house — her uncle's house, tall and narrow and dear, the brass on the door that her aunt was so particular about, the nursery windows on the second floor.
She was out of the cab almost before it stopped, begging the driver to hurry with her sea-chest, and then she was up the steps and knocking.
The maid who opened the door did not know her for a moment.
Elizabeth understood why — she was still thin, brown from the Spanish sun, in a gown no one in this house had ever seen.
After a few seconds, the girl’s face altered with recognition, and she gave a small shriek.
“Oh, miss! Come in, come in, Miss Lizzy. Ma’am! Come and see, it’s Miss Lizzy!”
Elizabeth moved into the hall, and there was a clatter on the stairs, and her aunt came down them at a run with her cap askew and her face already breaking.
“Lizzy? Lizzy! Oh, thank Heaven!”
They came together hard enough to stagger.
Her aunt's arms were around her, trembling in a way that would have done Mrs Bennet proud.
Mrs Gardiner was sobbing, bubbling her name over and over into her hair as though the repetition might make it truer.
Elizabeth held on and shut her eyes and let herself, for one moment, simply be home, be held by someone who had loved her since she was a child and asked nothing of her but that she be alive.
“You are here. You are here. Oh, my dear, we had your letter from… from some dreadful place, weeks and weeks ago, and then nothing, nothing at all, not another word from anyone, and I did not know —” Her aunt pulled back to hold her at arm's length and look at her, and her face crumpled at what she saw.
“Oh, Lizzy. Look at you. You are so thin! What have they done to you? What on earth happened? Can you possibly be well, truly —”
“I am well, Aunt.” She took her aunt's face in both her hands. “I am well. I promise you, there is nothing to worry about for me. I am very tired, but I am well, and I am safe, and I am home, and you are not to look at me like that, or you will have us both in pieces on the floor of the hall.”
It did not answer, of course. Nothing answered the first time.
Her aunt wept, and Elizabeth held her, and she was obliged to repeat it again — I am safe, I am well, I am here — and again when they had got themselves into the parlour, and again when the tea came and her aunt's hands shook too badly to pour it so that Elizabeth poured it herself, and again after that, half a dozen times over the first half hour, because grief and relief did not listen to reason.
She did not mind the telling. She had said harder things fewer times and been believed too quickly.
Finally, she asked the question that had been haunting her since June.
“Have you had any word of my uncle?”
Her aunt only shook her head and pressed her handkerchief to her mouth. “No. No word from my Edward. There was only the one dreadful letter in his own hand back in the summer, the one that went directly to his trading house naming the ransom.”
The clerk, she said, had been good enough to show it to her, to bring it personally so she might see her husband’s dear hand, but then he had taken it back and promised that the matter would be managed with all expediency.
And she had been a menace to him weekly, begging for any word, but there had never been anything to learn.
“Is he even alive, Lizzy?” Her aunt clasped Elizabeth’s hand and stared with those earnest, open eyes, the tears standing ready to fall. “Oh, my poor Edward, surely beaten and alone. Who knows that he might not be ailing and Lord knows what else —”
“He is living. I am sure of it, and I have reason to believe that his case is further along than you have been able to see from here. I have been… I have been in company these three months with people who understand a great deal about such matters. About captives, and ransoms, and how they are truly resolved. The thing being done is the right thing — if his people at the warehouse took the matter in hand and filed the papers where they should be, then matters are being attended to. Slowly, but attended to. I was assured again, only a few days ago, that men taken in this war are being brought home, Aunt. It is a known business. There is every reason to hope, and to keep hoping.”
“You were in safe company, then,” her aunt said, searching her face. “Your letter said as much, but I had not trusted it when you did not come back when you believed you might. I fancied so many things! A young woman, alone —”
“I was never alone.”
That much was true. There had always been a man’s hand to take, a man's arm around her in the night, a man putting his own back to the load to spare her, a man handing her into a carriage on a wharf an hour ago with his heart breaking behind his eyes.
“I was in the safest company I could have been in. I was looked after, Aunt, better than you can imagine, by… by good people, who saw me the whole way home. You are not to worry on that account. Not for a moment.”
Her aunt looked at her a moment longer, as if she still could not believe it.
Elizabeth had some trouble in not blinking, not letting her gaze slide away.
Her aunt had known her too long, and could certainly sense that Elizabeth was not telling her everything, which would only frighten her all over again.
She tried thinking of what else she might say to lighten the matter, but then a wail started up from the floor above, thin and cross and unmistakable, and Elizabeth's heart turned right over.
“Is that…”
“Thomas.” Her aunt was already half-rising, wiping her eyes, and for the first time something like a real smile broke through the wreck of her face.
“You will not know him, Lizzy. He was a scrap of a thing when you left, and now — oh, come. Come up and see them all. Marianne asks after you still, and Edward has got so wild you will not credit it, and the baby… Oh, just come and see. It will do us both good. There has been too much weeping in this house.”
Elizabeth rose and followed her aunt up the familiar stairs toward the nursery. Thomas had been but six weeks when she left, and he was a little person now, nearly six months old and would be changed past recognition. She was climbing the stairs to meet a different child.
And she carried up those stairs, folded small and secret against her heart, a piece of paper that told who she had become in that time, too.
The house did not know him.
It was an odd thought to be having, but he could not shake it — that the tall, familiar front of his own house looked at him the way the customs officer had, the way the banker in Santander had, as at a stranger who might or might not have business there.
It was absurd. He had lived here half his life.
He knew the number of the steps and the way the ivy had to be cut back from the railing every spring and the way the paint had faded behind where the knocker ought to be, because he was here so seldom most summers, and had not been here at all this summer.
It was like arriving at the house of a man he had once been and was no longer — a rich, untroubled bachelor who had walked out of this door in the spring, and had not come back, and never would.
He rapped his bare knuckles on the door, and there was an eternal pause.
No one would have been posted there, no guest expected to come in by the formal front entrance.
He rapped again, and the door opened to a footman who looked at first affronted, and then startled into humility.
“Mr Darcy, sir!” He snapped the door open, standing stiffly at attention as Darcy passed. “May I take your hat, sir?”
Darcy had carried the canvas bag with his clothing in it in his own hands, and he dropped it on the floor and submitted to being welcomed in his own home. “Thank you, Jeffries. See that bag attended to, will you?”
A moment later, his housekeeper, Mrs Hodges, appeared in the hall. The blank curiosity in her expression vanished in an instant, and her face broke wide open into something between joy and astonishment.