Page 172 of Faceless

“Mrs Darcy, you have done what was asked of you and somewhat more. The work you have done in the City over the last five weeks will outlast the silencing of it. Such reputation as a wife may construct for her husband in this season has been constructed. The breaking of the campaign is not the undoing of what was built. I should like you to remember that as you write to your husband. He should know it also.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Go and write. You have until three.”

LXIII

The Pemberley Mark

The earl’s letter came on the first Thursday in April, by Pemberton’s hand, sealed under the privilege of counsel and therefore unread by anyone between Pemberton’s chambers and Darcy’s table.

It was the first letter from his uncle since the confinement order.

Darcy did not open it at once. He sat before it on the table beneath the window for some minutes, his hand laid flat across the seal, because Elizabeth’s own letter had reached him ten days ago and he had been carrying its contents in himself since. He had known the order was coming; she had been forbidden to write of it in the censored letters that had followed, and he had been forbidden to ask. He had answered her one letter on the subject with such restraint as the gaolers would let him preserve, and he had thought of her, every day since, in a house in which she could not open a door.

The earl’s letter, then, would not be a surprise as to the fact. It would be the fact taken apart and laid out for his inspection by a man who had been doing the work in his absence.

He broke the seal.

Nephew,

I shall not rehearse what your wife has herself written to you. I shall instead give you what she could not. What follows is the inventory of the defence as it stands today, with such commentary as I think you require. You will read it once and burn it, and you will not refer to any of its contents in any letter that leaves your hand.

The petition to void the marriage was denied last month, as you know. Sterling spent heavily on the filing and obtained, in return, only the misprision order against your wife, which is not nothing, but is far less than he attempted, and which has not improved his standing in the chambers that matter. He has, by my information, made himself tiresome enough on collateral motions since that the bench has begun to regard his solicitor with the impatience that precedes a serious displeasure.

The fruit of that displeasure is a small but useful concession. Your wife will be permitted to attend the trial. Pemberton filed the request more than a week ago and was prepared for a refusal; the order came yesterday afternoon. She will be brought from Matlock House under Richard’s escort, Pemberton having secured generous terms as to the guard she travels under. She will be admitted to the public gallery behind a partial screen, and returned here directly the day’s proceedings adjourn. She will not be exposed to the corridors or the carriage yards. The order specifies what counsel may say to her in the recess and what she may say in reply; which is to say, nothing of substance. I judged it worth taking on those terms.

The cost of that concession is the second part of the order, which I shall give you plainly because there is no useful way to give it otherwise. Pending the outcome of your trial, the misprision charge against her remains live. If you are convicted, she shall be arraigned. If you are acquitted, it shall be discharged at the same hearing. The Crown’s reasoning, conveyed through the Solicitor-General, is that the misprision case cannot proceed without first establishing the underlying treason; we have not contested the logic of it. The effect is that your trial is now hers also, and one verdict will dispose of you both. You will understand the gravity of this without further comment from me. I will not pretend it is welcome news. I will say that I do not consider that it alters the strategy. We were always going to win this case entire, or lose everything by it.

I shall add one further point, because it cannot wait until we have a verdict, and because I should not wish you to spend the next two weeks alone with versions of it worse than the truth. You have been picturing your wife after a conviction, I am sure, and picturing it without the benefit of what I have spent five weeks arranging.

Misprision is not treason, so there is no fear of the rope. She is with child and gently born, and the Solicitor-General has let that much be known off the record. Transportation, they cannot use either; her standing makes a transport ship politically impossible, certain to draw fire in the House and the press alike.

The rest I have kept from her, for her spirits are low enough already. The likely sentence for a lady is confinement for life, on the face of it; in practice, at a property I have already identified and prepared. Her own funds, which I shall decline to detail here, are intact and beyond the reach of any attainder against you.

