Chapter 26
Elizabeth Darcy
The first days in Portsmouth gave Elizabeth very little except sore feet, tired eyes, and a growing dislike of uncertainty.
They rose early, returned late, and spent the hours between walking from inns to shipping offices, from the harbour to lodging houses, from one man who might know something to another who almost certainly did not.
A gentleman like that might have passed through, someone would say.
An ostler might remember him. A clerk at another office might have the name of a captain.
A man near the quay might know more. Each possibility sent them onward, and each one had come to nothing by evening.
Darcy’s men carried descriptions ahead of them and returned with names, guesses, and contradictions.
Darcy paid for information, refused to pay for obvious inventions, and remembered every person they spoke to with a precision Elizabeth might have admired more if she had not been so exhausted by the reason for it.
By the fourth morning, Portsmouth had begun to feel less like a town than a maze built out of noise: wagons over stone, sailors calling across the streets, gulls crying above the roofs, and everywhere the smell of salt, fish, smoke, damp wool, and tar.
Elizabeth had never been anywhere so crowded with men going somewhere and so empty of the one man she needed to find.
The latest lead came from a clerk in a shipping office near the harbour.
He did not know Mr Bennet, but told them of a certain Captain Jenkins, a man of prodigious memory and sociable habits who knew much of what went on in Portsmouth.
Captain Jenkins had died in a storm the previous month, but his widow still lived in Portsmouth and might know whether her husband had carried an English gentleman of Mr Bennet’s description.
It was little enough, but after three days of nothing, Elizabeth would have followed less.
Mrs Jenkins lived in a narrow brick house on a quieter street some distance from the busiest part of the harbour.
The curtains were clean, the step freshly swept, and a black ribbon had been tied to the knocker.
Elizabeth saw it and felt her hope become suddenly ashamed of itself.
They had come to ask a widow to open her grief because it might serve their own ends.
Darcy seemed to understand the change in her. He placed his hand over hers where it rested on his arm. “We need not press her beyond what is proper,” he said quietly.
“No,” Elizabeth said. “But we must ask.”
He nodded and knocked.
Mrs Jenkins opened the door herself. She was a woman of perhaps five-and-thirty, dressed in black that had not yet lost its newness. Her face was pale and tired, but there was a firmness about her mouth, the look of a woman accustomed to waiting for ships and refusing to be ruled by fear.
“Mrs Jenkins?” Darcy said, bowing. “I am Mr Darcy. This is my wife, Mrs Darcy. We are sorry to trouble you, but you may have information of great importance to us. We must find a gentleman who may have taken ship from here.”
The woman looked from him to Elizabeth. “You are asking after my husband’s passengers.”
“If you are willing,” Darcy said.
Mrs Jenkins hesitated only a moment before stepping back. “Come in, then. I cannot promise I shall be of use, but you may ask what you came to ask.”
The room into which she showed them was small and neat.
A workbasket sat beside the hearth. A child’s wooden horse lay near a chair, though no child was in sight.
On the mantel stood a painted miniature of a man in naval dress, dark-haired and weather-browned, with a smile that made the loss of him more immediate than the black ribbon on the door.
Elizabeth saw Darcy notice it as well. He bowed his head slightly toward the portrait before taking the chair Mrs Jenkins offered.
“You have lost your husband recently,” Elizabeth said softly.
Mrs Jenkins’s eyes moved to the mantel. “Six weeks ago. There was weather off the coast. His ship made harbour, but he did not live to see it.” She folded her hands in her lap. “That is all there is to say of it, unless one wishes to say a great deal more than does any good.”
Elizabeth liked her for the answer, though it made her heart ache. “I am very sorry.”
“Thank you, ma’am.” Mrs Jenkins looked between them. “Now, then. You are looking for a gentleman.”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “My father may have sailed with Captain Jenkins some months ago. He is a gentleman of not quite fifty years, with brown hair and dark eyes, and a rather satyrical sense of humour.”
“Toward Guernsey?” Mrs Jenkins asked.
Elizabeth’s breath caught before she could stop it.
Darcy leaned forward. “Then there was such a passenger?”
“There was a man such as you describe,” Mrs Jenkins said, nodding. “I remember him well.”
Elizabeth had prepared herself for another uncertain answer, another half-remembered description, another lead that might collapse the moment they touched it. The plainness of Mrs Jenkins’s reply struck her harder than she expected. She reached for the arm of her chair and held to it.
