Page 153 of Faceless

He bowed. “I shall be in the morning room if I am wanted. Take what time you need.” He went out, and the door closed behind him.

Elizabeth and Jane looked at each other across the rug.

Then Jane was across the room, and Elizabeth was in her arms, and Elizabeth had her face pressed against her sister’s shoulder and was not even trying to hold herself together. Jane just held her and sobbed. She put her hand against the back of Elizabeth’s head the way she had done a hundred times in their childhood, and did not let go until Elizabeth had stopped shaking.

“Oh, Lizzy! Lizzy, how are you? Oh, you look as if you have not slept in a month! What has happened?”

“I am well. I am — Jane, oh, Jane!”

“Hush. Sit down.”

She sat, still trembling, and trying to dash hot tears from her face. Jane sat beside her on the sofa and kept one hand fast around Elizabeth’s.

“Lizzy, I have been waiting an hour to ask this, because the colonel made me promise not to begin in the carriage. I have nearly burst with it. Who is the colonel that he should know you, and why are you staying in the home of an earl? And where is your husband?”

“In London. He is in the Tower.”

Jane’s eyes rounded. “The Tower?

“Treason. He has been charged with treason. He is in the Tower.”

Jane paled and put her other hand over Elizabeth’s. “Lizzy! What…”

“He is alive. He is well. He is being defended by the best barrister in London. The earl is moving every piece available to a man of his standing. He is — Jane, he is not what we thought. None of it is what we thought.”

“You must tell me. Tell me anything. Tell me everything. I cannot — I have been imagining you in a draughty cottage somewhere on the moors with a reclusive man twice your age. I cannot comprehend what you have just said. Begin somewhere.”

Elizabeth held her sister’s hand and gathered herself. “He is the Baron of Auchengray, but his name is not Carlisle.”

“I — I do not understand.”

“He has been living under a false name since April of last year. He had been falsely accused of the charge for which he is now imprisoned, and the man who accused him had arranged matters such that the trial would have been a foregone conclusion. He took the only step available. He retreated to a property he held under another name, in Scotland, and prepared to defend the case from there. While he was there, certain news reached him concerning our family, and he —”

“Lizzy, you are shaking. Take a breath, for mercy’s sake! Has this man harmed you?”

“No! He intervened. When he heard what was arranged for me — arranged for us — he acted to save me, and you, too, but he was in such a precarious situation already that he kept his identity from me. He believed at the time that my safety required it. He believed I would be safer if I could honestly testify I did not know whom I had married.”

Jane’s eyes narrowed. “Lizzy, whom did you marry?”

“Mr Darcy.”

For a moment, Jane did not seem to have heard her.

Then her face changed.

It changed slowly. Elizabeth had been watching her sister’s face for twenty years and had never seen it do quite this. The colour drained from it. Her lips parted. Her grip on Elizabeth’s hand went so slack that Elizabeth thought for an instant Jane was about to faint and tightened her own hand instinctively to hold her.

“Mr Darcy? But I thought he died! Fitzwilliam Darcy. Of Pemberley?”

Elizabeth sucked in a breath. “The very same.”

“Mr Bingley’s friend, of ten thousand a year, the one who once called you merely tolerable and refused to stand up with you? That Mr Darcy?”

“That Mr Darcy.”

Jane drew in a long breath that did not quite catch. She put her free hand to her mouth and looked at Elizabeth over her fingers, and Elizabeth saw her sister’s eyes fill in the slow shocked way they had filled when their father had died, and Jane swallowed it down and mastered it because Jane was Jane and would master anything required of her, but it took her several seconds, and her hand did not come down from her mouth.

“Oh, Lizzy! You said — you said you would never even dance with him!”