Chapter 10
The bottle had taken up residence on his desk the way grief takes up residence in a house, not in any one room, but everywhere, so that there was nowhere he could set his eyes that it was not also somehow in.
He had moved it three times that morning. Into the drawer, where knowing it was there was worse than seeing it. Onto the corner of the blotter, where it stood in the edge of his vision through every other thing he tried to do.
And now into his hand again, for the dozenth time, held up to the cold light of the study window with the last two spoonfuls of it running slow down the glass.
It was the card he could not leave alone, and the card was the one thing he did not have.
He had sent men over that shop twice more since the first night, quietly, on other pretexts, and it was not there; and he had come by degrees to the settled opinion that they had taken it up as they went, and that a party who would spend four seconds of a snatch on a scrap of paper was a party who knew that the scrap could be read against them.
Which told him something, but nothing he could use.
It told him that the card had been written by a hand that could be identified, and that the writer had known it; and there the whole of it ran out into the sand, as everything in those days ran out into the sand, because a hand that cannot be looked at cannot be known.
Darcy was not a man accustomed to being beaten by an absence.
That was the most disquieting part of the whole miserable business; that the one object in the case which had certainly existed, which three women had watched her hold and read and be moved by, had gone out of the world between one quarter of an hour and the next and left nothing behind it but the fact of having been.
He put the bottle down when Foster brought up Sable’s note, and took the note instead, and read it standing.
It was short, as the man himself was short. The coaching inns along the western and northern roads had yielded nothing, no closed carriage standing where it had no trade to stand, no horses hired in haste, no turnpike-keeper’s memory of a vehicle worth the remembering on the afternoon in question.
He had begun on the livery stables and would have more, the note said, when there was more to have. He did not waste a word on regret, which Darcy was grateful for; regret was the one commodity the household at Gracechurch Street was not short of, and he had no use for an outside supplier.
Darcy folded the note away, and looked once more at the bottle and did not pick it up, and went to call for the carriage.
He went to Gracechurch Street every evening now.
He went because the house held the people who loved her, and because grief shared in a warm room was a fractionally smaller thing than grief carried alone through the dark to an empty bed.
And because, though he would not have said this to a soul, being in the rooms she had lately been happy in was the nearest he could now come to her.
Mr. Gardiner met him as he always did, and they sat in the small back parlour as they always sat, and said, most evenings, very little.
It was a strange intimacy, this. Two men who six weeks ago had been agreeably acquainted, now bound by a thing neither could speak of above a murmur, keeping a watch together over the house.
Mr. Gardiner had aged a decade in days. He ran his warehouse by day with a competence that cost him visibly, and came home by night to a wife he could not console, and sat up with Darcy over a decanter neither of them drank from to any purpose.
He held the household on his two shoulders like a man holding a roof-beam after the walls have gone, because to set it down was unthinkable and to keep holding it was barely possible, and there was nothing in between.
Mrs. Gardiner came down that evening, which she did not always manage. She had been a handsome, lively woman before; she was hollowed now, her eyes ringed dark, moving through her own house like a guest uncertain of her welcome.
She had taken the whole weight of it onto herself, she asked for a minute and I gave it to her, and no one had yet found the words that could lift any part of that from her, because the words did not exist. Darcy had looked for them and come back empty.
“Mr. Darcy.” She stood in the doorway with Jane at her arm. Jane, who had appointed herself her aunt’s shadow, holding the older woman up by tenderness. “You will stay and take something. I will not have it said this house let you go home on an empty stomach, whatever else it has failed to manage.”
Her voice wavered on the last of it. Jane’s hand tightened on her arm, and the two of them held each other up in the doorway, and Darcy rose and said that he would stay, and would be glad to, which was at least half true.
Mr. Bingley had taken the ladies into his arms and under his care. He was a man built for sunlit rooms and easy company, and the disaster had stripped every one of his natural advantages from him at a stroke.
He had found the one thing he could do and he did it without fail, which was simply to be present, to fill a chair that would otherwise have been empty, to ask Mr. Gardiner whether the fire wanted building and to build it when it did, to sit up the latest of any of them so that no one need be the last awake.
