Page 141 of Faceless

Darcy stood a few paces behind her. The folded document in his hand was one she knew at once by its shape.

She took it without speaking.

“Keep it on you,” he said. “If Richard brings me… brings us back with the case intact, it is yours and the… the date upon it might prove important. If he does not—”

He stopped. He forced the rest through.

“If it begins to endanger you, burn it. If they question you before you have burned it, show it to them and tell them the truth as it stood in July. You married a man using a false name. You did not know, and the letters you wrote to your sister prove that. That ignorance was real, and it may yet shield you.”

She looked at the paper between them, at the seal, at the whole weight of law and choice and survival compressed into something that would fit inside her coat.

“Promise me,” he said.

She raised her head.

“No.”

His face changed, very little and very entirely.

“Elizabeth—”

“I will consider it if there is no other way. That is the furthest I will go.” Her fingers closed around the document. “Do not ask me to promise beforehand that I will erase you. I will not promise that of my own husband in his mother’s house.”

He stepped to her then and took her face in both hands. His thumb passed once across her cheek. She caught the cuff of his coat in her fingers and held it.

“And do not put me in the next month already, Fitzwilliam. I am coming with you. Wherever it is we are going, we are going there together, and I shall thank you not to plan around your absence before I have given anyone permission to be absent.”

“I am not planning around my absence.”

“You are. You are six contingencies ahead of the carriage, and three of them have me in different rooms from you. I have noticed.”

He almost laughed. She felt his breath on her forehead. “Elizabeth —”

“I have noticed, and I am declining. We are leaving together. We shall stay together. If anything in the next fortnight requires us to be apart, you may bring it to me then, and I shall consider it on its merits. I shall hear you out. I shall weigh it. And then I shall decline to go.”

This time he did laugh — a single rough sound against her hair — and then he bent and kissed her, hard and brief, with the controlled urgency of a kiss he could not allow to run longer if he meant to leave on time. He stepped back. He let her go.

“Put it in your coat. And let it be seen only when it will benefit you.”

She put it in her coat.

From the yard, Fitzwilliam called. “Darcy, the ship will not wait.”

The word went through the house like a bell.

Darcy sighed and pulled her close to his chest for one more embrace. “I love you.”

Elizabeth let herself fall, just a little. She closed her eyes and hoped he would not notice the tear stain she was leaving on his coat.

LII

Fight

Darcy rode at Elizabeth’s right hand. Once, when the way dropped steeply, and her mare took the descent with more spirit than comfort, his hand came out to the bridle before he appeared conscious of having moved. She steadied the horse herself, and he let go at once. Neither of them spoke of it.

The road north had not improved with the failing light. The storm of the preceding night had torn at the lower bank and left one section half-slid into the ditch, so that they were obliged to leave the proper road for a field-track that had frozen and thawed and frozen again into ridges which declared their opinions of every horse’s hoof with unpleasant force. Fitzwilliam ranged ahead in the intervals where the country opened and fell back beside them where it narrowed, his body carrying the old professional wariness of his trade. Roads had long ago ceased to be innocent things to him.

There was too much in the air for speech, and what filled it was not quite silence but something denser — the kind of knowledge three people already held in common and had no need to speak aloud.