Chapter 18
The Earl had got as far as the word carefully a second time, and was laying out for his wife the strategy of the thing he meant to do, the men quietly engaged, the magistrate sounded out in confidence.
Darcy and Richard brought in at the last possible hour so that the knowing and the acting should fall in the same stroke, when the door of the study opened without a knock and the careful plan died where it lay.
Darcy stood in the doorway. He had not been announced, he had come past the footman the way a man comes past a hedge, and the footman’s face appearing anxiously behind him told the whole of how he had got there.
He was still in his greatcoat. He had Lady Matlock’s note in his hand, the one that had been put into it four hours since, and the bottle from the modiste’s buttoned inside his coat where she had bidden him carry it and he had plainly not waited for six o’clock.
“I have brought the bottle,” he said, and took it from his coat and set it on the desk between them. His voice was low, which in Darcy was the dangerous register. Richard could have told them so.
“I have brought it before you asked for it. I have told no one but Richard, and I have gone nowhere else first, and that is the whole of my obedience, Aunt, and it is more than I have given anyone in a while. You wrote that by six you would have something for me. You wrote that it was the last thing you would ask me to bear blindly. I find the bearing has run out somewhere short of six. What do you know that you would not put in a note?”
Lady Matlock looked at her husband, and her husband looked back at her, and in the moment between the two older people Darcy read everything the silence was trying to manage, and his face changed.
“You know who has her.” It was not a question. “You know, and you were going to let me live one more hour not knowing and dole it out to me in a managed hour with the men already placed. You were going to handle me.” The quiet went out of his voice. “Tell me. Now. All of it.”
So they told him for there was nothing else to be done. The alternative was to lie to his face, and not one of them could have done it.
Lady Matlock told it plainly, the cordial and the card and the invented anecdote and the forging of her own hand, and Anne who could not look at her, and at the end of it the name.
She did not soften the name. She had learned, across a long life, that there is no kind way to hand a man the worst thing, and that the attempt at kindness only makes him carry it twice.
“Aunt Catherine,” Darcy said. For a moment he did not move at all, and then the whole of it went through him.
The watch pressed on the wrong boy, the year of pollution and disgrace, the apology that had been so good, the tea, the warm questions about the wedding, visiting him the day of what would have been his wedding and then offering up her vile talk of providence, every kindness meant to wound.
“She has had her in that house the whole time. While I walked the river. While I paced off a lane like a fool. She had her a mile away, and came to my house and took tea and offered her twisted comfort.”
“Darcy,” the Earl said.
“I am going now.” He was already turning. “Richard is at his lodgings. I will have him on the way. You may follow or not, sir, as you choose, but I am not spending one further hour of her life debating the management of it.”
“You are not.” The Earl was on his feet. “You are not going to charge that door alone and hot, and I will tell you precisely why, and you will hear me, because you are not a stupid man and I will not let grief make you one for the half-hour it would take to ruin everything.
That house is full of hired servants,” he continued.
“Catherine is not a fool. She has a back way and a carriage and a property in Wales I have heard her speak of, and the only thing on this earth that makes her dangerous to Elizabeth is the moment she understands she is found out. If you go through the front with no plan behind you, you give her the one thing we have so far denied her, which is warning. She will have the girl out the back and into that carriage while you are still shouting in the hall, and we will be a month finding her again, if we ever do.”
Darcy was not a stupid man. He stood with his hand on the back of a chair and made himself breathe, and Richard’s voice came back to him out of the first day, the hour it’s spoken, she’s finished; so we work in the dark.
And he understood that the dark they had worked in all these days was not yet done with them, that even now, with the name in his hand, there was a way to do this that lost her and a way that saved her, and only his own discipline stood between the two.
“Then we do it now, and we do it right, and we do it together,” he said, “but we do it now, sir.
Not at dawn, not in a managed hour, now, because Anne has known that Lady Matlock came asking about a cordial, and if she has told her mother, then the warning you fear has already been given and every hour we spend placing men is an hour Catherine spends deciding what to do with a witness she can no longer keep.
The caution that was wisdom this morning is folly by now.
Send for Richard. We go as soon as he can reach us. "
He looked at his uncle. "You wanted the knowing and the acting in the same stroke. Very well. I know. Let us act.“
And the Earl, who was a slow man but not a stubborn one, and who had heard the truth in it, that Anne’s discovery had already started a clock that no amount of careful placing could stop, looked at his nephew a long moment, and then went to the bell and rang it.
He began, in the flat fast voice of a man who has changed his whole plan in the space of a breath, to give the orders that would put them all in motion within the half-hour.
The light was already going grey and thin when the carriages came into the quiet costly street where the de Bourgh townhouse stood with its blacked railings.
