Page 185 of Faceless

Pemberton sat.

The first witness was called.

LXVIII

In the Box

Webb was good in the box. He had given evidence in courtrooms before, in capacities Darcy was glad not to have enquired about, and he gave it now in the same calm, detached manner a senior clerk might use to deliver an account of a year’s bookkeeping. He laid out the original instructions Darcy had given him in April of the previous year. He laid out the progress of the investigation. He laid out the customs records, the manifests, and the schedule of MacNeil’s debts and the timing of Sterling’s payments. He did not editorialise. He let the documents do the work.

The prosecution’s counsel cross-examined him for the better part of an hour. The cross-examination was clever and got nowhere; Webb had been answering exactly such questions, in his own internal accounts, for a twelvemonth.

Hodges followed. The prosecution’s counsel rose to cross-examine before Pemberton had finished his own questioning, which was the first sign Darcy had had that the man across the room intended to make a meal of Hodges if he could.

The questioning was clever. “You were in your master’s employ at the time he received warning of the warrant against him? You were with him at Rosings when the warning came? You were privy to the arrangements by which he was thereafter reported dead? You yourself helped to make those arrangements? You accepted a retainer from him for that work?”

Hodges answered each question in the affirmative.

He did not soften. He did not equivocate. He named the dates. He named the sum of the retainer. He acknowledged that he had been one of three persons in England in April of last year who had known Mr Darcy was not dead, and that he had concealed that fact from the household, from the staff, from his master’s solicitor in London, and from Mr Darcy’s sister. He acknowledged that he had returned, in the months that followed, to the London house in Grosvenor Square on numerous occasions, by night, to retrieve correspondence and papers his master required, and that none of these visits had been entered in any log the house’s regular staff would have seen.

The prosecution’s counsel sat back with the small satisfied gesture of having worked his way to this point over some minutes and arrived.

“So, Mr Hodges. By your own admission, you assisted your master in faking his death, concealed his survival from his own solicitor and his own sister, secretly entered his London property under cover of night to remove documents, and accepted payment for the doing of all of it. Do you wish the court to believe that these were the actions of a confidential servant whose master was innocent of the charges against him?”

Hodges set his hands on the rail of the witness box. “My lord.”

He had addressed himself to the bench. The judge looked at him.

“I have answered every question put to me by my learned friend in the affirmative, and I have done so because every fact in his question was true. I should be grateful if the court would permit me to add one observation.”

The judge inclined his head.

“Sir. My master had been warned, by a person whose position I shall not name in this court but whose name the bench has been informed of, that a warrant was being prepared against him on a charge of high treason, and that the warrant had been procured by Mr Sterling, whose hand by that date had reached far enough into the Home Office. My master made the determination that he would not permit any person in his household to be exposed to questioning. If my master had remained alive on the public record, every person who had served him faithfully would have been called upon to swear before magistrates as to his whereabouts, his correspondence, his associates, and his intentions. Each of those persons would have been required to lie or to be a party to his concealment.

“My master chose to spare them that choice by becoming a dead man on the public record, so that no servant of his could be compelled to commit perjury for him and no woman associated with him could be threatened on his account. The arrangements I assisted with were arrangements made to shield other persons from the consequences of his danger, not to shield him from the consequences of his conduct.

“I accepted his retainer because I had been with him ten years, and I knew the manner of man he was, and I did not require to be paid to assist him, but he would not have it otherwise. Sir, I shall tell you what I shall tell any man who asks me. My master’s secrecy was not the secrecy of a guilty conscience. It was the secrecy of a man who had calculated that a year of his own legal death was the lesser injury, by every measure he could weigh, than the injuries that would otherwise have fallen on persons innocent of any part in the case against him. I should be ashamed to call myself a confidential servant of his if I did not say so to this court.”

The prosecution’s counsel had been, Darcy thought, a man who had practised many years at the bar and had not, perhaps, been answered in precisely this manner before in any court room of the kingdom. He did not, at once, frame his next question. The judge waited. The jury, which had been watching Hodges with the small attention reserved for a servant put up by the defence to do flattering work, was now watching him with a different attention entirely.

Sterling’s counsel sat.

Pemberton declined to question, and Hodges stepped down.

Darcy watched him go. He had been holding the rail of the dock for the last three minutes without registering that he was holding it. He let it go. The wood was warm where his hand had been.

Bingley was called next.

Darcy had not known, before the morning, in what order Pemberton intended to put the character witnesses or even the names of everyone he got. He had told himself it did not matter. He had been wrong. He had not been prepared for Bingley.

Bingley came up from the witnesses’ bench. He had perhaps four paces between the bench and the box, and as he passed under the gallery, his eye lifted, by some instinct Darcy could not have named, towards the screen at the far end.

Darcy saw Bingley’s eye find Elizabeth behind the screen, and find Miss Bennet sitting beside her with her hand still in Elizabeth’s lap.

Bingley swallowed.

His face did not change for the public benches, because Bingley had been raised well enough to know what a courtroom required of him. But Darcy, who had known him since they were boys at school, saw the small movement of his throat and the brief grief that travelled across his face before he mastered it. Jane Bennet in the gallery, holding her sister’s hand, with her sister visibly carrying Darcy’s child, and Bingley about to testify in a treason trial — every part of which contained, in Bingley’s understanding of it, his own failure to have made Jane Bennet his wife a year ago when he might have done.

He took the box. He gave Darcy the small, awkward bow he had been giving him since they were eighteen. He took the oath.