XLIX #3
“Mr Darcy!” She had her hand to her breast. “Mr Darcy, sir — oh, thank God you are returned. We did not know to expect you, sir, we had no word —”
“I know. Forgive me. There was no way to send it.” He came in past her into his own hall. “I am sorry to arrive on you with no notice.”
“You are home, sir, that is the whole of what signifies.” Behind her, another footman had appeared, gaping, and a housemaid on the stair had frozen with a dust rag in her hand, but the moment his attention passed their way, they scattered back to their duties as if he had only just returned from his club.
“Miss Darcy had your letters, sir, one in May, and another arrived some six weeks back. She was terribly worried, sir, that her replies to you went unanswered, and we all feared — well. It is a pleasure to see you home.” Her eyes went over him — the two-week beard he had grown at Elizabeth’s request, the deep tan, the unbrushed coat.
“You’ll be wanting tea, sir. And I will have a bath drawn for you at once. ”
“What of Miss Darcy? You said you had spoken with her. Is she in London? Is she well?”
“Well, sir, quite well, I promise you. She is in Town, staying with my lord and lady Matlock, these two months past. She could not be easy alone at Pemberley, sir, with no word of you, and her ladyship thought it best she be with family. Shall I send round to say you are come, and that they might call? They will want to know this very hour, sir, all of them —”
“No.” He said it too abruptly, and regretted it almost at once. “Not tonight, Mrs Hodges. Let me be fit to be seen first. I will go to her tomorrow. Tonight, only send word that I am arrived and well, nothing more, and beg them to let it wait ‘til morning.”
He could not stand in Matlock's drawing room tonight, filthy and gaunt and hollow, and be exclaimed over, and questioned, and made to account, with Elizabeth’s absence still raw in him and his heart torn in two directions across the width of London.
Georgiana deserved better than the wreck of him that had come off the ship today.
She should have her brother tomorrow, washed and tidied and rested, able to be glad to see her.
“Of course, sir. I'll have something more than tea sent up — you'll not have eaten proper in an age. I’ve kept your room aired, sir, and I will have your valet attend you directly.”
“Thank you, Mrs Hodges. I will be up in a moment. Something to attend in my study first.”
She curtseyed, her face beaming. He could not help wishing, as he passed her, that he had been permitted to introduce her to her new mistress today.
How she would have fussed over Elizabeth!
Taken her in hand and made much of her, had every maid in the house lined up begging leave to carry the mistress’s bath or pour her tea.
A few moments’ introduction would have been all it took for Elizabeth to win the house, and Darcy would have had the pleasure of watching Mrs Hodges’s hopes for a good and lovely wife for her master answered.
But that would have to wait, and he tried to persuade himself that the waiting would make it sweeter. He was not entirely convinced.
For now, he put his hand inside his coat and took the last thing he had carried up from the ship, and went with it down the passage to his study.
The study was exactly as he had left it in April.
He crossed to the desk and laid the papers down upon it.
The loan schedule, rescued from the floor of the inn in Tudela, with the outline of a boot print still on it.
The receipt, declaring that the certified copy of the claim had been found and forwarded on from Vitoria by official channels.
The salvoconducto, with a stamp from every checkpoint he and Elizabeth had passed through.
The only thing he did not have, the piece of paper that made them all worth something to him, was their marriage document.
That, he had sent with Elizabeth, because a woman had a right to keep the proof of who she was, if anyone ever asked her.
And if, sometime before they could be reunited, she were found to be…
Well. She ought to have some evidence, some answer to the questions she would face.
He looked at the rest of it for a moment.
He should sit. He should open it, read it through, begin the reckoning — the letters to write, the men to see, the race against Michaelmas that had three weeks left to run, and every one of them precious.
Instead, he stood over the desk with his hands planted on either side of the stack, and found he had not the stomach for a single page of it tonight.
It could wait until morning. It would have to wait until morning, because if he sat down to it now, in this cold, unchanged room, alone, he thought he might simply put his head down on the desk beside it and not lift it again for a long while.
He left the papers where they lay, squared once against the edge of the blotter out of some old habit of order, and shut the study door on them.
He bathed. He ate a little of what was sent up, more to satisfy Mrs Hodges's professional pride than from any hunger.
He let the hot water take some of Spain out of his bones and could not make it take the rest. He permitted his valet to neaten the edges of his new beard and trim the rest even, and declined to explain why he would not submit to a full shave.
And when it was done, and he was clean and clothed in his own linen, and the house had gone quiet around him, he went to the room adjoining his.
He stood before it a moment, that door that separated his rooms from the empty, unused mistress’s suite. He had never troubled to use this door before. Never had a reason to imagine it standing open, a pass-through to the dearest place in the world to him. He opened it and went in.
The mistress's chamber lay under its Holland covers in the last silvery light from the shrouded windows — the furniture humped and ghostly beneath the pale cloth, the bed a shape under wrapping, the whole suite of rooms sleeping the long, dustless sleep they had slept since his mother died, waiting for a woman who had never come to wake them.
South-facing. New hangings, whatever colour you like.
A window seat where you may sit and read and refuse to attend to me.
Those had been more than words to provoke her imagination and acquaint her with what life with him would be.
More than that, he had wanted to finally furnish these dead rooms in his own mind, putting her here as his partner and lover, mistress of everything he could call his, and the only person he meant to be answerable to.
Soon, he would bring her home. Within the fortnight — tomorrow, even, if the calls he meant to make went as he hoped they would. He would fling open the windows and pull the covers off, and watch her fill the place up with light.
He stood there in the dark a while longer, among the sleeping covered shapes, and then he went out, closed the door softly behind him, and went at last to his own bed. Alone.