Page 163 of Faceless

“Oh, indeed. I am repaying the household in small ways. Your aunt has been induced to take her tea at the south window instead of by the fire. I gather no one has rearranged her tea-table in thirty years, and she is finding the experiment exhilarating. Your uncle has been heard to mutter on the subject, which Richard tells me he has not done in a decade. Georgiana has been encouraged to play something other than Haydn in the evenings, and the household is presently being entertained by every piece she was forbidden as a girl. The cook is being asked, gently, whether she might consider not boiling the carrots into submission. I am told the kitchen has not yet recovered. I take that for approbation.”

A laugh broke from him. “Heaven help Matlock House! You are the most exhausting woman in England, Lizzy.”

“I know. I have been working at it for some time.”

He looked as if he might laugh again, but just then the gaoler moved from the wall. “Time, ma’am.”

The half hour was over. She had not seen it pass. She had spent some of it laughing and some of it holding back tears, and now the gaoler was at her elbow, having given them every minute he was permitted, and unable to give one more.

Darcy’s hand tightened once upon hers and released.

He rose. So did she.

He stood across the table with his eyes on her, and what she had won from him in the last half hour was still there in him. He was not stiff. He was not the prisoner who had come into the room. He was grieved, and angry — not at her — and entirely present in his own face for the first time since the door had closed behind him, and she could not bear to leave him in this room with that face and no one to see it.

She came round the end of the table.

The gaoler did not stop her. She had been told before she entered that the Lieutenant of the Tower had permitted an embrace at parting. She had not yet decided how she meant to use the permission. She decided now.

She put her arms around her husband and lay her face against his throat, and she felt his arms come up and close around her — slowly at first, as a man who had been forbidding himself to do exactly this for the last half hour, then properly, and tightly, and with the entirety of what he had not been allowed to put into his voice. He bent his face into her hair. She heard him draw a breath against the side of her head and let it out unsteadily.

She lifted her face and kissed him.

She had not warned him. She had not warned the gaoler. She kissed him on the mouth, and Darcy, who had been holding her with the discipline of being under observation, lost the discipline entirely and kissed her back, and she held the kiss for several seconds longer than she had any business holding it.

The gaoler cleared his throat.

She did not let go. She kept kissing her husband for two seconds more, because she had decided in the moment that she would, and because she could not see, in any of the legal machinery being built around them, when she would next be permitted to do so. The gaoler cleared his throat a second time, more pointedly. She drew back at last, and put both of her gloved hands against Darcy’s face, and looked at him.

He was breathing as though he had been running.

“Elizabeth —” His voice had gone very low. His hand had come up to cover hers against his cheek. “Elizabeth. You must not come again. I am asking you. Please. Whatever the gaoler will tolerate, whatever Pemberton will arrange — do not come again. Not until this is decided. I can bear this place. I cannot bear seeing you in it.”

She set her jaw and stared at him, willing him to back down.

He was not dismissing her. He was begging her. He was trying, even with what was left of his command, to put himself between her and a danger the law had not yet decided how to use against her — and he was, for the first time in this room, asking rather than instructing.

She felt the pain of the asking. She felt the part of him that had spent four months at Auchengray buying her safety with his silence rise up in this room and try, one more time, to do the same work.

It was not enough. It had never been enough.

“I shall come every week, Fitzwilliam. You may take it up with the gaoler.”

He closed his eyes for the briefest moment. When he opened them, what was in them was the look she had been waiting for — not anger, not pride, but something darker and more helpless than either, made of love and the perfect impossibility of governing her from across a prison table.

He bowed. The slightest movement. Formal. Beautiful. Furious.

“As you please, Mrs Darcy.”

Then he let her go.

The gaoler took her elbow — not roughly, but firmly enough to remind her that the permission had been spent — and turned her towards the door. She did not look back. She had decided she would not look back. She heard Darcy not moving from where she had left him, and she did not look back.

She walked out under the gaoler’s eye, down the stone passage, back through the outer office, where Richard rose at once on seeing her face. “Well?”

She did not answer him until they were in the carriage. Only then did she put both gloved hands in her lap and discover that they were trembling.

Richard, who knew better than to offer comfort until invited, merely drew the blind half down against the winter glare and said, after a moment, “Did he attempt to send you away?”