Page 47 of Mr. Darcy’s Victorious Bride

"After we brought you home, I told Mr. Darcy I would look on the shipping side." He set down the knife. His voice stayed level, the merchant's voice, and that was how she knew what it cost. "I looked. That ship had sailed for Bombay before. More than once."

The room went very quiet.

"I found the sailings in the port ledgers. I have done business enough with India to know what that trade was. I have the dates, and I have nothing else. No paper names a woman. No man will say how many went." He stopped and drew a breath. "The women aboard her the night we found you were taken off, thank God. The women on the earlier sailings were never traced. I never saw their faces, Lizzy. I have only the dates. I have carried them ever since."

Elizabeth sat with her hands around the warmth of nothing, for she had no cup, and let it land.

She had known it, and had refused to look at it. Braithwaite's trade had not been invented for her. The iron cuff had come to her ankle already worn smooth with use. She had been the one who was taken back, and somewhere on the far side of the world were women who had not been, because no one had ridden through the night for them. "Why tell me now?" she asked. Not accusing. Wanting the answer.

"Because on Monday some clever man in a silk gown will try to make this trial about one gentleman and one lady and one regrettable quarrel." Her uncle looked at her. "And I thought you ought to walk in there knowing whom else you speak for."

Elizabeth reached across the table and gripped his hand. They sat like that until the candle guttered. Then she kissed his cheek and went up.

A housemaid was waiting on the landing, half-dressed, holding a letter and an apology. "Begging your pardon, ma'am. A messenger came to the kitchen door, not a quarter hour past. Said it were urgent legal correspondence for Mrs. Darcy, for the proceedings, and must go up tonight." The girl twisted her apron. "He were dressed like a clerk, ma'am. I never thought."

"You did nothing wrong. Go to bed."

A clerk, at the kitchen door, at one in the morning? Elizabeth did not want to wake him with it. She carried the letter into her aunt's little sitting room and set the candle on the table. The seal was unmarked. The direction was written in a hand she did not know, small and even.

The letter inside was in the same small, even hand, a clerk's hand. The voice was not. She had heard that unhurried courtesy in the dark, and she knew it before the first line was done.

Madam,

A friend writes, who wishes you well and has no wish to be known.

Tomorrow you are to stand before the Lords. That room will want every particular, told plainly before three hundred gentlemen and every newspaper in London.

It is said in some drawing rooms that your nerves have not recovered. Should they fail you in that room, you will have proved it before all England. Physicians will be consulted. There are quiet establishments in the country for ladies whose nerves have failed. Their families call it kindness. The ladies are seldom seen again.

Your sisters are unmarried. What will the county say of them then?

A lady who is unwell may be excused. No one would think the less of you for it.

The mist came up at the edges of the room.

It came the way it always came, from the floor, from the corners, carrying smoke and damp stone. The candle flame stretched and swam. Low on her back the old scar woke and burned hot and raw. Her breath went high and small. The table was very far away and then very close.

She sat down on the sofa.

In through the nose. Out through the mouth. The cushion beside her was worked in rows of small flowers. Elizabeth put her finger on one flower and followed the row, the way Jane had taught her. She followed it one stitched flower at a time, until the room was a room again. The smoke was only a tallow candle wanting trimming.

Then she read the letter again.

Then she read it a third time, and this reading was different. Her hands had stopped shaking, and she had begun to hear it. Establishments. Somebody had carried Caroline Bingley's word from a Netherfield library all the way to a cell. Underneath all that kind concern, what was the letter asking her?

He was in a cell. He had spent his solicitor, a bought clerk in Thornton's office, and a man on a fence in Hertfordshire. Every one of his moves had failed. And now, on the last night, the man who had once sent ivory earrings by liveried footman was reduced to buying a kitchen-door messenger to ask, behind all that borrowed kindness: please, madam, do not come tomorrow.

And he had misjudged her! An hour ago, at a deal table by a banked fire, her uncle had told her about the women on those ships. The letter asked her to think of her nerves and her sisters. Her uncle had given her other women to think of. "You are too late!" she said aloud, to the letter, in the empty room. "He got there first."

She went upstairs and sat on the edge of the bed. She put her hand on his shoulder, and he woke at once, the way he always woke now. His face went from sleep to fear in the time it took him to say, "Elizabeth."

"No one is hurt. I must show you a thing, and you must hold on to yourself while I do it."

She gave him the letter. She watched him read it.

His hands began to shake. She had seen her husband angry before. She had seen his fist close in a garden, and had flinched from it. She had never seen this. The paper trembled. His knuckles went white and bloodless. When he reached the end, Fitzwilliam stood entirely still for a moment. Then he set the letter on the coverlet with terrible gentleness. Fitzwilliam rose and turned toward the door. He meant to walk to the jail that very minute and⁠—

"Fitzwilliam."