Richard had been collected on the way and had asked three short questions and made one short plan and otherwise said nothing.
He went round to the mews and the back with two of the Earl’s men before the front bell was ever rung, so that whatever door Catherine might think to use should have a soldier behind it.
Darcy went up the steps with the Earl at his shoulder, and did not wait to be admitted. The footman who opened to the bell found the door taken out of his hand, and Darcy was into the hall and asking, in a voice that brought a stop to the whole house, for Lady Catherine de Bourgh.
She came out to them. That was the thing Darcy had not expected, and ought to have. She did not hide, did not bar a door, did not run for the back.
Lady Catherine came out of the drawing-room into her own hall with her chin up, the mistress of the house receiving callers, and she looked at her nephew and her brother standing in her hall with the cold afternoon at their backs, and she was not afraid.
He saw that at once and it chilled him worse than fear would have. She was not afraid, because she did not believe herself to be in the wrong, and a person who does not believe herself in the wrong has no fear to be worked upon.
“Fitzwilliam,” she said. “And my brother. You have come a great way into my house without invitation.” She did not trouble, this time, to offer them chairs.
She had seen the bottle in her brother’s man’s keeping as they came in, and her brother’s face, and her nephew’s. She was a great many unpleasant things, but she had never been slow, and she knew to the inch how much they knew. She did not waste a breath denying it.
Lady Catherine only stood very straight in the middle of her own hall, the mistress of a house she understood she had already lost and regarded her nephew with the cold composure of a woman who, having nothing left to gain, had settled on the one thing still in her power to take.
“Where is she?” Darcy demanded, his rage barely held.
“You will find her,” Lady Catherine said. “You have men on my stairs and a soldier at my mews. I am not such a fool as to think otherwise. You will have her out of here within the hour and you will think you have won something.”
Her chin came up. “So I shall not waste my breath on where she is, since you will have it regardless. I shall spend it on the only thing worth saying to you, nephew, the thing your devoted Lady Matlock and my dear brother have been far too tender to put to you plainly, and I find I should like you to carry it out of this house along with your prize.” She came no nearer, and her voice did not rise.
“You told the world she was ill. You built it yourselves, all of you, brick by brick, the low fever, the physician, the darkened room, the wedding only postponed, so that her vanishing should not ruin her. A pretty piece of work. I have admired it. But consider what you built, Fitzwilliam, now that you are so determined to have her back. By your own tale she has lain ill in a loving family’s care, wanting nothing, free to send for anyone she chose.
But she did not send for you. She did not marry you from her sick bed.
By your own story, she did not become Mrs. Darcy.
I give you that to keep. I find it is the one wedding gift of mine you cannot refuse. ”
When Darcy spoke his voice was perfectly steady, and perfectly cold, and that coldness was a thing she had not reckoned on, because she had aimed the blade at a man half-mad with grief and found instead a man who had gone entirely quiet.
“She did not send for me,” he said, “because you drugged her at the modiste and carried her out a back door and have kept her behind a barred window. That is why she did not call. I know it, you know it, and still you stand in your own hall and offer me her silence as though you had not been the one to lock her in it. There is no cruelty left in you that can reach me, Aunt. I have spent days now imagining the worst that one human being might do to another, and you are smaller than all of it. You are an old woman who has lost, and cannot bear it, and has nothing left to spend but spite.” He did not raise his voice. “Get out of my way.”
She did not move. She did not stand aside, and she did not answer. In the silence of that refusal, before any of them could break it, a voice came from the staircase behind her.
“Stop.”
Anne stood on the fourth stair, one hand on the rail. No one had seen her come. She had been standing in shadow listening for some time, and had heard her mother, beaten and unrepentant, reach for the cruelest thing left within her grasp, and had reached, herself, the end of something.
She was white to the lips. She did not look at Darcy, nor at the Earl.
Anne looked at her mother, and what was in her face was not defiance, which her mother would have known how to break, but a terrible quietness, the quiet of a person who has ceased, finally and entirely, being afraid of the one thing she has been afraid of her whole life.
“Anne,” said Lady Catherine, and there was a warning in it that had governed her daughter for eight-and-twenty years.
It did not govern her now.
Anne took her hand from the rail and turned, not down the stairs toward them, but up toward the dim landing and the floors above, and said, without turning her head, in a voice that shook and did not stop, “She is on the third floor. The back room. It has a bar on the window and two locks on the door, and I know, because I stood in it before they brought her, and I have the key in my dressing-room, and I will fetch it, and I will take you to her myself.”
And she went up, into the dark of the stair, leaving her mother’s warning unanswered in the hall below. Darcy had pushed his aunt aside and was already moving after Anne, and the house that had kept its terrible quiet came all at once awake.