Darcy had not known, before this, the full measure of his friend. He knew it now.
They were sitting so, near eleven, when the knock came that briefly undid them all.
It was only Tom, the Gardiners’ boy, breathless from the street, but a knock at that hour went through the house like a current, and Mrs. Gardiner was on her feet before the door opened and Jane was reaching for her, and Mr. Gardiner had crossed half the room, and for the length of one held breath the whole exhausted household stood electrified around a single thought that none of them said aloud.
“Beg pardon, only the Colonel sent word he’s coming round, and not to wait up nor be alarmed, he says, but he’s coming.” Tom got it out in a rush. “That’s the whole of it, sir. He said not to be alarmed.”
It was the cruelest sort of message, the kind that forbids alarm and so produces it, and they waited out the quarter-hour until Colonel Fitzwilliam came in stamping the cold off his boots, and read their faces in the doorway, and lifted both hands at once.
“No. Nothing of that. Forgive me, I should have known better than to send ahead at this hour; there is no hour now that a knock does not mean the worst. It is not the worst. It may be nothing at all.”
He took the chair Mr. Bingley pushed toward him and leaned to the fire and told it plainly. Sable’s men, working the streets about the modiste’s, had turned up a thing worth the running-down.
In the days after the disappearance, a man had come twice to Madame’s back premises asking after the junior clerk, the girl Sarah, by name. Asking where she lived. Asking after her particularly.
The room came awake around it. A man asking after the girl who had carried the cordial, the girl who had taken the bottle from the veiled stranger’s hand, was the first thread in all those days that ran anywhere at all, and every face in the parlour turned toward it with a hunger that was painful to see.
“I ran it down myself,” Richard said, “this afternoon, before I let myself hope, because I have learned what hope costs in this business when it is spent too early.”
He turned the brandy glass Mr. Bingley had put in his hand and did not drink from it.
“The man is a physician. A Mr. Adair, who keeps rooms off the square, a respectable sort, attends half the small tradespeople in those streets. The girl Sarah had sent to him on her mother’s account; the mother is consumptive and failing.
He called, he physicked the old woman, and he came round to the shop twice after, once to ask where the family lodged, the visit having been arranged through the shop, and once, plainly, to make sure of being paid, the family being poor and the fee not nothing. ”
He set the glass down untouched. “That is the whole of it. A doctor chasing his money. I have seen the mother. I have seen the rooms. There is nothing in it.”
The thread, pulled, had come away in his hand, attached to nothing.
Darcy watched the hope go out of the room the way it had gone out of him that morning over Sable’s note, feature by feature, each face setting back into the grey patience that was the only sustainable expression any of them had left.
What none of them could see, what no one in that room could possibly have seen, was how near the thread had run to the thing itself before it frayed.
The doctor was real and innocent and a dead end.
But the coin that had paid the doctor was not innocent; it had come folded in a handkerchief from a veiled woman who knew a poor girl’s name and her mother’s illness, and the same girl who had sent for Mr. Adair had taken a sealed bottle from that same gloved hand and put it into Elizabeth’s.
“It was right of you to run it down,” Darcy said. “It was right of you not to tell us until you had. You will go on being right about both of those things, Richard, and I will go on hating you for it, and we will neither of us stop.”
“I know it.” The Colonel looked into the fire.
“I keep thinking I have known terrible sieges. I have not. There is no siege like this one.” He was quiet a moment.
“We will have her,” he said, not as comfort, he was not a man who offered comfort he had not verified, but as a thing he had decided to hold, the way Darcy held the narrowing field and Mrs. Gardiner held her guilt and Mr. Bingley held his chair by the fire.
Because the holding was the work, and the work was all any of them had.
The trail was cold by midnight. They sat with it cold a while longer, none of them willing to be the first to go up, until Bingley, who had appointed himself to this office and would not be relieved of it, saw them off one by one to what sleep they could manage, and banked the fire, and put out the candles, and was, as he had been every night that week, the last of them awake in the dark house.