Page 93 of Faceless

His own pride was the lock on her recognition. But that would not hold indefinitely, and his calendar grew shorter by the hour.

Webb’s last had borne the cadence of work in motion — every page since August had narrowed, the names tightening, the captains’ positions becoming clearer, the Home Office suspecting he was still alive somewhere, the witness who would close the matter now within Fitzwilliam’s reach if he chose to extend it. It had a season now. He could feel its weather.

He was going to have to be alive again.

He was going to have to stand before her in actual daylight, after three months of dark, and say — with whatever portion of his voice he could call upon at the time — that George Carlisle was Fitzwilliam Darcy. That the man whose constancy she had taken into her arms and answered with all the tenderness of her wit and the warmth of her body was the man she had pronounced confusing, and proud, and not of sufficient interest to mourn.

She would have to forgive him for being Fitzwilliam Darcy.

XXXVI

The Passage

He went to the passage late in the morning because the mural chamber had become intolerable, and he had nowhere else to go.

Webb’s packet had come at first light, in the careful fiction of mundane estate correspondence. The case was firming. Fitzwilliam had located a witness through regimental channels — three weeks, perhaps four, before the ground would be solid enough to build on, the matter in hand before Christmas.

The second piece of news was Lydia. Fitzwilliam had read the marriage notice in some London paper before Darcy’s letter could reach Bermondsey, had done the arithmetic in thirty seconds, and had gone to Webb with his jaw set and the future predicted. Before the ink had even been dry on Jane Bennet’s tearful letter to Elizabeth, Lydia Wickham had been located in Norwich, funds arranged from one of Darcy’s accounts through a solicitor whose trail led to no name she would recognise. Darcy had read both pages, put the letter in the fire, and saw it through to ash.

The squint gave him what it always gave him — the far shelves, the window, the hearthrug where Falstaff was sleeping in the proprietary attitude of large dogs. Elizabeth was in her chair, a book open in her lap, the fire going, and the shawl she had stopped needing indoors since the grate arrived folded over the chair arm.

Her shoulders were tilted slightly forward, whether in agitation over something or urgency to read the next page, he could not tell. Her free hand was turning his ring on her finger. She turned it when she was thinking. He had seen her do it a hundred times through this slit. Mrs MacLeod came through the library door.

She was carrying something — a cloth-wrapped bundle, the size and shape of a flat stone. She said something to Elizabeth that Darcy could not hear through the wall thickness. Elizabeth set down the book, took the bundle, held it in both hands to test the warmth, then pressed it against her middle through the fabric of her morning dress.

He saw her close her eyes briefly. The slight easing of her shoulders.

He did not understand it immediately.

Then he did.

The memory came up without being summoned — whole, complete — his mother in her sitting room, the ladies bringing something similar wrapped in flannel, himself perhaps twelve, curious enough to ask and young enough to think the question was acceptable. His mother had turned from the window with the look she wore when he asked something she had not expected from him. A woman’s courses can be painful, Fitzwilliam. It is nothing to alarm yourself over. It happens every month, and it will pass. He had nodded with the air of one informed and gone back to whatever he had been doing and not thought about it again for twenty years.

He counted.

October eighteenth. He had been counting since that first night— five weeks of waking before dawn and counting. Then, more lately, ten days of chastising himself for last night’s indulgences and going to her bed anyway — every night, helpless to do otherwise — and counting again.

If she were in pain from her courses now, she was not with child. Not from October, and not from the last ten days. There must have even been an interval since that first night that he had not known of. The five weeks of counting, the small hours calculations, the France that he had kept constructing and dismantling in the dark — none of it had been necessary.

He stood in the passage, his hand against the cold stone, and told himself he was relieved.

He was relieved.

He was relieved, and underneath the relief, there was something he was not going to examine — the France calculation, the version of events where she was carrying his child and he had to act, her face in daylight, a child whose name he could give openly. That version had required the crisis to force his hand in a way the courts had not yet arranged.

He was not going to follow that thought. He pressed his hand against the stone until the cold of it became the only thing.

Through the slit, he could see Elizabeth still in her chair, the wrapped stone against her middle, her eyes open again and looking out the window at the grey November sea. Falstaff had relocated from the hearthrug to press himself against her legs. Her hand had found his head without her looking down.

He stayed until she reached for her book again. Then he went back to the mural chamber and sat at the table with the cold ash of Webb’s letter in the grate and could not name how the relief could be at once so complete and so insufficient. He picked up the pen and worked.

He came to supper, and she had only to hear the chair drawn out across from her to know that something in him had altered. The quietness was the quietness of every other evening, but underneath was a different cast of attention, a thoughtful one disinclined to explain itself.

She ate. She would have it in his time, not hers.

“I have had news,” he said, “of your sister.”

Elizabeth set down her fork. “Lydia?”