Page 167 of Faceless

There are, in confinement, experiences so violent that they make no outward show whatever. Darcy sat down before opening the letter because he had the obscure conviction that if he remained standing, he would try to put his fist through the stone wall.

He broke the seal.

By the second line, he was very nearly lost.

He read it once quickly, once slowly, and a third time because the sentence about the right silence had gone into him like a blade finding its own sheath. He could see her writing it. Could see, more dangerously, the room from which she had written — a Matlock desk under good candlelight, her hand against the paper, her mouth firm with the effort of leaving out what could not safely be said.

She had written my dearest husband. And signed it with the name that could destroy her or be the making of her.

No gaoler, no petition, no court in Westminster could do much with three plain words. That was the brilliance of it. The letter was as irreproachable as it was ruinous.

He drew paper towards him and sat a long while before writing, not from uncertainty of feeling but from the opposite problem. The feeling was exact. The page would have to take only as much of it as could safely cross the walls.

My dearest wife,

Your letter has been received and has already done me more good than the physician attached to this place would consider decent.

I am not surprised that you rejected my advice. I was not, in truth, surprised when you rejected it in person. I offered it because I am still vain enough to imagine I can prevent consequences by placing myself in their path. You are correct that the argument does not improve under examination.

I am relieved beyond expression by every line touching my uncle, my sister, and your own sister. Please tell Georgiana that I expect her to beat me at chess again if she means to boast of it in my absence. Tell Miss Bennet that I am conscious she has been handed a family more complicated than any woman should have thrust upon her between breakfast and dinner, and that I am in her debt.

I am particularly obliged by your account of Grosvenor Square. Hodges, I should tell you, has been your partisan since Netherfield. He observed, from the small material available to a valet, that I had come to fancy a woman of more than ordinary character, and he has been waiting since to have a proper occasion to be of use to you. He has it now. He will not give you trouble. He will, if anything, give you rather more loyalty than you have asked for. I should let him.

You say you were glad to see me. I have read the sentence several times and find it suffers very well by repetition.

It is a strange thing to discover how much of one’s peace resided in the knowledge that another person was in the next room. I had not understood that knowledge fully until it was removed. You write of touch and sight. I have been thinking instead of sound and taste. I remember the rhythm of your breath when you have just fallen asleep against me. I remember the small catch in your voice in the half-second before you say my name. And I remember the salt at the hollow of your throat after you had been walking the headland. I remember the trace of wine on your mouth after supper, which I had thought I should not be permitted to remember. Memory is a poor substitute for the thing itself only because it is so exact.

You must continue to sleep, whether the house deserves the honour or not. You must continue to eat, however little appetite London or its barristers produce. I know too well the habits by which you deny yourself what is necessary when your mind is occupied elsewhere. Consider this not advice, which you would reject, but instruction, which you may disregard if it pleases you, and which I shall issue all the same.

I have spent an ungenerous quantity of thought on the precise forms in which my own acts are now being paid for by you. Prison encourages the study. If London, law, and my family are all to descend upon you at once because I first chose concealment, I can at least require of you that you do not meet them faint for want of rest.

I remain, with better judgement than when I first held your hand and infinitely less peace,

Yours,

F. D.

He read the letter over and held it in his hand after the sand had dried, then sealed it.

The room had not changed. Stone remained stone. The broth remained bad. The window admitted the same mean strip of winter sky. Yet the world inside his confinement had altered by a measurable degree. Her hand had crossed into it. Her mind had crossed into it. The distance between them had not lessened; it had acquired traffic.

When the warder came to collect the letter, Darcy surrendered it without comment.

That night, he slept no better than before. He slept, however, in possession of her words.

LXI

The Arithmetic

February came and went at Matlock House by small repetitions. A tray left outside Elizabeth’s door before breakfast. Notes from Pemberton in a hand progressively sharper as Sterling’s petition acquired supplemental insolence. Richard gone to Bristol and present only in letters and in the mud on his boots when he reappeared. Georgiana reading in the library until midnight, pretending not to notice when Elizabeth failed to turn a page for ten minutes together. Jane quietly intervening with soup, oranges, reason, and the sort of practical sisterly tyranny from which there is no appeal.

She had been three weeks at her aunt’s drawing room by now. The Tuesdays in Coleman Street had become a small fixed point in the week, and to the Tuesdays had been added other days — a Thursday with Mrs Hartshorn of Threadneedle Street, who underwrote at Lloyd’s and had wished to be introduced; a Friday dinner with the family of a junior King’s Counsel whose wife was Pemberton’s wife’s particular friend; a Sunday at the Gardiners’ church, sitting in their pew, where she had been observed by perhaps a dozen families whose names she had not yet learned and who had, by Monday morning, learned hers. Her aunt managed the introductions with gentle authority; she had kept house in the City for fifteen years and knew precisely which doors were worth approaching first. Elizabeth had only to be present, civil, and respectable.

She had begun to be recognised. Yesterday, she had taken tea at her aunt’s with four ladies whose husbands sat between them on the boards of three banks and an East India agency, and the conversation had been general for an hour before she had understood that all four of them had come specifically to meet her and were leaving with views of her they meant to repeat at home.

By this morning, two more invitations had arrived at Matlock House — one to dine on Friday in Lothbury, one to attend a private musical evening the following week at a house in Aldermanbury whose mistress, she gathered, had hesitated for some days before sending the card and had decided, in the end, that her curiosity outweighed her caution. Elizabeth had accepted both. She had then sat at the small writing-desk in her chamber for a quarter of an hour with the cards in front of her, working through what it had cost the lady in Aldermanbury to send the second of them.

But she had Darcy’s letters.