Page 135 of Faceless

“And did he know?” Elizabeth asked.

“Not for some years. Her family knew from the outset and could not persuade her to look elsewhere. My father required a certain amount of time to arrive at the obvious conclusion. He came round eventually.”

“I see the inheritance is on both sides,” she said.

He only turned the handkerchief once more, then set it back in her palm. “She only visited Auchengray once — this house, before she was married, a last journey while she was still a Fitzwilliam. The land was an inheritance from her mother, the countess, and so I suppose they came north to inspect it before the details were written into her settlement. She never came back, though, because her heart was at Pemberley, like my father’s.” He closed her fingers around the handkerchief gently. “You have been the mistress of Pemberley since the day you signed the settlement. I cannot give you the house just now.” His thumb moved once across the back of her hand. “But it seems you have been carrying a piece of it since November.”

The newest letter from Webb arrived on a Tuesday.

He knew before he broke the seal that it was worse than the last. That one had come a fortnight after Christmas — cautious, the language chosen with care. Both Harker and MacNeil had been cleared at the December assize. Their ships were provisioned, and one had already cleared the Pool. Foss alone remained under summons, and Webb had reason to suspect Foss’s interview within the month would be the last. Darcy had burned it over the library fire and told Elizabeth the shape of it, and she had pored over the figures for an hour afterward and arrived at the same walls he had been arriving at since April.

This letter was shorter, and the courtesy was gone. The body that had been recovered in April had been exhumed and re-examined. The identification had not held. A coroner’s amendment had been entered in November and only now reached Webb’s hands.

The warrant was no longer a formality maintained against a presumed-dead fugitive; it was an active warrant against a man believed to be living, and the Home Office had assigned men. Webb had identified two of them. He was closing down his visible activities and moving his lodgings, and advised Darcy to prepare to do the same if the situation required it.

He did not define required. He did not need to.

Darcy burned this one faster than the first. He was still at the fire when Elizabeth came in.

She did not ask what he had burned. She had seen him burn the last letter, and she had asked then, and she understood now what the speed of burning meant. She came and stood beside him and watched the last of it turn to ash with him.

“How bad?”

“They have ruled the death suspicious. There is an active search.”

For a few seconds, she only stood there. Her hand closed on the back of the chair beside the fire, she grasped what active search meant before her face caught up to it, and she decided, by visible effort, not to put it on her face.

“Then what is the date on the coroner’s amendment? When did it actually go in?”

“November. Webb only had it this week.”

“And the men they have assigned. Have they been anywhere near here?”

“Webb does not think so yet. He has identified two of them in London. There will be others he has not identified.”

“How long, Fitzwilliam, before we know whether they are close?”

“Days. A week at most. If a stranger appears in the village asking after the laird’s habits, we will know within an hour. Beyond that… I do not know.”

She drew a slow breath and let it out. He had been watching her for the better part of a year, and she was working through it — pulling each piece of fear into a place she could set it down, putting her hands to whatever she could touch, finding her ground. She turned and rested her palm on the mantel, looking at the fire and not at him.

“Then we should be thinking, not standing here being frightened at one another.”

“Elizabeth.”

“We are not entirely without resources. My uncle Gardiner — please do not say no until you have heard me. He keeps an entire warehouse of correspondents. He has men in Bristol, in Liverpool, in Hull, on the docks at every port that matters. They are honest merchants who carry one another’s letters for the price of a meal, and they are utterly outside any channel the Home Office knows how to watch. If Webb cannot reach the clerk, my uncle’s people might at least find out where the clerk has gone, which is more than we have at present.”

“And every man you bring in is another man the Home Office can find me through, Elizabeth. Webb has been doing this since before either of us was born; if Webb cannot put pressure on the clerk without exposing himself, your uncle’s friends will not be able to do it without being exposed in their turn. And once one of them is, the line back to your uncle is not a long one, and the line back to your uncle does not stop at your uncle.”

She closed her eyes briefly. “I know, Fitzwilliam. I am trying to think of anyone we have not already tried, because the list of people we have already tried is not yielding.”

He came over and put his hand at the small of her back. It was the most ordinary gesture he had developed since November and the one he reached for now without thinking. She did not turn into him, but her breathing slowed by degrees.

“Then what is left?”

“What was left yesterday. The clerk has to come forward. Sterling has to miscalculate somewhere. Webb has to find a new channel.” He paused. “And we have to be ready to move within an hour of any sign that this house is no longer safe. That is the part that is new.”

She did not answer at once. She took it in — the move within an hour — and decided not to ask, yet, what move looked like or where to.