Page 145 of Faceless

“I will tell you what your choices are, since you appear not to know them. I can take you to your uncle in Pentonville. You will be received there with kindness and no questions, and you will pass the next months in retirement until the matter is concluded one way or another, and your name will be kept clear of it so far as I can manage. If that is what you want, say so now, and I shall see to it. You will be safe. You will see your sisters. You will have nothing to do with what happens to him until the verdict is read, and possibly not even then.”

“That is not —”

“I have not finished. The other option is that I take you to Matlock House. To my father. You will not be received with kindness there because my father is a fair man, but not one who deals in kindness. You will not be in retirement because there will be no retirement available to a woman who has chosen the other path. You will be brought into a fight, Mrs Darcy. You will be asked to give evidence of the most humiliating kind. You will be asked questions by solicitors and barristers and by men of considerably less polish than those, and you will be expected to answer them without flinching. You will visit my cousin in the Tower of London, in a room with a guard in it, in front of strangers, and you will conduct yourself as becomes the name

Mrs Darcy. You will do this for as many weeks or months as it takes, and at the end of it, he may still hang, and you will have spent yourself for nothing.”

He stopped. “Pentonville is the kinder option. I shall not think less of you if you choose it. But I need to know now, before we are on the road, because the two roads do not run together and I cannot turn the carriage round once we are halfway down one of them.”

She drew in a breath. “Colonel —”

“Not yet. Think, Mrs Darcy.”

She thought.

She thought of the house in Pentonville — of the small fire in the parlour and Mary at the pianoforte and Kitty at her drawing and Aunt Gardiner calling in twice a week to manage her mother’s nerves. She thought of being received there in mourning clothes for a man whose death had not yet happened and might yet not, of sitting in a parlour while the verdict was decided by other people in other rooms, of being told the outcome by letter weeks after it was final.

She thought of Matlock House. Of a family she had never met. Of being put into a coach to the Tower in a borrowed gown. Of barristers’ questions. Of strangers’ eyes. Of conducting herself, in a guarded room, as the wife of a man who was supposed to be dead.

She had her answer before she had finished thinking. She had had it on the half-landing with Richard’s hand on her mouth, possibly before. The thinking was only the ordering of what she already knew.

“Take me to your father, Colonel. I am going to fight for my husband.”

Richard held her eyes for an instant longer. Then he gave one short nod, the kind of nod a soldier gives to another soldier who has just enlisted for an action neither of them is going to enjoy.

“Then we ride. Now. Get dressed.”

LIII

The Earl

The packet out of Aberdeen had not been built with any view to mercy. The moment the harbour fell behind them, the ship began to declare its opinions through every timber and bolt, and the January sea was in no hospitable temper. Richard had had the foresight to leave a bucket within reach.

By the time the first violent hour had passed, she had ceased to care whether the ship foundered, whether the Crown fell, whether Sterling hanged, or whether any civilised person ever again pronounced merchant packet in her hearing. Richard came at intervals with water and fresh cloths, determined not to witness more of another person’s misery than kindness absolutely required. Once, he looked at her with a concentration so marked that even in her present condition, she noticed it. He looked away. She was glad of it.

The crossing in July had been perfectly tolerable. She had not been ill once. This time, though —

Well, it was mostly the weather. She put the thought away.

The first day, she could not raise her head from the bunk. The second, she managed broth and dry bread by the small bolted table and then immediately wished she had not. By the third, she had begun to find a rhythm with the ship — she could walk three paces from her cabin to the companionway without disgracing herself, and she could keep down water and the hard ship-biscuit that seemed to be the only food the cook had any confidence in.

The third evening, Richard came and sat opposite her at the small bolted table and produced a pack of cards from some military pocket and dealt them with the solemnity of a magistrate opening proceedings. They played badly. He did not press her into conversation. From another man, that restraint might have felt distant; in him, it was consideration in the language he trusted.

The fourth day, the wind shifted, and the ship steadied, and she went up onto the deck for a quarter-hour wrapped in a borrowed cloak and watched the coast of England moving past at the speed of an idle walk. Norfolk, Richard said when she asked. They would round into the Thames estuary by nightfall. He took her arm at the rail and stood with her until the wind drove her below.

That evening, he came to her cabin with a tray and stood in the doorway a moment before he set it down.

“We will be in London by morning,” he said.

She looked at him. There was no use pretending either of them did not understand that by London he meant not merely arrival but another family, another house, another set of eyes into which she must carry this impossible account and stand by it.

“Very well,” she said.

He nodded once and went.

She slept at last in fragments. Each time she woke, the ship was still moving south through the dark, and Darcy was still absent, and the paper proving her marriage was inside her coat folded against her like a second body.

Matlock House in the London morning had the quality of large established houses in which dignity had become structural. The footman who admitted them did not stare. Richard gave his name. Something passed very quickly through the servant’s face at the sight of the woman beside him, but then it was gone. They were shown into a library and left there while a message went up through the house.