Page 158 of Faceless

Georgiana lifted her face. “And you? What does it mean for you, Lizzy? Today, tomorrow?”

“It means by morning there will not be a household in London that does not know my husband has a wife. It means that if your uncle is correct about Sterling’s next move, the petition Mr Pemberton has been preparing in quiet must now be answered in public. It means I shall be looked at. Written about. It means we are in it, Georgiana. All of us. From this afternoon.”

Georgiana was quiet a moment. “I am sorry.”

“Do not be. You defended me, and I shall not forget the rest of my life that I had a sister-in-law who did so.”

Georgiana drew an unsteady breath and turned her face back into Elizabeth’s shoulder. They sat together by the fire while the rain went on against the window at the far end of the room, and somewhere — perhaps already — a carriage was carrying Miss Bingley towards the first drawing room of her afternoon, and the news with her.

After a little while, Elizabeth lifted her head and looked towards the door.

“Whitford?”

He was in the doorway at once. He had not gone far.

“Yes, my lady?”

“Find his lordship, please, and tell him his niece and I should be most grateful if he could come up at his earliest convenience. There has been a development which he must hear of from us before he hears of it from anyone else.”

“At once, my lady.”

The door closed. Elizabeth tightened her arm round Georgiana’s shoulders and gathered, with what time was left to her, the words in which she would deliver to the Earl of Matlock the news that his careful week-long silence had ended in his own drawing room.

LVII

Us

Three days after Miss Bingley’s unwelcome call, a footman appeared at the library door at eleven in the morning, with the request that Lady Auchengray attend Lord Matlock in the small morning room upstairs.

Elizabeth set down Pemberton’s memorandum and went at once.

The Earl stood at the window with a packet of papers in one hand. He turned when she came in, scarcely looked at her, and shut the door himself. “Please, make yourself comfortable.”

She sat in the chair opposite his desk.

“My solicitor assures me that Sterling’s marriage petition is exactly as nasty and as thin as we expected. He is proceeding on the theory that any court sufficiently shocked by my nephew’s conduct may be induced to forget the law. I have no intention of permitting that experiment to succeed.”

“I am glad to hear it.”

“You need not be glad. You need only be prepared.” He crossed the room and laid the papers on the table between them. “The first conversation we had was about fact. This one is about use. Tell me,” he said, steepling his fingers, “everything you know that Pemberton does not. Not merely names and dates. Texture. Habits. What Webb thought he had and then lost. What Darcy said when he believed he was not saying anything. Which parts of the story have weight, and which parts are merely noise.”

So she told him everything she could think of.

She told him of Webb’s letters, read by the Auchengray fire, and of all that Darcy said they had assembled across the months — the clerk’s trail from Grosvenor Square to Bermondsey to Bristol, every secret lodging found out; the customs records set against the Mary Rose’s manifests, until the discrepancies no honest cargo could explain stood plain; MacNeil’s debts, and Sterling’s quiet payments to his creditors, stopped the day the captain sailed and leaving him ashore with writs and no means to answer them; Foss’s brother, and the Constant delayed for reasons that existed only on paper.

The earl wrote as she spoke. He filled a page, turned it, began another, and did not look up.

Then she told him things no memorandum could properly contain. She told him how Darcy spoke of Sterling when he was tired enough to forget caution for half a sentence at a time. She told him which names altered his breathing; which questions he answered too quickly; which gaps in the history were omissions of guilt, and which were omissions of pain. She told him what fear had looked like in a man who spent most of his effort making fear useless. She told him, lastly, the thing she had not meant to tell anyone because until speaking it aloud, she had not known it was knowledge.

“He did not believe Sterling would stop pursuing him. He believed only that Sterling could not move against him by the ordinary legal instruments so long as he remained, on the public record, dead. The concealment was not safety. It was time. He thought he required perhaps another few months. He had hoped to have his case fully assembled and lodged with counsel before the death was discovered to be a fiction, and then to surrender himself on his own terms. The discovery came sooner than he had reckoned.”

The earl had been listening without interruption. Now, for the first time, he leaned back.

“Yes,” he said. “That sounds exactly like him.” He glanced back over the page he had filled, and the one before it, and the one before that. “You are remarkably clear, Mrs Darcy.”

“I was married in the dark, my lord, not kept in it.”

That did produce a smile, brief and dry.