Page 173 of Faceless

He set the letter down. He sat at the table for a long while without moving.

He read the letter a fourth time and paused over every mention of Elizabeth. She is well. She is not happy. She is doing such work as can be done within these walls.

He had been preparing himself to hang. There was no other word for what had been happening in him since the cutter had put him ashore at the Tower wharf. He had been arranging the speech, the conduct, the final letters, the morning of, the chaplain he would refuse, the precise moment at which his composure was to be relinquished, and to whom. The work of it had become almost ordinary.

He had not, however, been able to do the same work for the woman he loved. Every time he had tried, the picture had collapsed. A woman in Newgate. A woman on a transport ship. A woman alone in a city that had stopped knowing her. He had not been able to look at any of it.

The picture his uncle had given him was not the picture he wanted, but it was a picture he could bear. Elizabeth at a country house his uncle had identified and prepared. His child in her arms. Jane Bennet beside her. Richard her guardian, and the man who would stand as father to his child in the absence of one. Mrs Gardiner at the door once a week. His uncle pressing month by month against the conditions of her confinement, and against whatever political weather might one day release her.

Not Newgate. Not a transport ship. Not alone. Not without her child. Not without family.

He found that he was weeping.

He had thought there was nothing left in him to spend, but the tears came up from a place he had not known was there, and they were not for himself, and they were not entirely for her. They were for the thing he had been holding for too many months and had not been able to set down.

Then the worst of it came up.

The arrangement was bearable only because he was not in it. He would not be at the country house. He would not be at the bedside when the child was born. He would not be the hand she reached for in the night. The wife he had loved would be cared for, would be safe, would not be alone — and none of the people doing the work would be him.

He bent his head onto his arms on the table and wept properly, without restraint. There was nothing of the whisper, no thought for concealment now. Anyone within hearing would know the echoes of pained sobs, his gasped cries of her name, and a thousand pleas to Heaven.

When it had passed, he sat up and drew the handkerchief from his coat. He looked at the Pemberley mark Elizabeth had admired before she had ever known whose mark it was, and held it briefly against his mouth, and folded it, and put it back.

He stood. He banked the fire. He blew out the candle.

He lay down on the narrow bed in the dark.

He was easier in himself than he had been since the cutter had put him ashore. The picture of his wife after his death had stopped being a thing he could not bear to look at. His uncle had built it into something he could carry. He did not want it. He would spend himself preventing it. But if it came, he could meet it. He had not been able to say that an hour ago.

He thought of Elizabeth at her writing desk in the morning light. He thought of her hand on the curve that must by now be visible. He thought of their child.

Then he slept.

LXIV

The Worst Hour

The afternoon was the worst hour now.

Elizabeth had learned the shape of her days by trial. The mornings were tolerable; she could write, read, work with Hodges on whatever papers had come down from the upstairs library in the night. Noon was bearable; she ate when she could and rested for an hour with a book she did not read. The trouble came at three. Some unkind clock in her body had decided that three was the hour for grief, and grief arrived at three whether she had invited it or not.

She had been sitting on the chaise by the window of the small drawing room set aside for her use, with a book she was not reading and a shawl Mrs Hatchett had brought up half an hour ago, and the grief had come up in her without warning. She had set the book down. She had put her hand on the small curve at the front of her gown that she could feel under her palm as plainly as her own pulse, and she had thought, with the cold clarity that came over her at this hour and could not be governed, that the child she carried might never see his father.

The tears had come up before she had had time to refuse them. She had let them come, because she had learned that refusing them only made them stay longer. She had wept into the shawl with both her hands pressed against her face, quietly, because she was at the upstairs window of a house that contained too many people who would come at the sound of her, and she did not wish to be comforted by any of them.

She did not know how long she had been at it when the knock came.

“Mrs Darcy.” Whitford’s voice, low, through the panel.

“A moment, Whitford.”

She drew breath. She wiped her face once with the shawl, and then again with the back of her wrist. She crossed to the glass over the chimneypiece and looked at what was there. Her face had gone red about the eyes and along the bridge of her nose. There was nothing she could do about it in the time she had. She drew breath again.

“Yes, Whitford?”

“Mrs Gardiner is below, ma’am. She asks if you are disposed to see her.”

“I am. Show her up. And would you ask Mrs Hatchett for tea, please.”