Chapter 19
Anne went up the stairs ahead of them, and Darcy went after her, and the Earl after Darcy.
The second footman started forward from the half-landing and then, seeing the soldier’s coat that was Richard come in from the back, thought better of it and flattened himself against the wall to let them pass.
Below, in the hall, Lady Catherine’s voice came up the stairs once again. “Anne!” she thundered, pitched to carry, freighted with years of command. Anne did not break stride.
It was the most remarkable thing Darcy had ever seen her do, more remarkable than the turning on the stair. She simply did not answer it, did not flinch under it, climbed on as though the voice were nothing.
On the second landing Anne turned aside into her bedchamber and Darcy had a half-glimpse of a dressing-table, a glass, a hairbrush set down crooked, and she was back in a moment with keys in her hand.
The new-cut brightness of one of them caught the dim light. Anne did not give them to him at once. She stood holding them, looking at the keys in her own palm and something went over her face that Darcy would not, afterward, be able to name.
Then she closed her hand and went on up the last flight, and he understood that she meant to do the thing she had said, to be present at the undoing of the worst thing she had ever done, and not to be spared any part of it.
The third-floor passage was narrow and bare and scrubbed, and at the end of it was a door like any other, but for the new brass of a second lock fitted above the old one, and a bar of grey afternoon light lying under it along the scrubbed boards.
Anne stopped before it. “Here,” she said, and her voice had almost nothing left in it.
She put the keys into Darcy’s hand, and her cold fingers closed his around them, and she stepped back against the far wall of the passage making herself small.
“The rest of you stay where you are,” Darcy said. He did not raise his voice for he had no need to. The Earl stopped where he was. Richard, arrived at the head of the stair and put out a hand to keep the others back, and the narrow passage went still.
Whatever was on the other side of that door, and Darcy had spent days refusing to imagine it and imagining it anyway in the worst hours, he would meet first and alone.
She had earned that much, and so had he. Elizabeth should not have to come back into the world through a crowd.
He fitted the key to the lower lock. His hand was not steady, and he did not waste effort pretending it was, but he turned the key, and the lower bolt drew back, deep and slow. Then the upper, the new lock, quick and light.
Darcy, who did not know she knew the sound by heart, who did not know she had lain awake learning the noise of those two bolts, set his hand flat against the door and pushed it open.
On the other side of it Elizabeth had got to her feet. She had been at the table when the locks began, not writing, only sitting with her hands flat on the wood the way she sat through the long middle of each afternoon.
She had risen, and turned to face the door and made ready for Lady Catherine in some new mood, or for Anne, for whatever the broken pattern meant.
Elizabeth had not let herself make ready for this. She had forbidden herself this particular readiness days ago, in the clear-eyed way she had learned to forbid herself things.
So when the door swung in and it was Darcy standing there in his greatcoat, with days of worry in his face and keys still in his hand, she did not at first believe it.
She stood quite still, with her hand come up to her throat, and did not move, because she had been wrong about so many sounds in that house and could not bear to be wrong about this.
Darcy crossed the room quickly, and then at the very end he slowed as though afraid to take hold of her too suddenly.
He stopped a foot from her and said her name, Elizabeth, and that was the thing that did it, that one word in that ruined voice.
She came the last of the way between them herself.
And then they had hold of one another, and neither of them said anything else for a while, because there was nothing in any language that would have been worth letting go to say.
They had both of them learned exactly how much could be held and not spoken. When she could, she put her face back far enough to look at him, to be sure of him.
She said, “You took your time,” and felt him laugh, a broken, astonished, grief-struck thing, more like a sob than a laugh, against the top of her head.
And she knew by it, more surely than by anything else, that it was truly him, and truly over.
“I should have come sooner,” he said, into her hair. “I should never have let you out of my sight. I have lifted every stone in London but the right one.”
“You were never going to find the right one. It was hidden very well, by someone who has hated me a great deal for some time.”
She drew back, and steadied, and he watched her gather herself, watched her put the captive woman down and pick the other one up, the one he knew.
“There is something of yours she took from me, and something of my own I am not leaving in this house, and I should like them attended to before I go, because I do not mean ever to be here again."
She touched the place at her throat where the brooch was not. "She took your mother's brooch from me the first day. The one your Aunt Matlock gave me. I should be very glad to have it back."
"You shall have it back," Darcy said, "if I have to take this house apart to the brick."
The savagery in his voice was so plain, and so unlike the careful contained man she loved, that she understood for the first time the full measure of what those days had cost on his side of the locked door.
And she loved him the more for it, and put her hand to his face to call him back from wherever the thought of the brooch had sent him.
Then she went to the table, and knelt down and felt along the underside, and worked the folded squares out of the gap one after another into her palm.
"I wrote to you," she said, getting up off her knees and brushing them off. "When there was nothing else in the world I was permitted to do. I could not send them, so I put them under her table, and told myself that if I were never found at all they should at least have been written."
She closed her hand over the little packet. "You are not to read them today. But I have kept my own account of this, Fitzwilliam, in my own hand, and it comes out of this house with me."
Darcy held her again. “My Elizabeth, there are no words for the shame that haunts me. You were hidden within our sight the entire time. Had I only taken one moment to think that she was newly arrived, that her behavior never rang true for either of us—”
“Oh my dear Fitzwilliam,” she said and caressed his face.
“There are many who will bear shame they have not earned, and I will not have any of you look at me and only see what was done here. Please, for my sake, do not carry the cross that is theirs to bear. You have carried too much these past days.”
Elizabeth looked toward the open door, where Anne still stood pressed to the passage wall, white and unregarded, and her face changed, not to forgiveness, which was not the work of that afternoon, but to pity for the life Anne would lead after all this.
“We will none of us go out the back,” Elizabeth said. “We will go out the front. In the daylight. Let the street see exactly who walks out of this house on her own two feet.”
So they went down, Darcy’s arm about her and hers about him, neither willing yet to be even a hand’s breadth apart, down the three flights and past the servants and the silent soldier and out through the hall.
Lady Catherine stood by the drawing-room door and watched them come, and said nothing now, having nothing left that anyone in the house would hear.
Elizabeth did not hurry past her, and did not cringe from her, and did not spend a word on her. She only looked at her once, full and level and unafraid, the look of a woman walking out of gaol under her own power past the person who had meant to keep her in it forever.
And that look, Darcy thought, was a worse thing for Lady Catherine to receive than any speech could have been, because there was no fear in it for her pride to feed on, and no hatred either, only the plain contempt of the one who had won.
And then the front door, which Anne had come down to open for them and stood holding, one last small office, performed without a word.
Down the white steps, into the grey afternoon, and the cold ordinary air of the street for the first time in many days, and the carriage at the curb with its door let down and a folded cloak waiting on the seat for her.
Darcy handed her up into it himself, as he had handed her up into a carriage on a happier night a lifetime ago, and got in after her.
The wheels moved. The house with the barred room went back over her shoulder and was gone, and she did not look at it. She had no further use for it.
She kept her eyes on the man beside her, and her hand in his, and let the ordinary motion of a carriage carry her toward a door that someone who loved her would be standing behind.