Page 125 of Homeless

“Elizabeth —”

“You must let me go now, Fitzwilliam, or I shall not be able to do it at all, and then we shall both have made a scene on a wharf for nothing.”

So, he pulled his hat a little lower over his eyes and handed her up. For the length of that touch, her hand gripped his hard enough to hurt, and then she was in and seated, and he shut the door.

Through the open window, she looked out at him. She made herself smile — a small, crooked, valiant thing — and he stepped back and lifted his hand. The driver clicked his tongue, and the carriage pulled away into the churning traffic of the wharf-road and was, within a dozen yards, indistinguishable from every other carriage in London. Gone, swallowed, carrying his whole heart away up Gracechurch Street to another man's house while he stood on the stones and watched it go.

He stood there longer than he should have. A man who did not wish to be remarked did not stand rooted on a wharf staring after a hired coach. He made himself turn. He made himself walk up the lane, and raise his hand for another cab, and give his own direction — Grosvenor Square, the words strange in his mouth after so long. He climbed in alone, into a coach that smelled of other men's tobacco, and sat back against the cracked leather with his hat in his hands and his wife driving away east while he was carried west.

The ring was still on her hand.

Elizabeth had not thought of it before, when she was standing on the pier with him. She had already been wearing her gloves, and it was such a part of her hand now that she had forgot it entirely. Now, she pulled her left glove off and spread her fingers to stare at the small, shining thing that had marked her as his since Estella.

To take it off seemed the worst sort of betrayal. But to keep wearing it…

She sucked air into her lungs — she suddenly had need of it — and eased it off her finger. There was a faint green ring in her skin where it had sat. Elizabeth flexed her fingers, made a fist, and studied her hand in the light. There would be no hiding that. Not for some days, not without scrubbing with lye or lard or whatever took off brass stains from fingers.

Well, perhaps that was fitting. She could put off the trappings, hide the shining, obvious bits, but the truth lay underneath. She belonged to Fitzwilliam Darcy and that cheap ring. The marriage neither of them meant to endure had marked them both, and she could not find it in her to be sorry. If her aunt saw it and asked questions… well, she would find an answer for them, too.

The cab turned into Gracechurch Street a little after one in the afternoon, and Elizabeth pressed her face near to the glass and watched the familiar houses come up one after another like faces in a half-forgotten dream.

She had not known, until she saw it, how afraid she had been that it would be changed — that some catastrophe would have swept over this street, too, while she was gone, that the world she had left in May could not possibly have gone on standing while hers was burned to the ground in Spain. But it had gone on standing. There was the corn-chandler's on the corner, and the railings she knew, and the same soot on the same bricks, and a maid she half recognised beating a rug behind Mrs Smithson’s house, and it was all so exactly unchanged, so stubbornly ordinary, that it almost made Spain vanish from reality with every cobblestone. Nothing here knew what had happened to her. Nothing here had heard of Tudela, or Vitoria, or a priest in Burgos, or a copper bath in Santander.

And then came the house — her uncle's house, tall and narrow and dear, the brass on the door that her aunt was so particular about, the nursery windows on the second floor. She was out of the cab almost before it stopped, begging the driver to hurry with her sea-chest, and then she was up the steps and knocking.

The maid who opened the door did not know her for a moment. Elizabeth understood why — she was still thin, brown from the Spanish sun, in a gown no one in this house had ever seen. After a few seconds, the girl’s face altered with recognition, and she gave a small shriek. “Oh, miss! Come in, come in, Miss Lizzy. Ma’am! Come and see, it’s Miss Lizzy!”

Elizabeth moved into the hall, and there was a clatter on the stairs, and her aunt came down them at a run with her cap askew and her face already breaking.

“Lizzy? Lizzy! Oh, thank Heaven!”

They came together hard enough to stagger. Her aunt's arms were around her, trembling in a way that would have done Mrs Bennet proud. Mrs Gardiner was sobbing, bubbling her name over and over into her hair as though the repetition might make it truer. Elizabeth held on and shut her eyes and let herself, for one moment, simply be home, be held by someone who had loved her since she was a child and asked nothing of her but that she be alive.

“You are here. You are here. Oh, my dear, we had your letter from… from some dreadful place, weeks and weeks ago, and then nothing, nothing at all, not another word from anyone, and I did not know —” Her aunt pulled back to hold her at arm's length and look at her, and her face crumpled at what she saw. “Oh, Lizzy. Look at you. You are so thin! What have they done to you? What on earth happened? Can you possibly be well, truly —”

“I am well, Aunt.” She took her aunt's face in both her hands. “I am well. I promise you, there is nothing to worry about for me. I am very tired, but I am well, and I am safe, and I am home, and you are not to look at me like that, or you will have us both in pieces on the floor of the hall.”

It did not answer, of course. Nothing answered the first time. Her aunt wept, and Elizabeth held her, and she was obliged to repeat it again — I am safe, I am well, I am here — and again when they had got themselves into the parlour, and again when the tea came and her aunt's hands shook too badly to pour it so that Elizabeth poured it herself, and again after that, half a dozen times over the first half hour, because grief and relief did not listen to reason. She did not mind the telling. She had said harder things fewer times and been believed too quickly.

Finally, she asked the question that had been haunting her since June.

“Have you had any word of my uncle?”

Her aunt only shook her head and pressed her handkerchief to her mouth. “No. No word from my Edward. There was only the one dreadful letter in his own hand back in the summer, the one that went directly to his trading house naming the ransom.”

The clerk, she said, had been good enough to show it to her, to bring it personally so she might see her husband’s dear hand, but then he had taken it back and promised that the matter would be managed with all expediency. And she had been a menace to him weekly, begging for any word, but there had never been anything to learn.

“Is he even alive, Lizzy?” Her aunt clasped Elizabeth’s hand and stared with those earnest, open eyes, the tears standing ready to fall. “Oh, my poor Edward, surely beaten and alone. Who knows that he might not be ailing and Lord knows what else —”

“He is living. I am sure of it, and I have reason to believe that his case is further along than you have been able to see from here. I have been… I have been in company these three months with people who understand a great deal about such matters. About captives, and ransoms, and how they are truly resolved. The thing being done is the right thing — if his people at the warehouse took the matter in hand and filed the papers where they should be, then matters are being attended to. Slowly, but attended to. I was assured again, only a few days ago, that men taken in this war are being brought home, Aunt. It is a known business. There is every reason to hope, and to keep hoping.”

“You were in safe company, then,” her aunt said, searching her face. “Your letter said as much, but I had not trusted it when you did not come back when you believed you might. I fancied so many things! A young woman, alone —”

“I was never alone.”

That much was true. There had always been a man’s hand to take, a man's arm around her in the night, a man putting his own back to the load to spare her, a man handing her into a carriage on a wharf an hour ago with his heart breaking behind his eyes. “I was in the safest company I could have been in. I was looked after, Aunt, better than you can imagine, by… by good people, who saw me the whole way home. You are not to worry on that account. Not for a moment.”

Her aunt looked at her a moment longer, as if she still could not believe it. Elizabeth had some trouble in not blinking, not letting her gaze slide away. Her aunt had known her too long, and could certainly sense that Elizabeth was not telling her everything, which would only frighten her all over again. She tried thinking of what else she might say to lighten the matter, but then a wail started up from the floor above, thin and cross and unmistakable, and Elizabeth's heart turned right over.