Page 23 of Faceless

“Five days is more than sufficient,” Collins added, “for women of good family to arrange themselves. I am certain the neighbourhood will rally.”

The neighbourhood did not rally.

Uncle Philips came himself the morning after, and explained with great sorrow and careful circumlocution that their house was not large enough — his mother had arrived the week before in delicate health, and the rooms were spoken for. He was sure the Lucases might make room. Jane sent a note to Lucas Lodge that afternoon.

Sir William’s reply came warmer in tone than its contents deserved. Lucas Lodge had never been a large house, and there was not a spare room to be found in it; and they must beg Jane’s indulgence on one further point — given Mr Collins’s position as master of Longbourn and Charlotte’s as his wife, they could not, in all propriety, appear to take sides in a family disagreement. They were certain the Bennets would understand.

Elizabeth read this letter at the breakfast table while Collins ate his eggs at the far end and Charlotte poured the tea in silence.

Mrs Bennet did not wish to leave all her friends in Meryton. She produced eleven more names over the following two days — Mrs Goulding, who was in Bath; Mrs Long, who had her nieces; and nine others, each of whom found a reason. They were so sorry. They hoped the family would be settled very soon.

Nothing came to rest. Collins’s five days moved like a tide coming in.

On the third day, Elizabeth sat with Jane at the small table in what had been their father’s study. She kept her eyes on Jane and on the paper between them — their accounts, such as they were, the small sums of money their father had set aside, the quarterly allowances, the arithmetic of five women with no house, with inadequate income, with nowhere in the county willing to take them in.

“Uncle Gardiner offered,” Jane said. “At the funeral. He said whatever they could do.”

“He did not know then what we would need.” Elizabeth’s eye went to the paper. Whatever they could do had meant, in that churchyard, a loan perhaps, or a recommendation, or a room for one of them for a few weeks. It had not meant five women arriving on the doorstep with their trunks and no fixed prospect of leaving. “We have no time to write and explain it. By the time a letter reached him and he had replied, Collins would already have us in the hedgerows.”

“We would be going without warning.”

“We would.” She folded the paper and put it in her pocket. “He will not turn us away. He cannot, and he would not, and we have nowhere else to go.”

They left on the fifth day.

The packing fell to Elizabeth and Jane because Mrs Bennet could not stop weeping long enough to be useful. Kitty followed her mother’s lead. Mary stood in the middle of her room with her hands at her sides, staring at her shelves as though she had never seen them before. Lydia packed her own trunk without being asked, efficiently and without speaking, and dragged it towards the stairs herself.

The decisions were merciless. This is ours. This is not. This is too heavy. This cannot be left. The books went into two trunks, and Elizabeth locked them and put the keys in her pocket before Collins could see how many she had claimed. A set of her mother’s china that had been her grandmother’s went into a crate wrapped in old linen, and then had to be removed again when Collins learned of it. Her father’s pen — the good one, the one he had used every day for as long as she could remember — went into her coat pocket alongside the trunk keys.

Collins stood in the doorway of the entrance hall as they brought the bags out, watching with an expression of benevolent oversight, as though witnessing their departure were a service he was performing for them. Charlotte stood at his shoulder with her hands folded, her eyes on the middle distance. Elizabeth did not turn to her. She did not trust herself to mind her tongue.

The cart was hired from the village because there was no money for a carriage and no one in the neighbourhood who was inclined to lend one, not today, not with so little notice, so very sorry. The bags went on the cart. The six of them climbed up after, because there was nowhere else to sit, and the cart set off down the lane and turned south towards London.

Mrs Bennet wept through Barnet. She wept through Hatfield and Welwyn and the long flat road south. Kitty’s hand was in hers. Lydia sat at the back of the cart watching Hertfordshire recede with an expression Elizabeth could not name. Mary kept her hands in her lap and her eyes straight ahead. Jane held Elizabeth’s arm in both her own.

The fields went past. The sky went past. Longbourn went further and further behind them and did not come back.

Elizabeth had two trunk keys and a pen in her pocket, five women in her keeping, and nothing else she could name that was certain. The road to London was very long. At the end of it was her uncle’s house, and she did not know what happened after that.

XI

The Map of What He Did Not Know

He had been in the chamber for most of the daylight hours for six weeks. He had developed a comprehensive knowledge of every irregularity in the ceiling stones.

He was not a man given to self-pity, which was fortunate, because self-pity in a space of this size had nowhere to go.

He had stopped walking at night three weeks ago. The cliff path was visible from the village, and June in Aberdeenshire was not dark until nearly eleven; a man walking the headland at that hour could be remembered and mentioned at the inn. So, the nights had become what the days already were — the mural chamber, the table, the documents, the insufficient candle.

Angus brought the Aberdeen packet on a Tuesday morning in the second week of June. Darcy read Webb’s letter at the table, the candle burning, his notes spread before him; read it twice; then sat for a long time with his eye on the wall.

The letter was dated the fifth of June and had taken six days to reach him, which was within the expected range. Webb wrote in the coded shorthand they had established in London — abbreviated, dry, stripped of anything legible to a third party — and Darcy had long since memorised the key and no longer needed to work at it. He translated as he read.

GC,

The matter of the warrant is closed. The Home Office has registered the death and closed the instrument. I must tell you, however, that the broader investigation into the southern routes continues. You are no longer its object, but the investigation itself has not been wound up. The routes were real. The gold was real, and the treason was real. Someone moved it, and the Home Office has not yet decided to stop caring who. You are certainly ruined posthumously, when this is settled.

Sterling has presented himself throughout as a man betrayed, a business associate whose shipping connections were used without his knowledge by the deceased. He has been cooperative with investigators in a way I find instructive. A cooperative Sterling has had time to prepare his ground.