Page 176 of Faceless

“She has formed views on what you ought to be wearing in your present condition, what you ought to be eating, what your child shall be named, and which of the bedrooms at Pemberley you ought to assign him when he is of age to be removed from his nursery. She has discussed all of these matters with anyone in Pentonville who has not contrived to escape her parlour. She had also formed a view, two weeks ago, on what colour of carriage Mr Darcy ought to acquire to take you back to Derbyshire after the trial, the trial itself featuring in her conversation as a small legal formality that is unfortunately delaying your departure for the country. Your uncle and I have been managing her with a regimen of patience, mild deception, and lemon cake. The lemon cake has been, on balance, the most useful.”

“She does not — she does not understand —”

“She does not understand. We have judged it kinder to all parties not to make her understand. The reality of the trial would not improve her nerves; it would only translate her present cheerfulness into the kind of distress that requires Kitty to fetch the salts. You have, in the present circumstances, less of your mother to manage than you might have, and we have judged that mercy is the better part of the arrangement.”

Elizabeth drank her tea. The lemon preserve had been put on the tray with a small spoon. She had not eaten any of it. She put a little into the cup and tasted it and almost wept again, for an entirely different reason.

“It is very good lemon preserve.”

“It is. Your uncle insists on a particular grocer in Lombard Street. He is very tedious on the subject.”

“Tell him I shall write him a letter on the subject of his lemon preserve as soon as I have finished crying.”

“He will be delighted. He has been waiting for a letter from you on any subject at all and is prepared to receive one on lemon.”

Mrs Gardiner finished her tea and set the cup down. She rose and crossed to Elizabeth’s chair and bent and kissed her, briefly, on the forehead, with the unfussed affection of an aunt who had been kissing her nieces’ foreheads since they were small.

“I will come again on Friday. Mind the lemon preserve. I shall expect it half gone.”

“Half gone.”

“At minimum.”

She went, and the door closed behind her. Elizabeth sat for some minutes without moving.

Then she rose, went to the window, and stood looking out at the street below, where her aunt’s carriage was being brought round. Her aunt stepped into it, arranged her pelisse, and briefly lifted her hand towards the window before the door was closed. The carriage moved off.

She turned from the window, put the jar of lemon preserve where she would see it from the chaise, and picked up her book.

She did not read it. But she did not, for the rest of the afternoon, cry again.

LXV

Two Days

They came to her in the small drawing room at four o’clock on a Friday afternoon, two days before the trial.

She had asked Whitford to lay the fire and to bring up an extra chair, because there would be four of them and the room had only three by habit. She had been moved into a heavier gown that morning by Lady Matlock’s maid, who had been informing her, for some days now, that the older gowns were no longer answering. The new gown was kinder to the rise of her body, far more modest over her swollen bosom, but unkind to her vanity. She sat at one end of the long sofa with a shawl across her lap, not for warmth but because she had decided, on her own consideration, that she preferred to receive the men in a posture that did not draw their eye to the curve under the bodice. She held her hands folded over the shawl as she had been taught to hold them at sixteen and had not, since then, made very much use of the lesson.

Richard came in first. He had been at the earl’s elbow all morning and looked it. Hodges came behind him, with two folios from Darcy House under his arm and a face that had aged, Elizabeth thought, by half a decade since she first caught glimpses of him in the shadows when he came to Netherfield with Darcy.

The third man she had never met. He stopped in the doorway, not having been in a drawing room of this kind for some time, and uncertain whether his boots had been adequately attended to.

Richard held out his hand. “Mrs Darcy. May I present Mr Webb.”

She rose. She had practised rising; it was no longer the simple exercise it had been in January. She managed it without putting her hand against the arm of the sofa, which had become her small private competition with herself.

“Mr Webb. I have been wishing to meet you these many weeks.”

He bowed. He did not, at once, know what to do with himself in the room. He was perhaps fifty, lean, with the kind of weathering about the face that suggested a great deal of work done in weather no one of standing had asked him to undertake. His coat was good but not new. His hands, when he straightened, hung at his sides with the deliberate emptiness of five years spent carrying things he had been instructed not to remember.

“Ma’am. I had not expected to be received in person. The colonel has been kind to permit it.”

“The colonel has been very kind to a great many of us. Will you sit down?”

Richard took the chair at her right. Hodges sat in the chair Whitford had brought in, which he had positioned near Hodges’s usual writing-table by long habit. Webb sat on the second sofa opposite, on the edge of it, with his hat on his knee.

“Before we come to the case,” Elizabeth said, “I should like to say something to you that I have wanted to say since I first learned of you in November. My husband owes you a great deal. Whatever happens on Monday morning, that fact will not be altered. I owe you a great deal also, because my husband would not have had word of me, or had what he has assembled against Mr Sterling, without your work, and a great part of what we shall put before the court on Monday is yours. I cannot pay you in the proper coin for it. I shall pay you in the only one I have, which is to say that I know what you have done, and I do not forget such things, and I shall make certain my husband does not either.”