Page 178 of Faceless

“The clerk who absconded from Mr Sterling’s chambers in March of last year. The one we have been hunting through six counties and several Scottish ports for a twelvemonth.”

“Yes.”

“I have, since the beginning of February, known the location of his wife.”

Elizabeth set her hands very still on her shawl.

“His… his wife?”

“Yes, ma’am. She lives in a small house in Wapping. The clerk himself has not been there in nine months, that I can confirm. She lives alone, on what means I have not been able to determine, and she takes in piecework from a draper on Cable Street. She has no servants. She receives no callers that I have observed, beyond the woman from the next house who looks in on her on Sundays. She is, by my reckoning, a respectable woman who married a clerk a decade ago and has been left to manage as best she may since he disappeared into the country last summer.”

“My husband told me that the clerk has stayed in England all this while, when he could have gone elsewhere.”

“He has. He could have been in France or America by Christmas of last year. He has stayed within these shores, and within a week’s ride of London for most of it. He has not gone abroad.”

“Because of her?”

“That is what I believe. I cannot prove it. But a man who runs at the cost of his livelihood and his reputation, and who has the means and the motive to put the sea between himself and the country in which he can be hunted, and does not, has, in my experience, a reason on this side of the water that he is not willing to sacrifice.”

“And he has not gone to her?”

“He has not gone to her in person. He has been careful on that point. I should be very surprised if she has set eyes on him in nine months. But, Mrs Darcy, I should be equally surprised if she has had no word of him in that time. A man does not stay within a week’s ride of his wife for nine months without finding some means of letting her know he is alive.”

“You believe they are in contact.”

“I believe it. I cannot prove it. I have watched her house at intervals for twelve weeks, and I have intercepted nothing that came to her in the post that could be construed as from him. But that is exactly what I should expect of a clerk careful enough to have eluded my best efforts for a twelvemonth. He would not write her a letter that the post might open. He would use a less obvious channel. There is a woman who brings the piecework from the draper on Cable Street and takes the finished work away again twice a week. There is a fishmonger’s boy who comes to the door on Tuesdays. There is, as I mentioned, the neighbour woman on Sundays. Any one of them could be the conduit. I have not been able to determine which, and I have not been willing to risk frightening the wife by attempting it. If she suspects she is being watched, she will stop receiving him, and the chain is broken.”

“But you believe the chain exists.”

“I should stake what reputation I have left upon it. If she sent word to him that he was safe to come, he would come. The question is what would make her send such a word.”

“What would?”

“I do not know. I have thought of it for twelve weeks. I have not been able to construct an approach that I could trust to land with her. I am a strange man at her door. Anyone I might send is a stranger at her door. The men of standing the earl might send are worse than strangers — they are gentlemen, and gentlemen do not visit Wapping houses unless they are coming to do harm.”

Elizabeth heard nothing else in the room.

But she did hear something in her own head. It came up out of her like a sentence she had been about to write down for weeks and had not yet had the paper for.

She knew, in her own body, what it was to be a wife who was carrying a man’s secrets.

She had been, for six months at Auchengray, a woman who could not write a true letter, could not speak her husband’s name in any household but her own, could not name what she was doing or whose name she was sleeping under. She had carried it, and it had been the loneliest thing she had ever done. And after she learned the truth, she had carried it still — because she loved her husband, because she was afraid for him, because it was the price of his safety.

She knew, also, what it would have been to be a wife whose husband had vanished into the country and was sending her, by some hidden channel, the small reassurance that he was alive. She had it in her own body, the room in Wapping. The piecework on the table. The Sunday neighbour. The fishmonger’s boy on Tuesdays. The draper’s woman on her two days. The watching, each visit, for the small alteration that meant a piece of him had arrived — the folded scrap in the bundle, the word from the boy, the slip from under the neighbour’s bonnet. The carrying of him for nine months by such means. The not being able to write back, because to write back would be to bring the hunters to her own door.

She knew, last, what such a wife would do, if the right person came to her door.

Not Pemberton. Not Richard. Not Hodges. Not Webb. Not a gentleman, not an officer, not a strange manservant.

A woman.

It was, in a perfect world, herself.

It was not, in this world, going to be herself, because she could not leave Matlock House without forfeiting the terms of her counter-petition and walking herself into Newgate within the hour.

But it had to be a woman.

She drew breath. The new gown made it harder than it had been a month ago. “Colonel?”