Chapter 12
ELIZABETH
Sir William Lucas's note arrived the following morning at half past nine.
The stable boy who delivered it had ridden from Lucas Lodge with the desperate haste of a man carrying bad news and eager to be rid of it.
Elizabeth received it in the breakfast room, where she sat across from Darcy and ate toast she couldn't taste and maintained the pleasant expression that had become her resting face.
She opened the note. Three lines, in Sir William's cramped hand.
My dear Mrs. Darcy,
I write in some distress. Charlotte has departed Lucas Lodge without farewell or explanation. Her rooms were found in disorder this morning. If you possess any knowledge of her plans, I beg you to inform me at your earliest convenience.
Sir Wm. Lucas
Elizabeth read it twice. Her chambers were found in disorder.
The detail snagged. If the Colonel had planned this, and the Colonel planned everything, he would have ensured a clean departure.
Bags packed, a note left, the fiction of a planned visit.
Disorder meant haste, or it meant Charlotte.
Charlotte, who was the most deliberate woman Elizabeth had ever known.
Had haste defeated her care, or had she left the disarray for someone to notice?
She set the note on the table with a steadiness she did not feel.
"Charlotte is gone," she said.
Darcy set down his teacup. The gesture was unhurried, the careful placement of porcelain on saucer that, in another man, would be casual but in Darcy was a form of punctuation, the deliberate pause before a prepared response.
"Gone?"
"Sir William writes that she departed without farewell. Her rooms in disarray." Elizabeth watched his face. The mask was perfect. Not a crack. Not a seam. "Colonel Fitzwilliam has taken her to London."
"That's a considerable assumption."
"It's the only reasonable conclusion. Charlotte would never leave without saying goodbye. Not to her father. Not to Maria. Not to me." She held his gaze. "Unless she had no choice."
Darcy took the note, read it, folded it. "I shall write to my cousin for clarification."
"Where is she, Fitzwilliam?"
The Christian name, used as a blade rather than an intimacy, cut through social pretence and demanded the answer Mr. Darcy would deflect but Fitzwilliam might provide. His attention sharpened.
"Richard has taken a residence in London. Not far from our townhouse." A pause. "That is where she is being taken."
"There. In his house. In his keeping."
"Under his protection."
"You use that word the way other men use currency — to purchase compliance and call it generosity." She leaned forward. Her hands were flat on the breakfast table, her fingers splayed, the posture of a woman planting herself. "Charlotte didn't go willingly."
"Consent obtained under constraint—"
"Isn't consent. We've discussed this."
Silence. The breakfast table was bright with morning light.
The toast sat between them. The silver gleamed.
Everything about the scene was civilised and orderly and exactly as it should be, and beneath the surface two people were conducting a negotiation about the fate of a woman who was not present and could not speak for herself.
"I should like to see her," Elizabeth said. "When we arrive in London."
"Under appropriate circumstances." He touched the handle of his cup but did not lift it.
"You keep saying under appropriate circumstances and supervised as though I am the one who cannot be trusted. I am not the person who removed a woman from her family in the night."
"Charlotte's departure was arranged. She knew. She consented—"
"She submitted. There is a world of difference, and you know it, because you and I have been standing on opposite sides of that difference since the parlour floor at Hunsford."
The charge echoed in the hushed space. She did not take it back. Darcy's expression held, but his attention sharpened as he absorbed an unexpected blow.
"Your concern for Charlotte does you credit," he said at last, his voice softer than before. "But I assure you, Richard would never raise a hand to her."
"There are wounds beyond the physical."
"Indeed." He held her gaze. "Though such wounds may, with proper care, harden into something more durable than the skin they replaced."
She looked at him across the breakfast table and wondered if he was talking about Charlotte or about her. Or about himself.
"I'll see her," Elizabeth said. "In London.
Not supervised. Not appropriate circumstances.
I'll see my friend, and we'll speak privately, and you will permit it because you have just acknowledged — whether you intended to or not — that what you are doing to both of us requires care.
