Page 11 of Faceless

Someone has been building a case against you. I did not know until it was nearly complete. The warrant is drawn — High Treason, giving aid and comfort to the enemy, specifically the movement of gold coin to France via your shipping interests. Sterling’s name is not on the instrument, but his hand is in it. The Home Office moves within the week. If you are in Kent, leave tonight.

— W

He set the letter down.

High treason.

Here in the study with the lamp burning and the ledger open beside them, the words had their full force — the thing that ended names, that stripped estates, that reached backward through a family’s history and forward through its future and removed both. Whatever he had contrived to secure for Georgiana would not survive a conviction intact. Her brother’s name would become the thing she carried for the rest of her life. Pemberley would go to the Crown — his father’s family had spent two hundred years building something worth the name, and Sterling had spent considerably less arranging to take it.

The gallows he held at arm’s length entirely. Some things were too large for the room.

And then his mind went to what would not now happen. Whether she would have come out early that morning. Whether she would have let him walk with her. Whether the sentences he had rehearsed by firelight would have finally arranged themselves into something he could put before her.

She would have said yes. He had been certain of that since midnight — certain with an odd, hard clarity he had not permitted himself until now. He had been hours away, sure of her answer and of what would have followed it, the hand she would have put into his, the real smile given him at last in full.

And he had abandoned her to certain confusion — because she had known. Every walk, every evening, the nearness of it had been plain to her for days. It had to be, for she was too intelligent for it to be otherwise, and he was leaving her with that knowledge and no answer. Whatever she was to make of his silence, she would make alone.

He held it a moment longer, something giving way in his chest that he did not try to name, before he set it down and moved on to what needed doing.

Hodges set the satchel down by the door and stood. “Sir. I will wake—”

“No.” Darcy looked up. “No one is to be woken. No one is to know we are here.” He was already writing — an address, a time, four words of instruction — and folded and sealed it before the ink was entirely dry. “Take this to Mr Webb; you have the Bermondsey address. Tell him the Red Lion on Fetter Lane, eight o’clock. If he cannot make eight, he is to send word to the same place, and I will wait.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Hodges.” Darcy counted out what was in the desk drawer — more than a year’s living for a careful man, kept in gold against a day he had not let himself imagine until tonight — and set it on the corner of the desk. “This is not wages. Take no situation while you wait for me; I want you free of any hours but mine. Remain here as long as the house is kept open, and keep your ears open longer. I want news of my sister above all — any letter from Matlock, any visit from the colonel, any word at all. If the colonel calls, you will see him before anyone else does; whatever he says, remember, and whatever he leaves behind, keep. After that, watch what passes through this house. If it is shut up, take what papers you may and go to a Mrs Paulson in Leather Lane — a lodging house, clean, no questions asked. You will hear from me through Webb, never directly. It may be months.”

Hodges’ eye went to the money, then to Darcy. He put it in his coat pocket without a word. “Very good, sir,” he said, and went.

Darcy turned back to the desk and added the ledger to the small pile he had already drawn from the drawer — the copies he had made in the first careful weeks after taking on the shipping interests, the correspondence that predated Sterling’s involvement entirely, the papers whose significance another man would miss because another man did not know the business as he did. He could not take much. He needed to be gone before the kitchen fire was lit.

Sterling had built this over months, with patience, and had anticipated every obvious move. He could not fight it — not openly, not in time; a trial would be over before the defence was properly drawn. He could not run to the Continent; running was confirmation, and the Crown would move on Pemberley within a fortnight.

He picked up the documents, tucked them inside his coat, and surveyed the study — the lamp burning, the desk bare, the ledger gone from its corner. His eye went to the fresh sheet of paper he had pulled towards him while Hodges was still in the room. He sat back down. He had perhaps forty minutes before the kitchen maid came down to light the range. He picked up the pen.

It was going to require a death certificate.

V

The Last of Him

The inn yard at Bromley was busy enough that Elizabeth did not notice the colonel until he was almost beside them.

He had come around the corner of the stable block, hat in his hand, with the look of having waited longer than anticipated for something not yet ready. He stopped when he saw them, with a smile that reached his eyes.

“Miss Bennet. Miss Lucas.” He bowed. “I had not thought to have company on the road.”

“Nor had we,” Elizabeth said. “Though I confess I am not entirely surprised. When did you leave Rosings?”

“This morning, as it turns out. My regiment will not wait indefinitely.” He fell into step beside them as they moved towards the inn door, the manservant following at a discreet distance with the bags. “And you? Mr Collins released you without too much ceremony?”

“He was everything gracious,” Elizabeth said. “And everything lengthy.”

Fitzwilliam’s expression suggested he found this entirely plausible. He held the door. “You had a fine morning for it, at least. The roads are dry.”

“They are,” Maria said. “We have made very good time.”

“Better than I have.” Fitzwilliam accepted the tea a serving girl brought and considered it with mild resignation. “One grows accustomed to Darcy’s coachwork and then one is abruptly reminded what the alternative feels like on a country road. I have been repenting my impatience with every rut since Sevenoaks.”