Page 139 of Faceless

The colonel pulled off his gloves one finger at a time, as if the body required some ordinary business before it could proceed to catastrophe.

“A day,” he said. Then, because he was an honest man and because there was no use in false comfort between them, “Perhaps less.”

The library was cold with the kind of cold that did not yield merely because a fire existed in the room. Fitzwilliam remained standing after they entered, his coat still on him, the weather still clinging to his shoulders and cuffs as though even now the road had not fully released him. Elizabeth sat only because Darcy said sit down in the voice he used when a thing was no longer to be argued. Falstaff pressed against Fitzwilliam’s leg and leaned there with the trusting weight of a creature who had accepted him at once into the household because his master had given his hand, and that was that.

The colonel put one hand on the dog’s narrow skull and kept it there, not caressing, merely resting it as though the contact were steadying.

“Webb’s man inside the Home Office has gone dark,” he said. “That warning was the last of him. Whether he was discovered or merely frightened into prudence, I cannot tell you. It makes no practical difference. That channel is shut. Sterling has appeared before the committee three times since Michaelmas. He is cooperative to the point of sainthood, his counsel excellent, his papers immaculate.”

Darcy had not sat. He stood at the table with one hand against the back of the opposite chair, the knuckles of it very white in the winter light.

“I had a letter only today about the warrant. Is it still…?”

“It was moving before last week. Sterling’s counsel petitioned for formal closure. Someone in Whitehall decided that if a man were to be dead, he ought at least to have the courtesy of being conclusively charged before the world forgot him. But enough people apparently thought the timing suspicious that the body was exhumed, and… well, I suspect Webb told you the rest in that letter.”

Darcy nodded slowly, his eyes unfocused. “And Auchengray is not a secret. Conveniently forgotten by even our own family, but not entirely erased.”

The colonel’s look was grim. “Father has not helped him, if that is what you mean, and I doubt anyone has bothered applying to Lady Catherine. But it will not matter. They know enough to look for a living Fitzwilliam Darcy, and everything that was ever connected to you will have been sorted through within the last week. They will have officers on the road by now if the weather has not turned them back.”

Her husband’s eyes drifted to the window, where the winter brightness had gone to late-afternoon pewter and the sea showed only in strips between sleet and distance. “What about the captains?”

“Harker is in the Mediterranean and not expected at the Pool before March. MacNeil is on the Baltic timber run, and will not be in English waters until April at the earliest, later if the ice holds. Sterling arranged both clearances at the December assize and is petitioning on Foss’s behalf now; Webb expects him to succeed within the month, after which Foss sails too, likely to the West Indies. Six months out.”

“So, no captain available before March.”

“Likely later. Possibly autumn.”

“And by then —”

“By then the case may have resolved itself one way or another. Yes.”

He paused.

“Misery is beginning to do the labour conscience would not. MacNeil’s debts are large and ugly, and no longer quietly serviced now that he is at sea and beyond Sterling’s reach. Foss has had four months to dwell on a brother who died on a voyage delayed for reasons that existed only on paper. Harker will follow whoever moves first, and is no use until someone does.”

Elizabeth heard herself speak before she had resolved to. “Is there no other way to work upon him?”

Fitzwilliam turned to her properly for the first time. There was surprise in it, but no resentment — only the quick recalculation of a man who had not expected her to arrive at the practical question so soon.

Before he could answer, Darcy said, “She knows everything.”

The colonel’s eyes flicked once to Darcy and back. “So I had begun to suspect when she met me at the door. If I may, madam, you look very well indeed. Much better than when I saw you last.”

If there had been another hour in the world, Elizabeth might have cared to examine the exact quality of that reply. There was no hour.

“I understand I have your proclivity for drink and gossip to thank, but I will do it some other time. Is there some other leverage?” she asked again.

“Yes,” he said, with a soldier’s refusal to waste syllables on comfort he could not substantiate. “Given time. Not virtue, not sudden zeal for justice. Time. The difficulty is not whether a weakness can be found — it is that the officers are already on the road to this house, and I cannot be in Bristol and Aberdeenshire at once.”

Darcy’s hand left the chairback and returned to it. “And what of the clerk? Are you still convinced he will not talk?”

“Still more afraid of the law than of Sterling. Webb thinks he has him near Weston, under another name — though he has thought as much, in one form or another, four times in five months. What has changed is that Webb believes he now knows why the man has not fled the country. Family. If that lever can be pulled, Marsh may crack. If not, he will go on choosing terror over honour, which is what most men do when family is the price.”

Elizabeth looked from one cousin to the other. There was nothing of theatrics or false terror in either face. That was what made it dreadful. Two men of intelligence discussing the collapse of a life with the ordinary calm of men who knew that panic consumed time without altering facts.

“You have no choice, Darcy. You have to get out of the country. Both of you, for she is not safe either, once they learn who she is.” Fitzwilliam reached into his coat and drew out a folded paper softened at the creases by handling.

“There is a packet at Aberdeen on the morning tide,” he said. “She takes cargo first and passengers as an afterthought, but she sails. Halifax before Boston. Not ideal. Merely possible. From Halifax, there are alternatives if you must continue under another name. Boston, if you prefer a republic to a colony.”