And care begins with allowing the people you claim to protect to speak to each other without surveillance. "
Neither spoke. Darcy's hand shifted an inch toward her, then stopped.
"One visit," he said. "Private. Unsupervised. And then we discuss the terms going forward."
Elizabeth nodded. The concession was not freedom.
It was a longer leash. But it was the first time Darcy had yielded ground that he had not previously planned to yield.
The difference between a calculated concession and a genuine one was visible in his face, in the slight discomfort of a man who has just done something he did not intend because someone he could not control had asked him to.
She noted it. She noted everything now, every crack, every yielding, every moment when the wall moved an inch she had not asked for.
Elizabeth wrote her response to Sir William while Darcy returned to his correspondence. She chose each word as one chooses steps on ice, testing the surface, measuring the weight it could bear.
Dear Sir William,
I am sorry to hear of Charlotte's departure and understand your distress.
I believe she may have accepted an invitation to visit friends in London.
This was spoken of during our recent conversations.
I shall make inquiries upon my own arrival in town and write to you directly with whatever intelligence I may gather.
Pray do not alarm yourself unduly. Charlotte is a woman of great good sense, and I am confident she would not have departed without sound reason.
Your obedient servant,
E. Darcy
Every sentence a lie. Every lie a brick in the wall that kept them all alive.
She sealed the letter and gave it to the footman.
She wondered whether Charlotte was reading a similar letter from the Colonel, polite, reasonable, explaining in measured tones why she would be leaving her family's home and entering a residence she had not chosen.
Wearing a ring she had not accepted. Beginning a life designed for her by a man whose courtesy was indistinguishable from his control.
"You wrote to Sir William," Darcy said from behind his newspaper. Not a question. "I have also written to him. Our accounts will correspond."
"I told him Charlotte has gone to visit friends in London. Which is true, in the same way that our marriage is a love match — true in every particular and false in every way that matters."
He lowered the newspaper. "You're becoming quite skilled at this."
"At lying?"
"At shaping the truth. There is a distinction."
"Yes. When a poor woman lies, she is a liar. When a rich man does it, he is shaping the truth. I have learnt a great deal about distinctions since my marriage."
His mouth almost yielded to amusement before he mastered it. Her satisfaction at provoking him joined the many reactions she preferred not to examine.
After breakfast, Elizabeth sat at the escritoire in the study and wrote to Jane. Her reply to Sir William was already on the road.
She wrote carefully. The letter was warm, chatty, full of news about the leased estate and the weather and their plans for London. Buried in the third paragraph, she placed the message:
Crocuses are blooming in the south border, have you noticed them at Longbourn yet?
Here the garden is pleasant but rather bare, and I find myself missing the colour of Hertfordshire.
A proper English garden wants tending, and this one has had none.
Rain is expected before we leave for London, which will do the beds good.
Last year's roses have not yet shown any sign of life, but I suppose it is still early.
She checked the initials: C-H-A-R-L. An incomplete name, but enough to tell Jane that their childhood precaution had become necessary.
She folded the letter, left it unsealed as Darcy's rule required, and gave it to the footman.
It would cross Darcy's desk before it reached the post. Jane would read it in her bedroom at Longbourn.
Jane, who believed the best of everyone, who had nonetheless looked at Colonel Fitzwilliam and seen what Elizabeth saw, who had set her gentle chin and said I will watch for the flowers.
Jane would read carefully. Jane would understand.
London and Charlotte waited. So did the next movement in this captivity disguised as marriage, and the slow negotiation between two people on opposite sides of a wall that had begun to crack.
That evening they dined alone. The table was too large for two, it was always too large for two, these tables designed for entertaining that they used for the peculiar intimacy of a marriage conducted in borrowed houses.
The candlelight threw their shadows long against the opposite wall, two shapes leaning toward each other across the silver.
"London," Darcy said over the second course. "We arrive Thursday. The townhouse has been prepared. Your rooms are on the second floor."
"My rooms. Separate from yours?"
"Adjacent. With a connecting door." He met her eyes. "Which you may lock from your side."