Page 119 of Faceless

She straightened. “A witness?”

“A clerk of Sterling’s who prepared the forged manifests and vanished before the warrant was drawn. He is alive, and we know where — but we have every reason to think he will not talk, and we cannot go near him without a lever. If Sterling learns we have looked, he moves the man again, or worse.” He turned his head and met her eye properly for the first time since they had entered the room. “My cousin Richard is working on it through army channels, and Webb does what he can from London. It is — not moving as quickly as any of us would wish.”

“Your cousin… he knows you are alive?”

“Since October. He had already begun to reconstruct what had happened — he went to Webb, told Webb he knew where I was and would come alone if Webb would not help, and I authorised Webb to bring him in.” Something nearly dry entered his voice. “Richard is not easily managed.”

“How did he find out you were alive? What made him suspect, and how did he know where to look?”

He paused, and a faint smile touched his lips. “It was because of you.”

She stared at him. “I beg your pardon?”

“When you encountered Richard in Cheapside in July, he had been wandering, tracing any connexion back to me that his grief could find. You were one of them.” He kept his eyes on the floor.

“Afterwards, he said rather more to my former valet than he intended to. He had been drinking. He told Hodges he had seen you, that you were about to marry Sibley. Hodges took that intelligence to Webb, who passed it on to me, and… well, you know what I did about it. By the time it circulated back to him in the autumn, Sibley had been publicly complaining that a young woman had abandoned him nearly at the altar and removed herself to Scotland, and the Bennet family’s circumstances were not difficult to trace. Richard followed the chain.”

“I … I do not entirely follow that chain.”

“You were the connexion. You always were.”

“But why would the colonel — you said he was wandering, in grief, the afternoon he encountered me by chance in the street— why would he think that I had anything to do with you? Cheapside is not a place you would have frequented. Miss Bingley was plain enough about that.”

He folded his hands and looked up at her. One brow lifted slightly.

“Unless…” she said, and her voice was very careful now. “... He already knew that I was…” She narrowed her eyes. “... someone who would matter to you?”

Still nothing from him.

“Or he guessed at something. At Rosings. He had seen something there that told him — what had he seen?”

“Enough,” he said, very quietly, “that when he heard gossip about you eloping to Scotland, he did not let it go.”

Something rose in her throat and closed. She tried to draw breath, failed, and gasped slightly. “You… How long?” she whispered.

“Hertfordshire. The autumn before. I had believed I had concealed it tolerably well.” Something near a smile crossed his face and was gone. “Apparently, the only one I concealed it from was you.”

She shook her head slowly. The motion sent a fresh pain through her temples, and she stopped. She had found him cold. She had found him proud. She had told anyone who asked that Fitzwilliam Darcy was not worth the effort of understanding, and she had meant every word of it.

“You certainly did!”

He pressed his fingers into his eyes. “To my utter mortification. The night before the express arrived, I had been… I was composing something. What I intended to say to you the following morning. I was not making very good work of it. But I had the whole of the next morning, or so I believed, and I—” He stopped, and gave a cautious shake of his head. “The express arrived at half past midnight.”

She stared at him.

The mural chamber was entirely silent.

“You were going to propose to me?”

His mouth tightened slightly, and he kneaded his temples.

She put her hand over her mouth. She did not know whether she was going to laugh or weep, and it turned out she was going to do both, which was inconvenient, and the laugh came out first — not a happy sound, the sound of someone confronted with a cruelty so exactly tailored to her that she could only marvel at the fit of it — and then the tears came after it and she pressed her hand harder against her mouth and tried to contain both.

“You had been composing,” she said, when she could speak. “What you meant to say? What was it?”

“I think I would do better never to repeat the words to you, for it was not going well,” he said again, his voice flat. The flatness of having given up on dignity altogether.

“I rather think it does not matter very much now.”