Page 189 of Faceless

But Marsh was in the box.

He had to look away from the gallery because if he looked at his wife for one second longer, he would weep in front of the court, and he had not yet, at three hours into a treason trial, given the room that satisfaction.

He looked at Marsh, instead.

He was a thin, worn man of perhaps thirty-five, holding himself upright with painful care. He looked at the jury once and then did not look at them again. He looked at Pemberton, at the bench, at the table in front of him.

He named names. Dates. Lodgings. Scully. Bream. Payments. He provided evidence for the sums Mr Sterling had been realising in the period in question — not the modest pilferings of an ordinary shipping fraud, but the systematic harvesting of cargoes diverted to the French market by every route the Continental blockade had left unsealed, sums which in any single quarter exceeded what Mr Darcy was alleged by the Crown to have gained from the whole.

He named the markets at which the goods had been sold, the agents through whom payment had been laundered, and the rough percentages Mr Sterling had retained against what he had passed down the chain. He named the manner in which Sterling had insisted the paper trail be arranged to suggest Mr Darcy’s knowledge while keeping Sterling himself far enough from execution that if one portion failed, another might still be made to hold, so that if the matter ever came to light, the prosecution would lead in one direction and Sterling would walk in the other.

He named, when Pemberton asked him to, the three occasions on which men in Mr Sterling’s pay had called at his own lodgings to frighten his family — an innocent woman and two children, which caused murmurings and head shaking in the court. He gave the descriptions of the men who had called with such accuracy that their likenesses could be sketched in the evening’s Post. He named the threats. Accidents to clerks in ditches. Children whose schools could be located. A wife who could be reached at her own door, at any hour Mr Sterling chose to send a man.

It was not eloquent testimony. It was, Darcy thought, all the more terrible for being plain.

Shame came up in him in a way he had not expected. Not shame for himself; shame for the world in which a man like Marsh, who had clearly been trying for years to be honest enough to keep his family fed, had been ground between Sterling’s machinery and his own family’s safety until the only thing left to him was to stand in a box and recite what he had been forced to do.

Pemberton produced a ledger that had previously been entered into evidence. “Do you know this writing?”

“Yes.”

“Whose is it?”

“Mr Sterling’s.”

“Have you seen him write before?”

Marsh gave Pemberton a look almost insulted by the necessity. “For three years. I stood at his elbow when he wrote that document.”

The note was passed up to the bench. The bench read it. The bench passed it to the jury. The jury read it, one man at a time, with the slow gravity of twelve London freeholders who had understood that the case before them had just acquired a piece of evidence they would be required to account for in their verdict.

Darcy looked at Elizabeth again because he could not help it.

She was still leaning forward. She had taken her hand from her mouth and was holding her sister’s hand on one side and Georgiana’s on the other. She was looking at him at last, now that the note had been read, and the room had learned what it meant. He could not hold her eye for longer than the second he had given her. He looked down at the floor of the dock. He had not, in his entire imprisonment, been more grateful to be allowed to look at his own boots.

LXX

Let Me Hear It

By the time Elizabeth’s sworn statement was read aloud, Darcy had been in the dock for seven hours.

Pemberton had saved it for last on purpose, and Darcy, as counsel rose with the document in his hand, knew why. The prosecution had opened on Darcy’s character — the false name, the staged death, the whole pattern they called the conduct of a guilty man. Pemberton had taken the day to dismantle the Crown’s substantive case by witnesses to the treason itself. He had now reached the close, and the close was the wife.

Pemberton could not call her. A wife was not a legally competent witness in her husband’s criminal trial; she could neither testify against him nor for him, by the rule that had stood in English law for two centuries. The statement was the way round it. Taken before a magistrate prior to trial, sworn, and admitted as evidence of Mr Darcy’s character on the defence’s discretion, it was the closest thing Elizabeth could have to a voice in the court that was deciding whether her husband would hang and, in consequence, whether she herself would stand arraignment within the hour.

The prosecution could not effectively rebut. They had already opened on Mr Darcy’s conduct towards her in their case-in-chief; the rule against repeated argument would not permit them to call rebuttal witnesses on the same ground. They might, in theory, attempt to dispute the matter of the prior arrangement, but to do so at this hour, in this room, with the wife visible in the gallery and her condition equally so, would have been to expose themselves to a piece of theatre no jury in London would forget. Sterling’s counsel had visibly reached the calculation, some minutes before Pemberton rose, that he would not attempt it. The statement would be read. The defence would rest. Whatever the jury was going to carry into its deliberations the following day, the last evidence to reach them in the case would be Mrs Darcy’s account of her marriage, in her own measured words, read aloud by counsel, with her sitting in the gallery in front of them.

Pemberton read it himself. He read it slowly, because the document had been prepared with weeks of care, refusing any phrase she could not stand by. He read of the prior arrangement with Selby — without naming him, because the statement did not require it — and of the conduct of the man to whom she had been promised, and of the danger from which Mr Darcy of Pemberley had removed her at considerable cost to himself. He read of the conditions of the marriage. He read of Darcy’s restraint and honour during the months of concealment, and of the moment at which Darcy had told her the truth, and of her continued residence in his house thereafter under her own free choice. He read of the marriage articles, entered as a separate exhibit, which the bench inspected with the close attention reserved for documents that would, in any other case, have been the centre of the evidence rather than its supporting margin.

Darcy did not look at Elizabeth while the statement was being read.

He could not.

He looked at the floor of the dock, which had been polished sometime that morning and had a small fleck of what might have been wax near the rail. He listened to his wife’s words being read aloud in a court of treason. There were parts of his own conduct over the last fourteen months that he had not yet forgiven himself for, and hearing Elizabeth name them — evenly, in writing, in her own voice — did not absolve him of them.

He had let her live in his house for four months, not knowing whose house it was. He had compromised her safety by every act of concealment. He had allowed her to be brought to London and confined to his uncle’s house and threatened with arrest, and to carry his child visibly through a city of strangers who had been told that she was a fraud upon them.

And despite all that, her account was generous. Far more generous than he deserved.