Page 155 of Faceless

“He… we were counting. He knows nothing certain. I have not been certain until very recently.” After a breath, she added, “I will tell him when I am permitted to see him.”

Jane did not answer at once. She slipped her hand into Elizabeth’s and held it tight. “Let us pray you may see him soon. I think he could do with something cheerful where he is.”

Richard brought Hodges on the fourth day. He was a compact man of perhaps fifty in good plain clothes, and he took stock of her with the swift, discreet attention of a professional habit of decades. She returned the assessment. The formality did its work.

“Mrs Darcy,” he said. “I am very glad to know of your existence.”

“And I yours. He spoke of you.”

His expression did not change — no performance of feeling — but a deeper stillness came over him before he answered. “He is well, I hope. As well as circumstances allow.”

“He was, when I last saw him.” She gestured to the chair across from her. “Sit down, Mr Hodges. We have a great deal to discuss.”

He sat. Richard moved to the window without being asked, near enough to be present, far enough to allow it to be her conversation.

“Colonel Fitzwilliam tells me you have been the connexion between Mr Webb and the household since April,” she said.

“Since May, strictly speaking. April was — there was a period in which my instructions were not clear.” He chose his next words with care. “Once I understood the situation, I proceeded as Mr Darcy would have wished.”

“Which was?”

“To remain available and to ask no unnecessary questions.” He folded his hands on his knee. “Mr Webb has included me in his correspondence to the degree that was useful. I have not commented beyond what was required.” He went on in the same tone. “I have also been maintaining intelligence of Grosvenor Square. The staff were let go in April — unavoidable — but Mrs Broadwood has been keeping the house on a retainer arrangement. She does not know why she is doing so. She has not asked.”

The housekeeper tending rooms for a dead man, the holland covers on the furniture, the fires unlit. “He inspires that,” she said.

“He does,” Hodges agreed.

“I need you to be my eyes. The solicitor will need documents from Grosvenor Square — correspondence, business records, anything that establishes Mr Darcy’s relationship with Sterling before April that he did not manage to take with him when he first left for Scotland. I cannot retrieve them myself without drawing attention to the house. Can Mrs Broadwood be trusted?”

“Completely.”

“Then we will need her. Beyond that, I need to know Mr Webb’s current capacity — not what it was in January, but now. Whether he can still receive correspondence safely. Whether there is any intelligence coming out of Sterling’s camp that bears on the trial. I am aware this is a considerable risk.”

Hodges took a little time before he answered. When he spoke, his voice was level. “Mrs Darcy. I dressed that man every morning for ten years. I know how he holds himself when he is concealing what something has cost him.” His mouth closed once on the memory before he continued. “In Fetter Lane, I packed his trunk and brought his coat and told him the carriage was ready. He shook my hand. Mrs Darcy, in ten years of service, he never once failed to thank me for the most mundane of matters.” He drew a breath. “I am not especially concerned about the risk.”

Elizabeth permitted herself a faint smile — only for an instant. “Very well. Then let us begin.”

LVI

The Visitor

Elizabeth had been at the window for the better part of an hour. The cold of the glass against her forehead was the only thing in the room that had not betrayed her. The fire was too much. The broth Mrs Hatchett had sent up was too much. The faintest movement of her own body was too much. She kept her face to the panes and her eyes on the rain that had begun to fall in the street below, and she tried not to think of the Tower, which was somewhere in this same city under this same rain, with her husband inside it.

The trying did not answer. The thinking was worse than the nausea, and she had spent the last hour discovering that the two could compete with one another and that neither was prepared to yield. The tears came and went without her leave. She had stopped trying to keep them from her face an hour ago, when she had understood that Georgiana could see them and was choosing, with a tact beyond her years, not to remark on them.

“Are you sure you cannot take any of it?”

“I cannot. I am sorry. Truly, I am.”

“Do not be sorry. Will you try water? Or one of the dry biscuits Mrs Hatchett brought up? She said you might bear those better than the broth.”

“In a moment. I cannot manage it just yet.”

“Then I shall ring and have them clear the broth away. The smell of it is making it worse, I think.”

“It is making it worse. You are very kind.”

“I am not kind. You are my sister, and you are not well. Sit a little longer. I shall be only a moment at the bell.”