Page 190 of Faceless

His eyes had filled, and he forced the tears down with the discipline he had been practising since the cutter, because he was not going to weep in the dock of a court in front of two hundred people, and he was not going to weep in front of his wife, who had not wept in any of the proceedings of the day so far as he could see, and who was sitting there now calm, having carried him since the twenty-third of July and ready to carry him through one more afternoon.

When Pemberton finished reading the statement, he laid it on the table and rested.

The bench called the adjournment for the day, closing arguments to be held tomorrow.

Darcy was led out of the dock.

He looked up at the gallery one last time on the way out. Elizabeth was still looking at him. Her face had not altered through the whole day. Only her hand had moved — it had come up to rest against the swell of her gown, where the child was. In the second before he was taken through the door to the cell where he would be held until the verdict, Darcy knew what she was telling him — that she was here, that the child was here, that they were both here, that whatever the verdict was tomorrow they had both been with him today.

He went down to the cell and put his face against the cold stone of the wall and stood there a long while.

Elizabeth rose with the rest of the gallery. She had been on the bench for nearly eight hours with only a few moments of recess.

The blood went out of her head as she came to her feet, with the small unmistakable lurch of a body that had not been properly fed since the previous evening and had been required, since then, to sit upright and breathe shallowly behind a panelled screen through a day of testimony in which she had not been able to permit herself to weep, faint, or otherwise behave as a woman in her condition might reasonably have wished to behave. Her back, which she had been carrying carefully since the noon recess, locked up entirely. There were black spots in front of her eyes. The rail of the gallery doubled.

She tried to put her hand on the rail, and it seemed to be a slightly different distance from her than it had been a moment before. She missed it on the first attempt, found it on the second, and held to it with a grip she could not feel in her fingers.

“Lizzy!”

Jane was at her right elbow. Georgiana was at her left. Between them, they could not, Elizabeth thought from a great distance, be quite strong enough to keep her upright if the floor decided to do what it appeared to be considering. She did not say so. She did not, just at the moment, have the breath for it.

Richard was at her side before she had fully understood that she was sinking. That the floor had somehow rippled and was proceeding to swallow her.

He put his hand under her arm, as he had carried wounded brother officers off worse fields than a London courtroom, and he took her weight against his side without making any visible show of the fact that he was taking it. He turned her towards the stair. Jane went ahead. Georgiana followed behind. The rest of the gallery, which had been gathering its hats and its shawls and beginning the slow shuffle towards the door, made way for them with the respect of a public for a woman with child who had sat through a treason trial without complaint and was being assisted from the building because she had at last reached the end of what her body could do.

This was the worst possible thing she could have done in front of two hundred people if her object had been to be seen as steady.

It also occurred to her, half a second later, that this might be the most useful thing she had done in front of two hundred people in any other sense.

She did not have the breath to consider it further.

The earl came up to her in the small drawing room an hour after she had been brought home. He did not, when he entered, perform the usual courtesies. He came to the chair across from hers, sat down, and looked at her.

“You will not attend the court tomorrow.”

“My lord! I will — I mean to! I cannot fail to appear.”

“I am not putting it to you as a matter for discussion, Mrs Darcy. You will not attend. Pemberton has been informed. Richard has been informed. Mrs Hatchett has been informed. The carriage will not be brought round in the morning. I shall not have any servant in this house carry an instruction from you to the contrary. You will remain at Matlock House until I send for you.”

“His lordship’s reasons — ”

“His lordship’s reasons are that the woman who is presently sitting in front of him very nearly fainted in the public gallery of a Crown court an hour ago, and that the woman in question is five months gone with my nephew’s child, and that I shall not, having spent four months arranging that she should not be in Newgate, deliver her to a sickbed by my own carelessness on the second day. That is the first reason. There are others. They do not signify. The first is sufficient.”

Richard, who had come in behind his father and remained standing by the door, spoke for the first time.

“My father is correct, Mrs Darcy. I shall not take you tomorrow. I should have refused to take you today had I known what the day would cost you.”

“You would not have refused. You know he needed to see me there. That everyone needed to see me there, that I needed to see him.”

“Elizabeth.” He cut her off with a sharp sigh. He almost never called her by her first name, and he employed it now intentionally, but not unkindly. “You went white in the gallery. If you had gone down on the stair, I should have been carrying you to the carriage in front of the entire press of London, and the papers tomorrow would have carried your collapse instead of my cousin’s defence. You will not do it again. I shall not be the one to permit it.”

Elizabeth set her cup of beef tea down on the table beside her. Her hand still shook a little. “He will want me there for the verdict.”

“He would not.”

“Richard, he would —”

“Mrs Darcy,” the earl interrupted. “My nephew would never forgive me, nor would he forgive his cousin, if either of us permitted you to make yourself ill in his service on the day his case is closed. He would consider it a piece of conduct so far beneath the office of his uncle and his cousin that no apology either of us could construct would cover the ground. I am not in any doubt as to what he would say to me, in private, on the matter of your appearance tomorrow if I were to permit it. I have no desire to receive that lecture from him at any future hour. You will remain at this house. I shall send Pemberton’s clerk to you every hour during the deliberations with such word as we have. You will be the first person in this household to know the verdict, by such margin as a fast horse may produce.”