Page 184 of Faceless

Darcy was brought in under guard.

Even prepared, the sight struck her like a blow.

Court clothes had been contrived for him. Clean linen, proper coat, the whole decent fiction by which governments pretend that confinement and public judgement may coexist with gentlemanly forms. None of it altered the fact that she knew too well what rooms he had slept in to reach this one.

He took his place and looked up.

His gaze travelled the gallery once, found the screen at the far end, and stopped. He did not visibly start. He did not allow his expression to alter for the benefit of anyone watching. But she saw the precise second at which the visible fact of her — fuller now, unmistakably carrying, present before the whole world as his wife — entered him and remained there. She knew he could see her because the screen had been arranged so that he could.

Then he looked to Jane, to Georgiana, to the earl, to Richard.

The family was all present.

Whatever else the court meant to do today, it would not do it to an isolated man.

Darcy stood in the dock and did not look at his wife.

He had looked at her once, on entering, because failing to do so would itself have drawn attention; a man brought before the court for treason who refused to acknowledge his wife in the gallery would have suggested to the jury that there was something between them not to be acknowledged. He had looked, and seen the dark blue gown and the screen at the gallery’s far end set just so, and seen her face — fuller, paler, fixed on him with the same calm she had worn into the Tower in February — and he had known within the second that if he looked again during the morning, he would not be able to keep his own face in the order the proceedings required.

So he looked instead at counsel, at the bench, at the floor of the dock, at his own hands when they could be trusted not to shake. Anywhere except the gallery’s far end, where Elizabeth was sitting with her sister and his cousin and the earl, with the child she was carrying having been brought into the building as a piece of evidence Darcy could not bear to think on for longer than half a second at a time.

The Crown’s counsel rose first.

The man was good. Darcy was forced to confess it within the first minute. He had been ready for theatrics, and what he got instead was a quiet, well-considered opening that framed the case not as a prosecution for treason — not directly — but as an examination of character.

“We come to you, gentlemen of the jury, not to ask you to convict a man for what he has done in some particular instance, but to ask you to determine, on the evidence, what manner of man he is. For a man who behaves in the manner you shall hear described, in matter after matter, year after year, has by his very conduct established the kind of man he is, and a man of that kind is capable of the offences with which he stands charged, and indeed of others not yet brought to light.”

The first matter the counsel proposed to examine was the marriage.

Not the petition to annul it. That had been refused, and the counsel named the refusal in a tone that suggested the bench had been imposed upon. It was no longer before the court.

What was before the court was his conduct during the marriage. His use of a false name in the contracting of it. His concealment of his legal identity from a gentlewoman who had been brought to believe she was marrying a Scottish baron. His prior and subsequent direction of household business, financial dealings, and correspondence under the assumed name. His staging of his own death. His allowance of his family — his sister, at the time of life when she most required him — to mourn him publicly for the better part of a year.

“Was this, gentlemen, the conduct of an innocent man? Of a man whose course was merely interrupted by a wicked accusation, who had retreated, as he and his counsel will doubtless tell us, only so far as was necessary to prepare a proper defence? Or was this, gentlemen, the conduct of a man whose conscience was sufficiently uneasy that he was prepared to deceive his solicitor, his banker, his sister, his neighbours, his tenants, and ultimately the gentlewoman whose hand he sought, rather than face the charges then being made against him? You will form your own view. I shall only say that a man who is capable of arranging his own death to escape inquiry is a man whose protestations of innocence ought to be weighed with very particular care.”

The counsel sat down.

Darcy had not, until then, grasped what the prosecution intended to do.

They were not going to argue the case on its facts. They could not; the documentary case was too strong now, and Sterling’s note had already been admitted on Pemberton’s preliminary motion. They were going to argue that even if every individual fact were granted, the pattern of conduct over the previous year was that of a guilty man, and that a guilty man’s protestations of innocence on the underlying charge ought not to be believed.

It was an attack on his character that did not require them to dispute a single piece of his counsel’s evidence.

And every piece of the attack was, on its face, true.

Heat came up into his face for the first time that morning, and he forced it down with the discipline he had learned at the dock at Tower wharf. He did not look at Elizabeth. He could not. If he looked at her now, while a barrister he had never met was reciting in open court the most private acts of their marriage, he would not be able to hold the rest of the morning.

He looked instead at Pemberton, who was already on his feet.

“My learned friend has accurately described the conduct of my client in the period in question. My client did indeed marry under an assumed name. He did indeed conceal his identity from his wife for some months thereafter. He did indeed arrange to be reported dead in April of last year. None of this is in dispute.

“What is in dispute, gentlemen of the jury, is the reason for which a man of my client’s standing, fortune, and unblemished prior reputation would have undertaken so extraordinary a course. The Crown invites you to conclude that the reason was a guilty conscience. The defence will demonstrate, by witnesses sworn and by documents admitted, that the reason was the precise opposite — that my client had become aware, in the spring of last year, that he was the target of a fraud being constructed against him by the very gentleman whose counsel has just spoken. That my client, judging correctly that a man of Mr Sterling’s resources and influence could not be safely confronted in open process before the fraud was fully exposed, withdrew from London under conditions of concealment in order to spend the months necessary to assemble the evidence against Mr Sterling that is now before this court.

“We shall further demonstrate, gentlemen, that every act of my client’s during the period of his concealment — including his marriage to the lady presently in the gallery — was conducted with such honour as the conditions permitted, and that his conduct towards his wife in particular was that of a man who refused to compromise her safety even when the temptation to do so must, by the natural feelings of a husband, have been considerable.”

The heat came into his face again at the mention of Elizabeth in open court.

He did not look up.