Page 183 of Faceless

By the time you read this, the worst waiting of our marriage may be nearly over. Or it may be preparing only to alter its shape. I would spare you both possibilities if I could. As I cannot, I must content myself with writing across the one night still left to us before the court attempts to arrange our lives according to its understanding.

Pemberton was here this afternoon. He is in a state of ferocity so well-bred it can only mean he is satisfied with the evidence. Richard’s last note would have done me good even if it had contained less of you than it did. My uncle, I am told, has reached that degree of calm which in him generally precedes devastation for his opponents. I am therefore almost easy.

I am not easy where you are concerned. I never shall be again, I think, not in the old sense. A man who has seen his wife walk into danger carrying his child does not recover earlier simplicities of pulse. Still less does he recover them when he knows she walked there partly because his own concealments first taught the world where to strike.

If tomorrow is kind, I shall come out to you altered. Not in love for you; there I have been beyond amendment for some time. Altered rather in my sense of what may be owed between two people who have borne one another through as much as we have borne. There is no room left in me for any life that is not entirely yours in the keeping.

You must not spend the morning imagining how I look. I warn you in advance that prison has not improved me, and that if you continue to love me under daylight and in court dress, I shall be vain enough to consider it a permanent condition.

I have thought of writing something brave. It would be out of place between us. The truth is better. I want you. I want our child. I want the ordinary future from which we have been so long divided that it has begun to feel indecently luxurious. I want to wake and know not only that you are in the bed beside me, but that there need be no law, no alias, no guard, no witness, and no fear between my hand and the finding of yours.

If they acquit me, I am coming first to you.

Yours,

Fitzwilliam

She read the last line twice and then lowered the page to her lap. Her own breathing had suddenly grown loud in her ears.

She pressed the heel of her hand below her ribs as though both the child and her own heart had leapt at once.

Jane came in softly some minutes later and found her still seated, the letter open on her knee. “Is he worried?”

Elizabeth looked up. There was no use pretending ignorance before Jane. “Yes.”

Jane crossed the room and sat beside her. “Will you sleep?”

Elizabeth considered the question honestly. “No.”

“Neither shall I,” Jane said. “But we may both lie down and preserve appearances.”

That was so exactly Jane’s philosophy of endurance that Elizabeth laughed and then, unexpectedly, laid the letter in her sister’s hand.

Jane read it without speaking. By the time she finished, her eyes were wet, though she had shed no tears. “He writes very well for a man in chains.”

“He does everything vexingly well.”

Jane handed the letter back. “Lizzy. Tomorrow, whatever happens, you must remember to breathe. Men in court forget women exist until a woman fails to breathe and then swoons, and then the entire court becomes alarmed at once.”

Elizabeth leaned her head briefly against Jane’s shoulder. “I shall try not to embarrass the law.”

“Do. It has enough embarrassments of its own.”

That night, she lay down and did not sleep. The house went quiet around her by degrees. Elizabeth turned first to one side, then the other, then onto her back with both hands clasped over the child as if the posture itself could hold her together. The only way she could find to rest without some part of her going numb was to lie on her side and wedge herself against a mountain of pillows, which, on balance, was not nearly so supportive or warm as Darcy’s chest at her back and his arm around her middle.

The tears came at last, not violently but in a helpless, continual way that wet the pillow and offended her pride. She made no sound. When the fit had passed, she wiped her face, drew Darcy’s letter against her breast, and lay waiting for dawn.

The courtroom was already crowded when they arrived.

Pemberton had contrived a side entrance to spare Elizabeth the press at the front, yet not even that could protect her entirely from the collective turning of attention that met a visibly pregnant woman entering to hear her husband’s fate. Curious. Hostile. Pitying. A few avid with the ugly hunger scandal always excites.

Elizabeth ignored them all.

She wore dark blue because Georgiana said the colour made her look sympathetic, and because Darcy had once, in December, told her it was his favourite shade.

Elizabeth was seated in the front row at the gallery’s far end, behind a panelled screen of the kind the court provided for women of standing in delicate health. It cut her off from the direct view of the press benches and the public crowd at the rear of the gallery, but it had been set at such an angle as to leave her sightline clear to the bench, the counsel’s tables, the witness box, and the dock. She could see the court entire. The court, if it troubled to look up, could see that Mrs Darcy was present.

The earl escorted Georgiana to her place and then took his own seat with grave, unconcerned hauteur, perfectly willing to let all of Westminster understand that if they mishandled his family, he would remember it for generations. Richard stood until the last possible moment, speaking low with Pemberton and then with counsel. Jane sat on Elizabeth’s other side with a handkerchief folded once in her lap and the calm face she wore when feeling too much to permit herself any performance of it.