Page 10 of Faceless

His valet arrived in a state of dishevelled alertness that suggested he had not been deeply asleep either, and Darcy was already at the wardrobe. His night clothes were thrown atop the trunk, and he was already in his breeches.

“We are leaving for London. Now!” He had one boot on, the other half-drawn. “Have my trunk packed — only what is necessary. We are not staying.”

“Sir.” The valet, who had been with Darcy long enough to know that now meant now, was already moving. “Shall I wake Colonel Fitzwilliam?”

“No.” Darcy dragged his coat on; the sleeve resisted, and he forced it. “Do not wake him. On no account wake him.”

“The carriage, sir — it will take a quarter-hour at least to—”

“Then it takes a quarter-hour! Have it ready.” He picked up the letter from where he had set it on the nightstand. Read it a third time, as though the words might have altered. They had not. He folded it. Put it in his pocket. His hands were not where he needed them. “We cannot wait for morning. We will not wait.”

The park had been empty that morning. She had walked the south path its full length and met no one, and come home to breakfast without remarking on it. Charlotte had met her eye once, over the rim of her cup, and made no remark either.

Colonel Fitzwilliam arrived at half past eleven with his hat in his hand, plainly having had an odd morning and not wishing to say so directly. He admired the parlour, accepted tea, and folded himself into the chair across from Maria with all the ease of long campaigning.

“We had not heard that Mr Darcy had left Rosings,” Charlotte said, setting down her cup. “Was it sudden?”

Fitzwilliam turned his cup in its saucer. The movement was brief and controlled; it did not escape Elizabeth.

“He was called away in the night,” he said. “I knew nothing of it until this morning — found a note at breakfast. Some urgent business in London. I imagine it is a dull affair — a difficulty with an account, perhaps.” He gave a faint huff that might have been amusement. “If it had been anything of consequence, I flatter myself he would have seen fit to wake me. Clearly, he concluded I should have been no use to him, which I find difficult to argue with before noon.”

“Lady Catherine must have been displeased.”

“Lady Catherine had expectations of Darcy she had hoped he would answer before the visit concluded.” He said it evenly. Then his eye came to Elizabeth.

She reached for her tea.

His eyes stayed on her — not intrusively, not long enough to constitute anything she could reasonably object to, but with an attention that had a shape to it, as though he had said something and was watching to see what it had done. She thought of Anne de Bourgh’s still face at dinner, of Lady Catherine’s very decided opinions about Pemberley’s future mistress, and she returned her cup to its saucer. “I hope the business resolves itself. He struck me as a man who attends to his affairs very capably.”

“He does,” Fitzwilliam said.

He stayed only as long as civility required. At the door, he turned to her last. “Miss Bennet.” He bowed; Charlotte walked him out; Elizabeth remained by the window, her eye on the lane.

Charlotte came back and took up her needlework.

“He watched you,” she said — no accusation, only a fact, offered in her manner, the manner of one long since resigned to the world being as it was.

“He had to look somewhere,” Elizabeth said. “I would not presume to make anything of it.”

IV

The Only Option

He had read it once, in the doorway of his room with the hall boy’s guttering candle the only light; then he had folded it, put it in his breast pocket, and had not taken it out again.

His valet packed in silence. The carriage was brought round in twenty minutes — Darcy had not said why, and Hodges had not asked — and the house was still dark when they came out through the gate onto the road south, Kent disappearing behind him into the lane.

The horses were pushing hard. He had told the coachman not to stop unless the horses needed it, and the coachman had met his eye and asked nothing, which was why Darcy kept him. He had the letter in four sentences, and his mind returned to them in the dark, again and again, the way a tongue finds a cracked tooth — not because he expected them to resolve into something different but because he could not stop. He took them apart. He reassembled them. He looked for the piece he had missed, the reading that changed the shape of it into something less catastrophic, and he did not find one.

The discrepancy in the ledger had not been an error. He had known that in the study at Grosvenor Square when he first opened it — too clean, too visible to a careful eye, placed where a careful man would find it. It had been an invitation, and he had accepted it with the wholehearted efficiency of pride in proper handling. He had written to Sterling, confirmed he had seen it, told him exactly where he would be for the next month, and gone back to dinner with his cousin, satisfied that he had dealt with the matter as he ought. Sterling would have had everything he needed within four days.

He did not let himself go further than that. Not yet.

They changed horses at Bromley. By the time London’s glow appeared on the horizon, the sky had lightened enough to see the road without the lamps; he knocked on the panel as they crossed into Southwark and gave the coachman the George Inn. There he stepped down with Hodges and the satchel, pressed a month’s wages and keep into the coachman’s hand, and told him to stable the horses and wait for word — the trunk to stay on the carriage until further notice. The coachman weighed whether to ask a question, decided against it, and pocketed the money.

They found a hackney two streets along, gave the driver an address two streets east of Grosvenor Square, and walked the last of the way on foot. The Square was quiet, the houses dark, the dawn just beginning to grey the sky above the roofline. No carriage. No lamps. No livery. Nothing that placed either of them in London before they were ready to be placed.

He let himself in with his own key and went to the study, lit the lamp himself, and sat down at the desk. The ledger was where he had left it, set aside with the quiet satisfaction of something handled properly. He pulled it out, opened it to the page, and then took the letter from his breast pocket and unfolded it on the desk beside it — reading it now the way he had not been able to read it in the doorway at Rosings, slowly, giving every word its full meaning.