“Did he give his name?” Darcy asked.
“I do believe it was Bennet,” Mrs Jenkins said. “After so many weeks, I cannot be certain, but it was something of that sound.”
Darcy’s hand covered Elizabeth’s where it rested on the chair arm. He did not speak, and she was grateful for it. She did not trust herself to answer him.
Mrs Jenkins watched them both, and her voice gentled. “Then that gentleman is your father.”
“It seems likely,” Elizabeth said. “Can you tell us anything of him?”
“A little. The tide delayed them, and my husband brought him here to supper before they sailed. It was not unusual, if he had taken a liking to a passenger or thought a man respectable enough not to alarm his household. Mr Bennet was a gentleman. Quiet at first. Older than you, of course, but not old. He had a way of looking at the world as if it had disappointed him, but not enough to stop amusing him.”
Despite everything, Elizabeth laughed once, softly and with more pain than happiness in it. “That sounds like Papa.”
Mrs Jenkins nodded. “My eldest asked why gentlemen wore black coats so often, and he told her it was because the world was determined to be serious and gentlemen were too cowardly to oppose it in scarlet.”
Elizabeth pressed her fingers to her mouth.
“My husband laughed over it for two days,” Mrs Jenkins said. “He said the gentleman had a dry tongue and a kind eye, which was not a common pairing in his experience.” She paused. “You resemble him a little.”
That affected Elizabeth more than the name had done.
For days she had been repeating her father’s description to strangers who had never known him: height, age, complexion, manner of dress.
None of it had seemed to belong to the man who sat in the library at Longbourn and laughed at his own family from behind a book.
Mrs Jenkins had remembered something truer.
“I beg your pardon,” Elizabeth said, looking down quickly.
“There is nothing to pardon.” Mrs Jenkins’s own voice had roughened. “I would give much for someone to come through that door and tell me my husband had said something foolish and particular. It is a comfort, to know they were themselves somewhere.”
Elizabeth looked up at her. “Yes. It is.”
Darcy waited until she was steadier before speaking again. “Mrs Jenkins, do you know why Mr Bennet wished to go to Guernsey?”
“I do not. My husband only said he had business there, though what kind he did not know. He thought him a scholar at first, or perhaps a clergyman, until Mr Bennet said he had five daughters and therefore had no need of any profession to make him acquainted with human folly.”
Elizabeth gave a watery laugh. “Yes. That is certainly him.”
“He carried a small trunk and a leather satchel,” Mrs Jenkins continued. “He did not seem frightened, if that is your question. Tired, perhaps. Preoccupied. But not pursued, not desperate. My husband would have mentioned it if he had thought the gentleman in danger.”
“Did he speak of returning?” Darcy asked.
“I do not remember that he did. Only that Guernsey was his destination.”
“Did the ship arrive?”
Mrs Jenkins’s expression changed only slightly, but Elizabeth saw it. Her hand tightened beneath Darcy’s.
“It did,” Mrs Jenkins said. “That voyage did, at least. My husband returned from it.”
“And Mr Bennet?” Elizabeth asked.
“I cannot say what became of him after they reached the island. My husband delivered him there. That much I know.”
Guernsey was no longer a rumour or a driver’s uncertain memory. Her father had sailed there. He had reached it, or near enough that Captain Jenkins had given his wife no reason to believe otherwise. Elizabeth tried to be grateful for that, and she was, but the gratitude came tangled with fear.
“Why would he not write?” she asked.
Mrs Jenkins answered carefully. “Letters from the islands are not always simple things, ma’am. Not now.”
Darcy turned to her. “Because of France.”
“Aye,” Mrs Jenkins said. “Because of France, and that greedy fool, Napoleon. The islands are loyal enough, but they sit close to danger. Ships are delayed. Letters are lost. Men wait weeks for news that never comes, and sometimes news comes after it has ceased to be useful.”
Elizabeth felt the room grow too small around her. France. Ships. Delayed letters. Lost letters. Every explanation was better than death, and none of them were safe.
Darcy’s hand remained steady over hers.
Mrs Jenkins seemed to understand what her words had done. “I do not say this to frighten you. Only to tell you there may be reasons for silence besides death.”
“That is something,” Elizabeth said.
“It is a great deal,” Darcy said quietly.