Page 143 of Homeless

The floor came up. He watched it coming, in a distant, lucid way, the tilt completing itself at last. There was Georgiana's cry and Jeffries's lunge and the ring still shut in his fist where he would not, even falling, let it go. He got out one more thing, or thought he did — her name, only her name — and then the narrowing light drew down to a point and went out.

LVII

The Price of Nothing

He did not come.

She could not think why he should, but she could not reason herself out of hoping for it. Some part of her had been braced all evening and then through the night for the knock. For the carriage in Gracechurch Street at an unseemly hour, for his voice below, for Fitzwilliam Darcy on her aunt's doorstep with her letter crushed in his fist, refusing to be refused, coming to argue and command and beg her out of it, as she had been certain he would. She had lain down last night in readiness for a siege, because she knew him, and he was not a man to accept a sealed dismissal and a returned ring and go quietly to bed.

And he had not come.

The morning was perfectly ordinary. No carriage had come in the night. No note had come with the early post. There was no sign anywhere in the world that Fitzwilliam Darcy had received, yesterday, a letter that gave him back his freedom and his ring. No sign that it had moved him at all. It had gone into his hands and produced nothing but silence.

She stared at the ceiling and tried to be glad of it.

He was being sensible, she told herself. For once in his stubborn life, he was sensible. She had begged him, in the letter, to let her go cleanly — to take the rescue, to spare them both the scene, to be reasonable — and he had done exactly that, and it was the best possible outcome. He had understood. Agreed. He was, at this moment, no doubt already turning his mind to the practical business of his salvation, to Marchwood and the bank and the future she had cleared for him, exactly as a sensible man should.

It hurt so much she could hardly breathe.

She had not expected that — had not budgeted for how it would feel to be taken at her word. She had braced for the fight and steeled herself to win it, to hold firm through his arguments and send him away for his own good, and she had never once let herself imagine that he might simply go.

How many times had she tried to unmarry this man? Perhaps even Fitzwilliam Darcy’s stubbornness had its limits. Perhaps he truly had enough of her nonsense, after all.

She refused to account for how long she lay there, curled around her pillow and screaming into her mattress, wetting it with her tears and making her stomach ill. No one would care. Her aunt was likely in her own room doing the same thing, both broken and pitying themselves over the men they had loved.

After a long while — too long, to be quite honest — she rose. She dressed with more than her usual care, and went to the small store of cosmetics her aunt kept and had pressed on her more than once: a little powder over the sunken cheeks, a salve on her swollen lids, a little something to take down the redness. She studied the result in the glass. It would do. She did not look well, but neither did she look as pitiful as she had.

She would call on the Earl of Marchwood this morning.

The thought of it turned her stomach. To go, herself, to that man — the man whose valley had cost her marriage, the man whose daughter was to be her replacement — and to stand in his house and ask him for a favour. He might be inclined to grant a favour if she asked prettily enough, if he only saw Miss Elizabeth Bennet, a gentlewoman whose uncle now languished, freed by payment and trapped by circumstance, in territory his own government would not enter to retrieve him.

He might refuse her — very likely, he would refuse her; she had no leverage, no claim, nothing but the justice of it and her own persuasive tongue — but he might not, and she could not afford to leave any door untried.

And she must go soon. That was what got her out of bed and into her bonnet, the thing that would not let her sit and nurse her raw, stupid hurt. She must make this call before Darcy made his. For Darcy would go to Marchwood — she had sent him to Marchwood, had begged him to go — and she could not, under any circumstances, be in that house when he came.

There was, in the end, a kind of mercy in the day. If he had come last night and fought her, she would be spent this morning, wrung out, in no state to do anything but weep. Instead, he had let her go, sensibly, as she had asked, and left her the strength and the clear morning to do what she must. She told herself that his silence was a gift.

She almost believed it.

Marchwood House stood on Grosvenor Street, tall and pale and formidable, and Elizabeth stood on the pavement before it for a moment, gathering herself. She had never in her life presented herself, uninvited and unknown, at the door of an earl, and everything in her upbringing told her it could not be done. But Viscount Bramwell had said it could. The earl received callers, he said, that a person with business of the kind that interested him might apply to speak with him.

And she had nothing to lose that she had not already lost, so she went up the steps and knocked.

She expected to be turned away. If it happened, at least it would let her feel she had tried, and go home, and not have to look the man in the eye. But after a short wait in a cold marble hall, the footman returned and said his lordship would see her, and her heart, which she had steeled for refusal, lurched into her throat instead.

He received her in a handsome, book-lined room, and was already on his feet to meet her. He was perhaps fifty, well-made, silver at the temples, with a pleasant, unremarkable face and a manner of great ease — a man entirely comfortable in his own consequence, who had nothing to prove and therefore no need to be anything but gracious. He came round the desk, bowed over her hand, and showed her to a chair.

“Miss Bennet.” He resumed his seat and folded his hands and gave her his whole pleasant attention. “You have business touching Spain, my man tells me. It is a subject I know something of — rather more than I could wish, these last years. How may I be of service to you?”

She had rehearsed it, but it still came out in something of a breathless rush. She did manage to say all the particulars, and was careful not to utter one word of herself.

He shifted in his chair, made notes on a paper, and said, “Go on,” when she had got to the end of the known facts.

“My lord, we have been given very little hope that any further effort will be undertaken on his behalf. It seems the general hope is that he will simply be permitted to walk out of the northern mountains and find his way to a British liaison officer, alive and in health enough to board a ship for home, assuming someone will help to arrange his passage and his papers. But how is he to find his way into British hands? We have been given no assurances that he is even at liberty, let alone given safe conduct.”

The earl had turned his pen over and was flicking the end of it, a habit of thought. He finally put the pen away and straightened in his chair.

“Edward Gardiner,” he said. “Yes. I know the case. Wine merchant, taken in… Tudela, if memory serves. Ah, yes, you said by Vega. Of course.”