Page 152 of Faceless

He hoped, with the part of his mind that was permitted to hope anything at this hour, that she had been moved to a softer bed by now. That the inn at Inverurie was behind her. That Richard had got her south by some route he could not be told. That she was, or would be soon, somewhere with a fire that drew properly and a window with a curtain across it and a coverlet she could lay her hand on without remembering whose place beside her had been empty when she woke. He hoped she was warm. He hoped, more than anything else he had hoped in his life, that someone had put a hot brick in the bed at her feet.

He had no way of knowing. He had only the picture he had made of it, which was the picture of her at Auchengray on the kind of January morning when the wind had come off the headland, and she had slept later than usual because the room had been cold, and he had stood at the slit in the mural chamber wall and watched her at the household accounts before she had known he was awake.

He wept, briefly, into his own palms.

When he had stopped, he sat up. He drew breath, slowly, and made himself stand and go to the chair where his coat lay. The handkerchief was in the inner pocket where he had put it when the Gaoler had let him keep it. He took it out and held it in his palm a moment, the Pemberley mark uppermost, and was on the point of returning it when his fingers caught on something behind the lining.

He stopped.

The pocket had a second fold inside it, deep against the seam, where the lining had been turned and stitched neatly closed. He worked his fingers in. There was a paper folded very small, no larger than a calling card, slipped into the fold as though it had been put there with care and an eye to remaining undiscovered.

He tore at the light stitches that concealed it and drew it out.

He did not at first know what it was. The handwriting, when he had unfolded it twice and brought it to the grey light from the window, was Elizabeth’s. He stood looking at it before he had read a word, working out the only way it could have arrived in his coat. The coat had been with him since they left Auchengray. The pocket had been against his chest for five days. She must have put the note in his clothing while he was elsewhere about the house — packing, perhaps, or speaking with Mrs MacLeod about what was to be left behind — and she had said nothing of it, and she had stitched the lining over it with her own hand, and she had sent him south wearing it without his knowing.

My dearest husband,

If you are reading this, then we are in worse straits than I had hoped, and you are alive, which is better than I had feared. I shall take what victories are on offer.

I am writing this on the afternoon before we leave Auchengray. You are in the yard with Angus, and the colonel is saddling the horses. I have perhaps ten minutes before you come in, which is just time enough to write a note I hope you will never read and find a place to hide it where you will not be forced to surrender it.

Come back to me, Fitzwilliam. I love you past sense and beyond any reason I can command. I shall be unbearable until I have you again, and I shall be insupportable when I do, and you have only yourself to thank for either.

Your most impatient and besotted

Lizzy

He read it a second time. He read it a third, and stood there a long moment with his head bent. He did not weep again. He had not the room left in him for it.

After a while, he refolded the paper along its existing creases and put it back where she had put it, deep against the seam, inside the lining of the coat. He smoothed the cloth over it. He took up the handkerchief, which had been on the table beside him while he stood, and put it back into the outer pocket above the note. He put the coat on. He sat down in the chair beneath the window and looked out at what could be seen of the inner ward in the grey morning, and he made the picture of her again, with her hand on the seam of his coat the day before the road south, and held it.

He sat down at the table beneath the window, and he set himself to do the only useful thing that remained to him for the morning, which was to compose, in his head, the line he would send out by the post.

LV

Let Us Begin

Elizabeth was in the library when she heard the carriage, and she did not go to the window because she had learned in three days at Matlock House that going to windows was a habit she needed to break. Every carriage in the street below was not bringing Darcy, and the constant searching was costing her something she could not afford to spend. She stayed where she was with the solicitor’s papers in her lap.

Then she heard the front door, and Richard’s voice in the hall, and a voice she knew better than any other voice she had heard in her life.

She was on her feet before she had decided to stand. The papers slid from her lap. She did not pick them up.

She rushed across the room and was at the library door when Richard opened it, and he stood aside without a word, and Jane was behind him.

Elizabeth stopped where she was. “Jane! How?”

The colonel removed his hat. “I collected your sister from your uncle’s home in Pentonville an hour ago. Regrettably, it did not seem wise to tell her many particulars. Forgive me, Lady Auchengray, for going round you. I judged that you had earned a little of your own people, and that my father’s instruction not to send word to your family at large does not extend to a particular relative who is said to be a person of discretion.”

“Whose discretion?”

“Your uncle was not hard to find, and I had prior evidence that he was a trustworthy man. He gave me his word, and vouched for your sister’s word, in his counting-house yesterday. He is satisfied that Miss Bennet may know what is necessary and tell no one. I am satisfied also. My father will be informed presently that I have done it.” Richard’s mouth altered very slightly. “He shall be cross with me, and at considerable length. He is, however, on balance a man who believes a woman in your present circumstance should be permitted the company of her sister for an afternoon.”

“Richard, I do not know how to thank —”

“There is one further detail you may wish to know.” He glanced at Jane, who had not yet been able to do anything but stare at Elizabeth. “Your mother was informed that I was escorting Miss Bennet this morning on business of your uncle’s. Your uncle was not, strictly speaking, untruthful in this. Your mother accepted the account without question and was, I am told, somewhat preoccupied by my regimentals. She was particularly approving of the facings.”

“I am certain she was. You have my sympathies, Colonel.”