Page 191 of Faceless

She did not, for some seconds, answer.

“When will the verdict come?”

“I do not know. The closings will not finish before late afternoon. The judge’s charge will go an hour at least, and the jury will retire in the evening. They will not, in a case of this complexity, return within the hour. They may deliberate through the night. They may deliberate into the day following. We shall know when we know.”

“And if it comes —”

“If it comes, I shall send Richard ahead of the carriage. Darcy… well. We shall see. You will not be required to do anything except wait.”

She closed her eyes briefly. She had not, until that moment, realised how tired she was.

“I should like to go to bed now, my lord.”

“I think that wise.” He had stood. He bent — which she had not seen him do for any person in any room of Matlock House since her arrival — and kissed her once, very briefly, on the forehead.

“You have done your part, Mrs Darcy. Permit the rest of us to do ours.”

He went out. Richard followed him, and Jane came in.

Elizabeth permitted herself, for the first time since she had come down from the gallery, to be helped to her feet without trying to hide that she required the help.

He sat on the bench against the cold stone with his back unsupported and his hands on his knees, because if he sank back against the wall, he would not have the strength to come upright when the guard came for him.

It had been hours. He could not have said how many.

The court had reconvened at nine. He had been brought back to the dock. He had not been allowed to sit in the dock at any point of the day, and by the time the jury had risen from the box and filed out in their slow line — perhaps four in the afternoon, perhaps five — he had been on his feet long enough that his knees, when he had been brought down the stair to the cell, had nearly given way at the second turning. Some hours had passed in this room since.

The piece of bread on the table in front of him had not been touched. He had looked at it twice. He could not.

His mouth was dry. His face was hot. His hands shook with a tremor he had given up trying to govern hours ago. He had not slept the night before. He had eaten almost nothing. He had stood in the dock for the better part of a day listening to a counsel he had never met describe him, in perfectly reasonable tones, as a man whose hanging would be a public benefit.

The Crown’s counsel had been very good, and Darcy had not been prepared for how good. The man had not raised his voice. He had not appealed to any low sentiment. He had merely stood and walked the jury through every act of Darcy’s last twelve months, reframing each in turn with such plausibility that Darcy had begun to hear his own life as the prosecution had assembled it. And the assembly held.

Every honourable act of his year had been turned, in the counsel’s hands, into the small private cruelty of having calculated all along — every protection of those he loved made the cowardice of saving himself, every act of restraint made the cunning of hiding something worse, every sacrifice he had paid for in coin and conscience and the months of his wife’s life named back to him as evidence of the very guilt he had paid them to disprove.

Pemberton had answered each in turn an hour later, and answered them well. But the counsel’s version had been heard first, and was the one a tired juror would remember in the deliberation room.

He sat now in the cell and put his hands over his face.

He had been grateful, through every minute of the counsel’s closing, that Elizabeth was not in the gallery.

She would have heard her own marriage described as a fraud upon her. She would have heard her statement described as a piece of inducement procured by his uncle’s solicitor. She would have heard her own absence from the gallery — the absence the earl had forced upon her against her will — used by the prosecution as evidence that the defence was staging her appearances. Or if she had been there, she would have heard that her presence was an obvious attempt to garner sympathy against her own misprision case, which was also at issue.

She would have heard all of it from behind the screen, where she would not have been able to weep, would not have been able to stand, would not have been able to do anything but sit with her hand at her mouth for two hours while her husband was being prepared for the scaffold in measured prose.

She had been spared that. The earl, who had sent her home the night before against her protests, had given her, by that one act, the only mercy of the day.

The shaking in his hands moved up into his shoulders and would not stop.

He bent his head and let it come. He did not weep aloud. He was a Darcy — he had lived as a Darcy and would die as one, if need be, and the guard at the door of the cell would not hear him surrender his dignity now. But the tears came through his fingers, and he could not have stopped them if he had wished to, and he did not wish to.

When the worst of it had passed, he wiped his face on the handkerchief he had carried since Auchengray, the Pemberley mark turned against his mouth, and he drew breath.

Then he prayed.

He had not prayed properly in weeks. The recitations in the Tower had become a performance of the office and not the substance. He prayed now without form.

He prayed for Elizabeth, who had been confined to a house she had not chosen, carrying his child, waiting at this hour for word that might not come until the morning or might not come at all in any form she could survive.