Your sister-in-law, Miss Bennet, has agreed to live with her in such confinement, having required, I think, less than half an hour to come to the determination. Richard will personally see to their safety. Mrs Gardiner will visit. The household will be staffed by people of my choosing, and I shall be a regular and disagreeable presence to whichever supervisor the Crown sets over the establishment. I shall not stop, from this side, such work as may produce eventual pardon and return. She will not be in Newgate. She will not be alone. She will not be destitute. She will not be without her child. I tell you this so that, if the worst comes, you may address yourself to what must be faced, and not spend what remains of you on a picture of her in circumstances I have arranged she shall not meet.

Webb has supplied the manifests, the customs records, MacNeil’s debts, and the dates of Sterling’s payments against them, the Foss material entire. He has added a deposition of his own, sworn before a magistrate at Plymouth, attesting to the chain of intelligence and naming his sources where he is at liberty to name them. The documentary case is complete. Pemberton has it indexed and is preparing it now for entry as exhibits.

Foss has agreed to testify on the express condition that he is not the sole witness in the box, and has signed an undertaking to that effect at my chambers. He is at a private house in Surrey under my arrangement, kept in comforts and under watch. MacNeil is at sea, expected at the Pool about the last week of April, a week past the trial date. He cannot be reached. Harker is in port and has refused all persuasion; Sterling’s people reached him before ours, and he is to be considered lost. He has not been subpoenaed, and will not be: testimony dragged out of a hostile man damages more than it assists. He will be left to his uselessness.

The clerk remains lost. Webb has placed him at perhaps three locations this quarter, none with the certainty required to serve process. I have written him off as a witness. I have not written him off as a piece of intelligence, of which more presently.

This leaves Foss to testify alone; a witness Pemberton can put up, and one Sterling’s counsel will try to dismantle. A second captain would have made him unassailable; we have none. The documentary case must support him instead, and will, before any jury that looks at it honestly.

The character case is in hand. Mr Bingley has been approached and is willing to attend in person; he has been useful in the preparation and will be more useful in the box. Hodges will testify to the household, the conduct of business before the charges, and the receipt and disposition of correspondence during the period in question. Mr and Mrs MacLeod have agreed to attest in writing to the temper of the household and the regularity of your habits in Scotland, which will go in as supporting statements. Your wife shall provide a sworn statement of her own, supported by the marriage articles, by the letters she wrote to her family from Auchengray during her residence with you, and by her own account of your conduct towards her, which Pemberton intends to put forward with some emphasis, both as to the rescue from the prior arrangement and as to the restraint and honour you maintained throughout the concealment. Two of the merchants Mrs Darcy was introduced to in February have offered to attest, in writing, to the good character of the connection. Lady Catherine has demanded a hearing on what I gather she considers her own urgent grounds, and has been politely declined. She is writing to me on the subject at intervals of perhaps three days, and I am not answering.

There remains the question of the public. Your wife’s work in the City through February has had a result I shall not undervalue. The mood in the Exchange is sceptical of the prosecution, and the papers Pemberton has reached have produced, in the past fortnight, three articles treating the Crown’s case as politically motivated. I attribute none of this to luck. I attribute most of it to her. The order of confinement has not undone what she built. I should wish you to know it.

She is well. She is not happy. She is doing such work as can be done within these walls, including a documentary review with Hodges that has produced two pieces of correspondence Pemberton has incorporated into the brief. She receives visits from her aunt once a week, with my approval. She is more than four months gone, by her own reckoning, and is well attended.

Matlock

The case was made. Not perfect. Not safe. But made. Everything he had built by candlelight in his library at Auchengray — the customs records laid against Webb's manifests while the snow came down outside, the schedule of MacNeil’s debts worked out by hand across December and January — all of it had reached London, had been indexed, had been written into a brief, had been received by his uncle and his uncle's counsel as the spine of a defence they meant to mount.

He had spent nine months in concealment for this. He had paid for it with four months of his wife’s life under conditions for which he could not forgive himself. He had paid for it with the news he had received two weeks ago by her hand and had carried since. He had paid for it with the small daily certainty that he had ruined her, in some way no future restoration could entirely repair.

He had not paid for nothing.