Page 160 of Faceless

Richard had insisted on accompanying her as far as the outer office. He stood beside her while the gaoler examined Pemberton’s authorisation and the Earl’s note and the marriage paper itself, folded and unfolded by official fingers she would have liked to break one by one.

At length, the documents were returned.

“You may see him for half an hour,” the gaoler said. “No packages. No sealed papers. Conversation in my hearing.”

Elizabeth took back the marriage paper and put it inside her coat.

“If I were less certain that you had been raised among your own species,” she said, “I might suppose you had been hatched from regulations.”

The man’s face did not alter. Richard snorted behind her and was obliged to cover his mouth.

“This way, ma’am.”

The room to which she was brought had one narrow window, a table, three chairs, and the kind of scrubbed severity institutions mistake for virtue. The gaoler stationed himself at the far wall, having seen every manner of human interview and valuing none of them. Elizabeth stood by the table and waited for nearly a quarter of an hour.

Then the door on the inner side opened, and Darcy came in.

For a moment, she did not breathe.

He was himself at once — the same height, the same shoulders, the same contained force. Yet prison had laid some new brittleness over his face. He looked worn — not broken — worn in the way a blade is worn against something that does not yield.

He stopped when he saw her.

The door closed behind him. There was a gaoler in the room, a table between them, and half an hour allowed by the state.

For a moment, he did not move. His face blanched in horror — that she was here, in this room, in his sight, on the wrong side of a guarded door — but in the space of two seconds, he mastered every response that came up in him at once. The hand that had begun to lift towards her stopped at his side. The breath he had drawn was let out without sound. His face, which had altered so plainly when he saw her that the gaoler glanced at him, was put back into the order observation required.

He crossed the small distance to the table and stood with his hand on the back of the chair, and what was in his eyes was not the look of having hoped for her. It was the look of having hoped she had been kept very far away from this place and discovering now that she had not been.

“Madam.”

He could not, she saw, bring himself to Mrs Darcy without knowing on what ground she was sitting in front of him. He had been told only that he had a visitor. He had probably walked the corridor from the Bell Tower assuming Pemberton. If she had come on any other footing than openly as his wife, Mrs Darcy would betray her in front of the gaoler. Madam was the most his prudence could manage until she had told him the rest.

“Mr Darcy, I am exercising the privilege of a wife to call upon her husband in his place of confinement. The Lieutenant of the Tower has been good enough to permit me the half hour. Will you sit down?”

It reached him in order — that she had named herself openly, that she had done so in front of the gaoler without apparent concern, and that this could only mean that the concealment under which he had married her had been abandoned, by someone, by some means he had not been able to control or even to be told of. His hand on the back of the chair tightened until the knuckles whitened.

“Sit down, Fitzwilliam,” she pleaded more softly.

He sat.

It was not obedience. It was a man buying himself two seconds in which to do the work of not speaking. She saw him close his teeth on three different sentences before any of them got into the air. She saw him lay his forearms on the table because if he had not laid them somewhere they would have gone across it to her, and the gaoler would have written that in his report, and Sterling’s counsel would have made what use of it they could.

When he spoke, his voice was very low and very level. “You should not be here.”

“I am of the opposite opinion.”

“Elizabeth —”

“If you mean that it is dangerous to be seen as your wife, you are too late. Our marriage has been in every drawing room in London for the last three days. Miss Bingley called at Matlock House and made some rather impudent assumptions about my character before Georgiana. Your sister informed her, in defending me, that I am your wife. The rest… well. You can imagine how quickly word spread.”

His eyes lifted to her, and his hand twitched on the table — the fingers curling as if he held hers in them. “Georgiana?”

“She is well. We spend most of our hours together. She is the chief delight of my days just now.”

His face lightened somewhat. “I am glad of it. How…” He swallowed, and his hand twitched again. “How stand other matters?”

“Mr Pemberton has been at work for better than a week, and the earl has put before him what information the colonel and I could give, which, I am told, is not inconsequential. My sister Jane has called at Matlock House twice and will call again tomorrow. There is a…” Elizabeth paused and glanced at the guard in the corner. “Well, the records from your London house have been consulted and brought before counsel. The danger has, I regret to tell you, advanced beyond the point where my absence from this room would materially improve it.”