Page 170 of Faceless

The room altered around that word.

Family.

Until that instant, she had not felt the line in it with full force. A family was not an abstraction to a man like Marsh. It is a roof, a wife, children who must eat, a lodging that may be found or burned, a name that may still open a door at the baker’s if disgrace has not reached there first.

“Does he have a wife?” she asked.

Richard looked at her.

“Webb believes so. Not named in the papers because she was not thought relevant. I begin to suspect that was stupidity rather than economy.”

Jane, who had come in halfway through the report and now stood by the sideboard with the coffee pot in her hand, said quietly, “If there is a wife, it will not be your men who reach her first.”

Richard’s gaze shifted to her, then back to Elizabeth.

A silence followed in which three intelligent persons saw the same thing at once.

Elizabeth set down her cup.

“No,” she said. “It will not.”

Nothing more was decided that morning. It was too soon. They had only the outline of a possibility, not yet its address.

Yet when Elizabeth went upstairs later to change her gown, she paused before the glass and laid one hand lightly over the small visible rise beneath the fabric.

The body had indeed formed its own calendar.

So, it seemed, had the case.

LXII

Misprision

The earl sent for her at eleven o’clock on a Friday morning. Whitford brought the message himself, which was the first signal she had that the call was of a different character from the others.

She found the earl alone in the library. He was at his usual desk, but his pen was set down, and his hands were folded over a piece of paper which had plainly been waiting for her to enter the room before being explained. He gestured to the chair across from him without speaking. She sat.

“I have a matter to put to you, Mrs Darcy, which I should rather have put a week ago. I have been holding it until I had something better to put with it. I now have the something better, and the original matter has not improved by the keeping. I shall give you both at once.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Sterling’s solicitor filed a petition on Monday before last asking the Court of King’s Bench to charge you with misprision of treason.”

She did not, at once, register the words.

“I do not know what that means, my lord.”

“It means he has petitioned the court to charge you with the offence of knowing of your husband’s treason and actively concealing it. He has failed to make a case to dissolve your marriage, as we knew he would. His next tactic is to tie your hands and incriminate you along with your husband.”

Elizabeth swallowed. “I… he knew that was a possibility.”

“You may now consider it a reality. The good news is that Sterling cannot make a case of aiding and abetting because the marriage articles and the conditions of your concealment will not support it. He has fallen back to misprision because misprision requires less to prove and does much of the same work. You are now a liability rather than an asset to Darcy, and at considerable risk yourself.”

She stiffened in alarm. “He wishes to have me arrested?”

“He wishes to have you removed. Arrest is the means by which he proposes to remove you. Yes.”

She put her hand on the arm of the chair. She did not trust her voice. “Newgate?”