Page 175 of Faceless

“Lizzy.” Mrs Gardiner slid down from the arm of the chair and knelt on the rug at Elizabeth’s feet, which was a thing Elizabeth had never seen her aunt do in her life. She took both of Elizabeth’s hands in her own.

“Listen to me. You shall be equal to it. Whatever you are required to be equal to, you shall be. I have known you for twenty-one years, and I have seen you rise to a great many things, and I should not undertake to predict the limits of you. If it falls to you to tell that child about his father, you shall tell him, and you shall tell him better than you presently think you can, because you will have years in which to learn the words for it, and you will have all of us helping you find them. I will help you. Your uncle, Jane, the colonel, even the earl, I fancy. We shall pool what we know, and you shall not have to do it alone. You have always been clever with words, and you will be clever when you have to be. Am I quite understood?”

Elizabeth swallowed the hard knot in her throat and swiped again at her eyes with the handkerchief. “Yes.”

“Good. I shall not say it again. I dislike paying compliments, and you dislike receiving them, and we have, mercifully, never required them between us. I shall return to it only if you forget that I have said it once.”

Elizabeth laughed, briefly, against the handkerchief. It came out broken. “Please, Aunt, divert my mind elsewhere. Tell me of Coleman Street and what Lydia’s letters have said, and how Uncle’s warehouse is doing presently. Tell me about any of it.”

“That is why I have come. Drink the tea your housekeeper is presently bringing, and I will tell you.”

Mrs Hatchett put the tea on the small table at Elizabeth’s elbow and withdrew without remark. Elizabeth poured for them both. Her aunt waited until she had taken a swallow before she began.

“Your name continues to be spoken well of. I should like you to know it. The papers Pemberton has reached have done their part. The Bingleys’ set in Bedford Square has been forming a settled opinion, which Caroline Bingley has not managed to disturb, having attempted at three different dinners in March and been politely set down at all of them. Your uncle has heard her named with the kind of pity that finishes a woman in the City within two seasons. I should not pretend that gives me no satisfaction. It is a wonder to me that anyone will still receive her brother, but I suppose his loyalties have been declared differently to hers.

“I mention it because it shows you the case. Many are split, but the City has formed a view largely favourable to you — and so to your husband. The men who will sit on his jury have been hearing of Mrs Darcy at their dinner tables, their wives whispering of you in the salons for two months, and none of it has been Sterling’s account of ruin and deceit.”

Elizabeth knotted the handkerchief. “What have they been hearing about me?”

“That you were promised, against your will, to a man whose temper was known in three counties and whose hand was not safe to any woman set in his way. That your sister had been promised to the same kind of arrangement and had narrowly escaped. That Mr Darcy of Pemberley, even while in hiding, heard of your situation and put aside his own safety to remove you from it, and married you under conditions he had not chosen, but judged the only ones in which he could keep you alive.

“The City does not, on the whole, accept romance easily. It has, in your case, made an exception. The wives of London have taken your part, Lizzy, so now Mr Sterling’s counsel has been competing against the only story the merchant class likes better than a fraud exposed, which is a young woman rescued from a brute by a gentleman of feeling.”

Elizabeth drew a slow breath. “Let us hope it is enough that London’s female population finds me curious.”

“Not only the wives. Your uncle is hearing the same thing in his coffeehouse and at the Exchange and at his Friday club, which I believe is the most reliable measure of public sentiment in the City. The phrase he heard yesterday, from a man he has not seen socially in three years, was that he hoped Mr Darcy’s barrister was as clever as the wife was reported to be. I gather it was meant as a compliment to both of you.”

“He said that?”

“He said that. Your uncle had it from him at Cornhill, in front of two witnesses, neither of whom contradicted him.”

Elizabeth set down her tea.

Until her aunt said it, she had not known how much of the last few weeks she had spent imagining that her work had been wasted. The confinement, in its daily texture, had been an erasure. She had imagined the rooms she had sat in going quiet behind her, the names she had been introduced to forgetting hers, the ground she had built trampled by Sterling’s men. She had not been able to tell whether she was imagining it correctly. She had not been able to ask. The earl’s reports had been administrative; her uncle’s letters had been kind; nothing had told her plainly whether the work had survived her absence.

It had survived. Her aunt was sitting in front of her, telling her so.

“Thank you.”

“You are not to thank me. I have only brought you a piece of news. You did the work.”

“I had not been certain it was still there to do.”

“It is. It will be there on the morning of the trial. I cannot promise what it shall produce on that morning, but I can promise that it shall be there. You have not been wasting your afternoons in this house.”

Elizabeth pressed her hand against her own cheek briefly and turned her face towards the fire. She did not, for a moment, trust herself to look at her aunt.

“Tell me of my mother.”

Mrs Gardiner sighed with the affection of having prepared the answer to this question all the way from her drawing room.

“Your mother is in tolerable health. She is, I have to tell you, exceedingly cross.”

“With me?”

“With everyone. The cross has settled on you in the past fortnight because the rest of us have refused to satisfy her on the question of when she may call on her daughter at the earl’s house, which she now considers her daughter’s house, and which she has, in the last week, twice referred to in my hearing as the Pemberley townhouse, which I have not corrected because correcting your mother is, as you know, an undertaking with no observable return.”

Elizabeth laughed brokenly. “Oh, Mama! She probably thinks I do nothing but ride about in carriages and think myself too fine for her now.”