Page 71 of Faceless

Not the life. Not Elizabeth, not Georgiana, not forty years of anything. Just the word. The house. His father’s desk and his mother’s window seat. The lake in the morning light. The east wood going gold in October. The forty thousand acres generations of Darcys had held, and his father had kept, and Darcy had been overseeing since he was two-and-twenty, carefully, because careful was what it required. His. His name on every document, his name in the living memory of every tenant farmer and every neighbouring family for thirty miles. Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley. That was the only answer he had ever had when the question was asked.

The Crown was going to take it.

All of it. The fields and the lake and the library and his mother’s window seat. The home farm. The village. Mr and Mrs Reynolds, who had been at Pemberley before he was born. The graves on the chapel side, his father, his mother, two infant brothers buried in 1791 and 1793. Forfeit to the Crown the property of one found to be alive when he had been declared dead, which was the legal language for what he had spent six months becoming.

The thought brought him out of his chair.

He stood with both hands fisted on the table and could not breathe in any rhythm for some time. The room did not move. The grey light kept coming through the window without changing. He was being unbuilt at the level of the foundation, and the only sound in the room was the rasp of his own breath being forced back into evenness.

He had married Elizabeth on the assumption that the situation would resolve. He had drawn up a Scots-law contract in her favour, because that was his way of saying I cannot tell you yet, but I will keep you safe. The contract had been drafted on the assumption that he had something to give her.

If the proceeding found against him, there was nothing to give. The estate would be seized. The contract would be a piece of paper executed by a baron of a barony that did not legally belong to him, by a name that was not legally his. He had married her on credit he did not have.

He pressed his forehead against the cold glass of the window.

There might not be a way back.

He knocked at the usual hour.

She drew the bolt and stepped aside. He came in out of the passage, and from the hearth rug came the scrape of Falstaff settling, a long exhale, and then the room was quiet. The supper was laid. Elizabeth found her chair and reached for her glass.

He did not eat.

She knew this was a different sort of dejection before the first quarter hour had passed. On easier evenings, she could tempt him, if not into carelessness, then at least into resistance worth having; tonight every answer arrived like something copied out by a tired clerk. The glass went down once and was not lifted again. The plate was barely touched. She tried the headland, the factor’s question regarding the east field, then Paley. Each thing she set before him came back correct and bloodless.

“You have not eaten anything.”

His glass touched the table. “I am not hungry.”

She waited. Nothing came.

Then, without preface, he put a question. “You must have your regrets.”

“As to what?” she responded.

The words came rough, none of the usual discipline in them. “This — all of it. A house in Scotland you did not choose. No family near. No society. Everything you were accustomed to, all the ordinary pleasures of your life, given up for an arrangement that cannot give back what it took.”

She considered that honestly before she answered. “I have regrets. I will not pretend otherwise. But the ledger does not read as badly as you seem to think. You have not misused me. You have seen to every practical thing and several I had not thought to ask for. There are women in far more respectable-looking marriages who would find my situation quite tolerable.”

“It is still lacking.” No rise in it. Just sorrow. That was worse. “Whatever you have been given, there are things this cannot provide.”

“Yes. There are.”

“What do you miss most?” he asked. “Of what you left.”

“Jane.” She did not have to consider that one.

“Naturally. But beyond your sister.”

She thought. “My father’s book room in the evenings. The fire and the quiet of it — a household quiet, not like here. Walking Longbourn in the autumn. Hill’s cooking.” Her voice altered on the next words. “The sound of people moving about downstairs when I was in bed. Lydia and Kitty fussing about which ribbons belonged to whom. Knowing the house was occupied. It sounds foolish.”

“It does not.”

“Now you,” she said. “What do you miss?”

He drank the rest of his wine. She heard the faint slip as the final drops passed his lips and the glass was drained.

“Come,” she said, keeping her voice easy. “It is only fair. I have confessed to Hill’s cooking, which I assure you is not a small humiliation.”