Page 112 of Homeless

He had half expected it — she had not slept well in days, and the good bed and the warm room had taken her down at last into a real sleep, deep enough that she did not stir when he opened the door. She lay on top of the coverlet, still dressed, as though she had meant only to rest her eyes and been ambushed by her own exhaustion. One hand lay open on the pillow beside her face, and in sleep, the barrier and refusal and worthless, noble dignity that made her think rejection was a kindness were all gone out of her. What was left was only Elizabeth — tired and dirty, and so dear to him that he had to stand a moment inside the door and simply master himself before he could move.

He crossed the room quietly and unwrapped the gown, then laid it out on the bed beside her, over the coverlet, where her eyes would find it the moment she opened them — the soft green spread out careful and smoothed, the shawl and stockings folded at its side.

Then he drew the chair to the window and waited for her to wake. He spent an hour, perhaps more, watching the harbour go pink and gold as the afternoon wore down, guarding his sleeping wife. The green gown lay between them like the ghost of a girl in a Hertfordshire ballroom, back before either of them had learned how much there was to lose.

She woke as the light was going.

He saw the moment it happened — the change in her breathing, the small frown, the way her mouth worked against the thickness of her tongue after a sleep that had left her too incapacitated to even swallow. He held still in his chair by the window and did not speak, because he did not want to be the first thing she saw.

She came up out of sleep by degrees. She stirred a little, swiped at her cheeks, and when her hand strayed senselessly back to the coverlet, it found the green muslin spread out there. She moved it once, tousling the fabric as a little crease appeared over the bridge of her nose, and she opened bleary eyes to stare at it.

For a moment, she only looked at it without comprehension. She kept blinking, as if that might resolve the gown into simply a blanket, or another piece of the furnishings. Then she understood what it was, and sat up a little. She lifted the sleeve, her thumb working over the edge of the lace, and then her head swivelled about to search the room until she found him.

She asked no questions. Her hand strayed into the fabric, and the crease in her brow had deepened from confusion to some more precarious feeling.

Darcy cleared his throat. “It may want taking in,” he said, when the silence had gone on long enough that he could not bear it. “We can have someone come up to help you fit it. It should… I think it will fit around the… the top. You may decide that it flows well enough from there, but if you like, we can… Well. I am sure you know more of what is needed than I do.”

She was looking down at the gown, and not at him. He saw her throat move.

“I like the colour.” She smoothed the muslin with the flat of her hand. “I had one very like it, years ago. I wore it half to pieces.”

“I know,” he said, before he could stop himself, and then wished he had not, because it gave him away — that he had noticed, all those years ago, what she wore; that he had carried the memory of it through everything; that in a foreign shop with a hundred gowns, he had reached for the one that was her. He looked away, out at the harbour going dark. “That is — I only meant that… well, it seemed the sort of thing you would like.”

She did not answer for a moment. And when he made himself look back at her, she was smiling — small, and shy, a smile he had not seen from her in several days. “Thank you, Fitzwilliam. It is… it is very kind. It is exactly right.”

He let himself admire that smile for a moment, bask in whatever slight warmth she would let herself offer, before he ruined it with business.

“There is something else.” He rose and went to pour her the water that stood on the washstand, because he needed a thing to do with his hands. “I went down to the harbour to ask after our passage. There is none to be had this week, or likely next.” He handed her the cup. “But I encountered someone I had known a little at school — Harcourt; you will not have heard the name, there is no reason you should. He is settled here on some business, I know not all the details, but he is the sort of man who knows everyone and arranges everything, and he has asked us to dine with him tomorrow evening.”

Her face took on the shadow he had expected to see — the instinctive withdrawal, the marshalling of a refusal. A dinner. Strangers. Society, when she was worn to the bone and heartsore and had not even considered trying to be sociable.

“Fitzwilliam, I do not think —”

“Hear me first. Harcourt is not merely a garrulous fellow with a good table, though he is certainly both. He has some place in the government's foreign business. He has for years. He moves in exactly the world where our affairs will be decided — the claim, and your uncle's ransom, and the whole question of how a thing is truly pressed at the Foreign Office once it reaches London. I do not know what happens to a claim once it goes into the channel, or what truly moves a captive's case, or whom one must reach, or how. I have been guessing, but here is a man who knows all of it, or at least some of it. Harcourt could tell us in one evening what I have failed to learn in a hundred anterooms.”

He saw the very spark of calculation he had expected. The strategist in her, the merchant's niece, the woman who had frightened a bond-office into finding a lost record — she could no more resist a source of real intelligence than she could resist correcting a false sum. The withdrawal in her face was giving way to something else, something sharper and more interested, and he pressed his advantage.

“For your uncle's sake alone, it is worth an evening,” he said. “You have wanted, this whole way, to know how you might help him. Here is a man who can tell you. I mean to go, Elizabeth — with you or without you. We cannot afford to leave such a thing unlearned merely because I am poor company just now. So I shall go, and I will bring you back whatever I can make of it, but you would make more of it than I could. You always do. You hear the real structure under facing.”

It was, he knew even as he said it, not entirely fair. He had wrapped a dare inside the grace of it, calling himself the one who was poor company just now. And she, who had never in her life backed down from a challenge or let pride keep her from a useful thing, would pluck up her courage and prove she could sit an evening across a table from him. He was not proud of the manoeuvre. He only wanted, badly, not to walk into that house alone; wanted her beside him one more time as his wife before England came and she began, in earnest, the work of ceasing to be Mrs Darcy. If it took a small unfairness to get her there, he was willing to be a little unfair.

She narrowed her eyes at him. He could see her sorting the dare folded inside the reason, realising exactly what he had done, and he braced for her to call him on it.

She did not. Perhaps she was too tired. Perhaps the intelligence was bait she truly could not refuse. Perhaps — he did not let himself hope it — she wanted, as he did, one more evening of standing beside him before the end.

“I will come,” she said. She looked down at the green gown across her lap and smoothed it once more. “For my uncle. And for your claim. Not…” She closed her eyes, made a smiling sort of grimace, and then lifted her shoulders. “You know.”

“For your uncle,” he agreed. “And the claim.”

“I think the waist may serve,” she said, her hand caressing the fabric again. “It is not meant to be fitted tight over my stomach, anyway. But it is several inches too long, so if the woman of the house has a needle, perhaps I need not go looking as though I have borrowed Lydia's gown.”

He permitted the softest huff of amusement. There she was. Somewhere under all that armour, his Elizabeth was still there. “You will look…” he said, and stopped, because beautiful was not a word he had the right to spend just now, and like yourself was nearer the truth and more than he could say, “… very well,” he finished.

XLIV

Intelligence

The Harcourts kept a house on the good side of the town, above the harbor, with candles in the windows and a servant to take their cloaks. Elizabeth walked into it on her husband's arm and decided within the first ten steps that she had made a mistake.