Page 140 of Faceless

He set the paper upon the table between them.

Darcy did not touch it.

“America… But… Georgiana…”

For the first time since entering the room, Colonel Fitzwilliam looked as though he would rather have been shot.

“She does not know,” he said. “She has not known since April, and she cannot know yet, because the fewer people who carry this thing, the less likely it is to break in our hands. She is tolerably well. She asks after me more than I enjoy. I have told her I am occupied with the regiment, which is true only in the loosest moral sense.”

Darcy’s face had drained of all colour.

Elizabeth saw, with a clarity almost cruel in it, the double pull of him — sister, house, history, name, the whole life he had been denied for nine months by his own design and by Sterling’s malice; and against it the harder fact that if he moved towards any of those now, all of them were lost.

“But this… it is temporary,” he said at last. “A few months…” He glanced at Elizabeth, then back to his cousin. “America is so far. Surely, the ship might put in at… Perhaps Orkney. We would be safe enough in Kirkwall.”

The colonel shook his head. “If I were you, Darcy, I would not show my face anywhere the English Navy sails.”

“But if I go to America, all is lost. I am too far away. If I am in Orkney, or perhaps the Hebrides or even Dublin, I can come back and fight in court once Foss can be persuaded to testify. We can still clear my name.”

“With what luck? Foss has been told what will happen to him if he speaks against Sterling, and the assurances he requires before he will speak against Sterling are not assurances I have been authorised to give. He is a captain. He wants to remain a captain. He wants to know that the Alicia Jane will not be condemned, that his name will not be ruined in the trade, that he will draw breath after his testimony as a free man with his ship and his living intact. A Crown immunity will not satisfy him on its own. He has watched too many men hang with a King’s pardon in their pocket. I have not the authority to offer Foss more than the law obliges. And I shall need the spring, or the others ashore, before I can put the case together properly. It is the best I have.”

No one spoke.

Falstaff, tired of human incompetence, sighed heavily against Fitzwilliam’s leg and resettled his feet.

Darcy picked up the packet paper at last, looked at none of it, and set it down again.

Then he went to the window.

He stood there with his back to them, one hand braced against the stone of the embrasure, looking out over the headland and the winter sea as if the coast itself might contain an answer not available indoors. Elizabeth did not move. The room had become too narrow for movement.

When he turned back, his face was composed. That composure frightened her more than agitation would have done. “How long before they reach the house?”

“If the roads hold, by tomorrow night. If they do not, then the following morning.” Fitzwilliam’s mouth flattened. “There is no we in what follows. You and Elizabeth go north. I see you onto the packet. I turn south again before the tide has cleared the harbour. Bristol cannot wait on sentiment.”

The sentence fell between them with the heavy plainness of law.

Elizabeth heard it whole. North. Sea. Separation. Perhaps six weeks of ocean and weather and absence so complete it had no visible shore. It came to her at once, and she kept her face still because there was nothing in the world she disliked so much as wasting the first useful moment on visible dismay.

Darcy looked at her then.

“Very well.”

They left the house in less than an hour.

Less time than it had once taken on a quiet evening to decide between the blue shawl and the grey. The absurdity of that might have made her laugh on another day.

Mrs MacLeod stood with both hands on the table when Elizabeth crossed the kitchen, her mouth set hard. Angus had the horses ready before he was asked. Fitzwilliam had become all efficiency — maps, distance, weather, spare pistols. The whole house had altered around him.

Elizabeth moved through her rooms quickly. She took linen, money, the stronger of her boots, the handkerchief she had been carrying since November, the Rasselas, the letters from Jane, the little red volume with Anne Fitzwilliam’s name inside. She left half of what she touched exactly where it lay.

When she came down again, the library fire was still burning. One of the chairs remained drawn half towards the other from the morning. Upon the sofa arm lay the book she had abandoned at the knock.

She passed her bedroom doorway and stopped. The long table. The chair where she had first sat rigid with terror. The chair opposite where she had learned the shape of a man without his face. The flint he had set to her left from the first evening, trusting her with the power to destroy his concealment before she had given him a reason in the world to do so.

“Elizabeth.”

She turned.