Page 14 of Faceless

“Tell me what he said,” Jane said — no accusation, only a door opened and left open.

Elizabeth set down her book. “I am not certain his word ought to be taken as settled fact.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“He mentioned Mr Bingley in passing. He said that Bingley was in London, and that his attentions were engaged — that there was a young lady he seemed quite serious about. He offered it as information. It may mean nothing definitive; it is one man’s account of another man’s inclinations, and I cannot vouch for his reliability on the subject.”

She could not say more than that. She had no proof of anything beyond a conviction that had been sitting in her since Hertfordshire, and she would not hand Jane a target for her grief that might prove undeserved.

Jane was quiet for a long moment. Outside, the sounds of Gracechurch Street continued their ordinary business.

“I see,” she said at last.

“Jane—”

“No.” Jane turned her eye to the window. “You were right to tell me. I would rather have it plainly. I had thought — perhaps when we were in town together — but it does not signify.”

It did signify. It was there in the careful set of Jane’s shoulders, in the brightness at the corners of her eyes that Jane was asking something considerable of herself not to let fall. One tear escaped anyway; Jane caught it quickly, almost before it arrived, and breathed slowly. Elizabeth sat with her in silence, because there was nothing to say that would improve on it.

“He was not worthy of you.”

“You do not know that,” Jane said, with the gentleness she gave even to disagreeing with the people she loved most. “He may simply have found someone better suited.”

“That is not possible.”

Jane almost smiled. It did not quite arrive, but it was close, and Elizabeth counted it.

Their aunt came in shortly after, read the room in a single glance, and announced that an outing would do everyone good — she had been meaning to look at gloves on Oxford Street, and there was no reason whatsoever to sit indoors. They put on their bonnets and got into the carriage, and Elizabeth sat with Jane’s hand in hers as London went past the window.

It was her aunt who named the street as they turned into it. “Grosvenor Square — is it not handsome? I always think it the finest address in London.”

Elizabeth looked out of the window. The houses were very large and very white and very certain of themselves. She did not know which was his, and she was not going to ask.

Her eye followed them as they passed, and she thought of Jane’s one escaped tear and the almost-smile that had not quite arrived, and of a man who had stood on a Kent hillside relaying his friend’s new attachment without apparent guilt; and she thought that if one of these very large, very white, very certain houses were to catch fire from a dropped candle or an overturned lamp, it would be difficult to argue that the universe had not demonstrated a certain sense of justice.

She turned back to Jane. “Which gloves? For what occasion?”

And Jane, who knew exactly what Elizabeth was doing and loved her for it, began to talk about gloves.

The ring was gone. Its absence had stayed with him since the moment he gave it to Webb — the ghost of it still present in the surrounding tissue, the slight indentation in the skin, the faint difference in colour where it had sat for five years. He turned his hand over, put it in his pocket, and looked out of the window instead.

At Gravesend, a vessel was waiting, as Webb had arranged, to carry him north by sea to Aberdeen, where no posting-house record would show his name and no coaching inn would remember his face. He would arrive at Auchengray by a road that did not exist in any document connected to Fitzwilliam Darcy.

Meanwhile, somewhere on the Dover road, his carriage was being overturned. Webb had recalled it from the George Inn — the trunk, the livery, everything — and sent it south without him; the coachman had been paid enough to disappear to Bristol and ask no questions. The ring was on the charred body found in the wreckage. Whatever else was in the wreckage, Darcy had decided not to examine. Webb had handled it. By tonight, there would be a body on the Dover road identified as Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley, dead of a carriage accident, a lantern catching the upholstery before the occupant could be freed; by the end of the week, it would be in every drawing room in London.

His uncle would read Webb’s letter in the library at Matlock and sit, as a man struck by apoplexy, for a long time before he moved. The Earl had buried soldiers and friends and a brother who died young, and had learned not to be destroyed by loss; he would also be angry — at the suddenness, at the lack of warning, at Darcy for being on the Dover road at all — and the anger would help him. Darcy was counting on it.

Georgiana would have no such anger to help her, only grief, uncomplicated and complete, laid over everything else she had already lost this year. He pressed his hand flat against his thigh, fixed his eye on the road, and put his sister away; there was nothing useful in dwelling on her when months would pass before he could do anything for her, and he could not afford to come apart in a hired hackney in broad daylight.

Richard was easier — a soldier knew that men died suddenly and without warning. He would take it badly nonetheless, and would ask the questions there were no answers to, and would never quite succeed in putting them away.

Richard would think of her. Richard had missed nothing, blast the man, but after this… perhaps he might think of offering her some comfort. She would cry. Not because she was soft, she was not soft, but because she was not indifferent, and she had known what the look across the dinner table had been for, and had been waiting for him to say the rest.

He sat in a hired hackney in another man’s coat, with a false name in his pocket and his father’s ring in a burning carriage somewhere to the south, and found that he was jealous of his cousin over a woman he had never claimed publicly. The absurdity of it could stand there unchallenged.

Better, perhaps, that she never hear of his “death” at all. She would live her life — sharp and difficult, reading books she had opinions about, arguing with people who deserved it — and would never know that somewhere in Aberdeenshire a dead man sat in a stone tower thinking of her.

George Carlisle, Baron of Auchengray.