Page 130 of Homeless

Elizabeth glanced at her aunt. News? She leaned forward. “What is it?”

Copeland moved an inkwell on his desk to a place he liked better, and then moved it back. Elizabeth swallowed. That seemed… ominous.

“There has been word,” he said. “Since you were last here, Mrs Gardiner. I would have sent to you, but I had reason to think it wanted saying in person, and gently.”

Her aunt's hand found Elizabeth's. “He is not…” Mrs Gardiner could not finish it. “Tell me he is living, Mr Copeland. Only tell me that.”

“He was living, ma'am, at the last we heard.” Copeland touched the corner of a paper on his desk, squaring the edge with the line of his writing surface, though it was already quite neat. “But the rest of the news was not encouraging. There are two things, and I shall give them to you plain, because you are not women who want them sugared.” He drew a breath and steepled his fingers on his desk. “The first is that the demand was raised, rather significantly.”

“More?” Her aunt's voice went thin.

“Indeed. The demand was put up to ten thousand pounds.”

Mrs Gardiner nearly swooned, and her knuckles went white on Elizabeth’s. “But… but… how are we to —”

“That part you are not to distress yourself over.” Copeland said firmly, with an odd glance towards Elizabeth. “The house has resources in hand.”

“I… I know there are resources, Mr Copeland, but I do not understand,” Mrs Gardiner protested. “I thought it was said that four thousand was already outrageous and a tremendous blow to the house’s account books, and that it took all the shareholders to agree, which was not —”

“We can manage more than you know of, ma'am, and I'll say no more than that, except that the increase has already been met. Some weeks ago, truthfully.”

“Weeks ago! But how —”

“I had not informed you at the time, Mrs Gardiner, because it did not require your concern and because the matter was so tidily in hand when the sum was required to be sent that we did not wish to frighten you with it. It was done some while ago by the proper channels, and we expect good news soon.”

Elizabeth narrowed her eyes. She could not for the life of her see how a trading house that had strained and debated on how to cut four thousand out of its capital could suddenly, easily, meet a demand raised so far past it without turning a hair. Copeland was a truthful man, but he was not a man who could conjure thousands out of the air. Something did not add up.

“If the money is not the trouble,” she asked cautiously, “then what is? And why are you telling us about it now?”

Copeland looked at her. “I wished to prepare you both for the sorts of tactics… We are not negotiating with honourable individuals, Miss Bennet.”

“I know that better than either of you can,” Elizabeth said impatiently. “They have not… not threatened his life, have they? Or even…” She could not make herself say tortured. Could not repeat what Ferrers had said about sending a man’s finger back to his family.

“Not to my knowledge, Miss Bennet, but I am certain that you are better acquainted than I with the… ah… the ordinary discomforts of travel —”

“What is it?” she demanded.

“The word is that Mr Gardiner is ill.”

Elizabeth stared, and forgot, for a moment, to draw breath.

Copeland tapped his fingers on the desk. “We are not told what sort of illness. We had word of it yesterday, that he had taken a complaint of some sort, and was low with it, and that… that time was not on our side to manage the extradition.”

Her aunt made a broken sound and pressed her handkerchief to her mouth. Elizabeth put an arm around her and held her, and managed to mumble several reassuring things — there now, we are doing everything, he is strong, he has always been strong. But the words she uttered came from very far away, because the word fever had shot into her like a splinter of ice, and was working its way toward her heart.

Copeland looked grave enough to have some grasp of it, but even he could not fully understand what it was. Her aunt heard “illness” and thought fever, which to her meant a sickbed and a doctor and broth and a cool cloth, of illness as it was known in a warm London house with money and care and a physician a street away.

But in the mountains, with no doctor and no medicine about, fever was a man on a pallet in a bare room, if he were very lucky. Fever was a body burning itself down to nothing over days… not weeks, but days… while the people who loved the person in the body could do nothing but change the linen and pray. She knew, as her aunt could not, exactly how a fever went in a place with no bark and no nursing and no mercy, and how fast, and how often it won. Her uncle was in a mountain gaol with men who did not care whether he lived except as it touched his price, which had already been sent and was now beyond negotiation. There was no Padre Ignacio for him, no one to sit through the crash and the false dawn and drag him back by main will. He could be dead already. He could be dying now, this hour, while she sat in a dusty office and held her aunt and said soothing lies.

Or he might not be ill at all.

The thought came cold on the heels of the first, and it was almost worse, because she knew this too, from her education of the road — that men who dealt in captives dealt also in fear, and that a fever was a very convenient thing for a captor to report if he wished to find a way to extort more. He is ill, he needs medicine, be quick, send more. Indeed, nothing emptied a frightened family's purse faster than the belief that delay meant death. It might be true. It might be a lever. It might be both — a real fever, seized upon and made the most of. And there was no way to know which from London; no way to reach across a sea and put her hand to her uncle's forehead and learn whether he burned.

“Did they say,” she asked, “why the demand was raised in the first place? From four thousand to ten, that is… rather a lot. Men do not generally raise a price without a reason they think good, and I wonder if they mean to raise it again. Are we to expect another such demand?”

Copeland's careful eyes flicked to her, and she saw that she had asked a sharper question than her aunt would have thought to ask.

“Nothing certain,” he said slowly. “These things come to us third hand at best, Miss Bennet, through the correspondent at the coast and the man he deals with. Much is lost in the passing. But the sense of it…” He turned a pen on his desk, his eyes falling. “The sense of it was that they had come to believe him a richer prize than they first took him for. That there had been interest shown in him. Inquiries. An English gentleman, it was said, had been seen asking after him, some while back, in the town where he was first held, and then again in places I have not been advised of. A person of means, by the account, and not alone. And they took from that, I suppose, that a man with such friends could be squeezed harder than a plain Cheapside merchant. But that may be no more than a rumour.”