Page 82 of Faceless

“I will thank you for it anyway.”

“Then thank me and let it pass.”

Her shawl stayed folded on the back of her chair, where she had set it down on entering the room, because she did not need it. Falstaff slept by the hearth rug as he always did. Neither of them mentioned the grate again.

The squint gave him the same narrow slice it always did — the shelves, the window, the desk where she sometimes wrote. She was at the window this morning, her back to him, a book open in her hands, turning pages slowly. Falstaff slept under the desk. The fire was built high, higher than he had seen it through this slit before, the kind of fire a person built after being cold a long time and finally deciding to remedy it. The shawl she had worn at every supper this past week was gone from her shoulders, and she stood in the firelight without it, and he thought about the cold evenings across the table and did not let himself think further.

She looked well, exactly as she always looked, which told him nothing. She had gone on living through these months — the walks, the letters, the books, the dog, the suppers in the dark — and she was not the kind of woman who broke.

He went back to his room.

Twenty-two days since… Twenty-three this morning, by the time the light came grey through the ventilation slit. He had no present way of knowing how it stood with her.

And he was not going to ask Mrs MacLeod.

To ask was to know, and knowing required him to reckon with what he had no answer for yet. No name, no house, no future he could lay against it. If she were carrying, there was a strong chance the child would arrive before he could make himself real to her and alive to the world again.

Nor could he ask Elizabeth. That conversation required him to acknowledge that what had passed between them had consequences neither of them had spoken of — and he did not know how to begin it from behind a wall of dark.

So, he did not. He counted instead.

A month was the usual interval; he knew the general principle and nothing more exact — not her constitution, not whether worry or cold might alter it. He did not know whether she was counting too.

In the small hours, he had found himself running the other calculation — not from desire but from necessity, the way one mapped the exits when the room began to fill with smoke. If she were with child, the reckoning came forward. He could no longer wait for the investigation to resolve in its own time. He would have to act, and the only action available to him that did not require him to be alive in English law was to leave English law behind entirely.

Switzerland, perhaps. The Italian states. Somewhere the warrant had no reach, and Fitzwilliam Darcy’s death could stand as a fact without anyone looking too closely at what had replaced him. He could be George Carlisle openly, in daylight, in a country indifferent to English legal proceedings.

The Geneva accounts were not what they had been, but there was enough to begin on, and if there was not, he would work — he had a fine hand and an even finer education, and would do it with joy, because she would see his face. He would see hers. They would be a married couple in the full sense of the word. If she were already carrying, the child would have two parents it could see, a name, a life he could actually provide.

Then he thought about Pemberley.

His father had sat at that desk for twenty years before him. His mother had planted the kitchen garden the year before she died, and he had kept it as she left it. Georgiana had taken her first steps on the east lawn. The tenants had been on the land for three generations, families whose names stood in the estate records before his grandfather's time, with no reason to expect the man who held it to decide his own convenience outweighed the obligation.

And Sterling, still free. The forgeries still on the books. The warrant still unsatisfied. A man who had walked away from all of that had not escaped — he had merely chosen to let it stand, and everything it had taken to get this far would count for nothing.

And all of it waited on a count he could not finish.

XXXII

The Door

Angus came at the usual hour with the Aberdeen packet and the domestic report. It was the arrangement they had developed over seven months — the closest Darcy came to knowing what was happening in his own house.

“Good morning,” Darcy said.

“Aye.” Angus set the packet on the table and removed his hat. “Cold enough this morning.”

“The north field — did MacAulay send word about the drainage?”

“Sent word yesterday. He’ll have the channel dug before the ground freezes, he thinks. Wants to know about the east boundary fence come spring.”

“Tell him to do what’s needed. He knows the estate better than I do.” Darcy sorted through the packet. Two letters — a dinner invitation from the Garrows and something from the minister about the parish subscription, neither of which required an answer before the week was out. They were for Elizabeth, anyway. Not him. “Any trouble in the house?”

“None I’d come to ye wi’. The wife had words wi’ the lass about the lamps yesterday, but the lamps were lit afore the kettle was hot, so I’d say the lass came out of it the better.”

“And the baroness. How is she this morning?”

“Well enough. She was at her book again. Russelus, the lady called it. By yon Abysmia, the Frenchman.”