Page 127 of Homeless

He stood there in the dark a while longer, among the sleeping covered shapes, and then he went out, closed the door softly behind him, and went at last to his own bed. Alone.

L

The Warmest Welcome

They would go to the trading house at midday, her aunt said. Mr Copeland, the head clerk, was surest to be found there about noon, when the morning's business was done and before he went out. It was Mr Copeland they wanted, for he had been the one with her uncle's affairs at his fingertips, and had been kindness itself to Mrs Gardiner these dreadful months. So, there were hours to wait.

“Oh, Lizzy, I am a wretch, I forgot entirely.” Her aunt had risen to deal with some crisis of Edward's and stopped halfway, struck. “There is a letter for you, from Meryton. It came, oh, a fortnight since, and I had not the heart to send it back and tell your mother you were still in Spain. I put it aside, and then it went clean out of my head. It is on the side table in the parlour, under the workbasket, I think.”

It was, indeed, under the workbasket. Elizabeth carried it to the window and broke the seal to read. Within three lines she was laughing, because her mother had plainly, comprehensively, forgot that Elizabeth had even left the country.

The letter proceeded to lay out a great deal of pressing business: that Elizabeth was to make the most of being in town and go about and be seen before her looks went off entirely, hopefully even catch the eye of some man with his own house, that her mother might come visit her in her own home; that if London could not be brought up to scratch, Mrs Long's nephew had turned out to have four thousand a year and Elizabeth was on no account to let her aunt keep her shut up in Cheapside when there was such a man to be met; that Jane was well but wanted looking after; that Kitty had a cough and Lydia had an admirer; that Mr Philips was impossible and her sister Mrs Philips far too given over to her nerves.

Not one word of Spain, though she had Elizabeth’s letter about it. Not the faintest apparent memory that her second daughter had crossed a continent at war and vanished into silence for a season. It was so perfectly, so gloriously her mother that Elizabeth laughed until her eyes stung, and thought that there was a strange comfort in being so entirely un-worried-about. She drew a sheet toward her to write back.

Dearest Mama,

I am only yesterday returned from Spain. I have much to tell you, though much of it, I fear, you may find…

The knocker echoed.

She heard the maid answer it, and a man's voice, and then the maid's step. Then she was at the parlour door, and she bobbed and held out a folded note. “For you, Miss Lizzy. The man's to wait if there's an answer.”

Her aunt looked up from Edward with her eyebrows climbing clean into her cap. “For you? Already?”

“Oh!” Elizabeth leapt up and took the note. “Yes, I will have an answer directly. No, wait. Will you tell him to send word back that I will write a longer note this evening, rather than a rushed one just now?”

“Lizzy!” her aunt protested. “You have been back in London not one whole day. Who on earth —”

“A friend.” She had the note already open in her hand and her face put into sober order. “From a… someone I came to know on the journey, who landed only yesterday, as I did. We had said we would write the moment we were each settled.” She was already moving towards the door. “I hope I may introduce you before long, Aunt — you would like… yes, I think, you would very much… Excuse me, please!”

She ran up the stairs with the note pressed to her middle before her aunt could frame the next question, because it would have been a shrewd one, and Elizabeth had no answer ready that would survive it.

She shut her door and sat on the edge of the bed and unfolded it, and there was his hand — that black, upright, deliberate hand she had watched write out a hundred desperate things across Spain. She traced the first letters fondly before she set to reading them.

My heart, it began, and she had to stop and press the back of her wrist to her mouth.

He had had her note, he wrote — the three lines she had sent by courier at dawn, before her aunt could be awake to hear of it. He could not tell her how it had grieved him to wake alone, and to hold even so little of her hand on paper. But he was pleased to know she was safe under her aunt's roof, to have proof in ink that the last three months had been real, and she had not been a thing he dreamt on a ship. He was going to Georgiana this morning, and he would tell her, he could not bear not to. His sister would meet her soon, even before the rest of the world knew her as Mrs Darcy, she could befriend Miss Darcy with no fear of censure.

He begged Elizabeth to eat, and to rest, and not to spend herself on the trading-house business past what she had strength for. He reminded her of her promise to send for him the instant there was any need of anything under heaven, and to remember, whatever the day brought, and whatever the weeks ahead required them to pretend to the watching world, that she was his wife, and beloved past his power to say, and that every hour carried them nearer to the morning he would open a certain south-facing room and never let her out of his sight again.

Yours, and no one else's, in this world or after it — F.D.

She read it twice, and then again a third time, until she had memorised every word. And then she folded it and tucked it against her heart, because she could not answer it yet.

She had sent one note at dawn, and here was his reply not four hours later. If she sent another now, and he another, and she another, then something would be made of it. There would be notes, streams of notes, a courier from Mayfair at the Gracechurch door thrice a day, and an aunt already sharp with curiosity. She could not write to him whenever her heart demanded it, which was every hour. She would have to ration him. She would have to be seen to have a correspondent, no more — a simple friend she met in Spain — and dole out her own husband to herself in careful doses like precious medicine.

She could not even settle to her mother's letter now. The bright, easy laughter of ten minutes ago had gone somewhere she could not reach it. So, instead of returning to the half-begun Dearest Mama letter, she rose and went to find the children.

Marianne was alone in the nursery, gravely conducting a tea-party for three dolls and a wooden horse. She smiled when Elizabeth stood at the door, and invited her to attend as a fifth guest. Elizabeth sat on the floor and drank imaginary tea and admired the dolls and let the ordinary sweetness of it soothe her a little. After all, there was something enchanting about the warm, undemanding company of a child who wanted nothing from her but that she hold the cup correctly and agree that the horse might have cake.

Marianne had taken Elizabeth's hand to guide the cup to the right doll, and she stopped, turned the hand over, and studied her finger.

“Cousin Lizzy, your finger is green.”

Elizabeth looked down. The faint band of it was still there, stubborn, where the ring had sat — greener, if anything, than yesterday, the brass having sunk its mark well into the skin. She had scrubbed at it in the bath last night and it had not gone. It would want days, and lard, and patience.

“So it is,” she said lightly. “It is nothing, sweetheart. Only the mark of a cheap little trinket I wore travelling — brass, you see, not gold, and brass will leave its colour on you if you wear it long enough. It will wash off in a day or two.”