Page 136 of Homeless

One more day could not put him off so very much. Perhaps even two. He had enough on his shoulders just now, if his note from yesterday was any indication, and she would not take that hope from him so soon, when he had lost every other one.

So she sat with the pen a long while, and in the end she wrote him something ordinary — that she was well, that she had slept, that she abhorred his empty pillow every morning, that she hoped his business went more kindly than his last note had allowed; a few affectionate lines that told him how much she missed him, how she was hoping to meet his sister soon, and that she was expecting a call from her uncle’s clerk later. She folded it, sealed it, and gave it to the maid for the messenger to collect it when he came at half-past three.

Mr Copeland came at eleven, and Elizabeth knew by his face, the moment she saw him in the hall, that he had not come to bring comfort.

Her aunt offered to take his hat, which he declined, then invited him into the parlour with tea he would not touch. Elizabeth sat beside her aunt on the sofa and folded her hands.

“I'll not keep you in suspense,” Copeland said, “for that would be unkind, and there's no kindness to be had here whatever way I put it. There has been a further report. It came through the same channel as the packet I sent round to Miss Bennet yesterday.”

Mrs Gardiner turned. “Packet, Lizzy?”

Elizabeth smiled tightly. She had not told her aunt about the letter. It had come to her, addressed to her, and it had not seemed that her uncle meant for his wife to read yet that he might not come home, until the thing was assured. She had spared her aunt all of it, because she could not see what good it would do to break her heart just yet.

“Oh, just some leftover business with the wine factor in Navarre, Aunt. Nothing of any real importance.”

“Oh.” Mrs Gardiner turned back to Mr Copeleand, who had, most certainly, caught Elizabeth’s fib, but was good enough not to call her out.

“Yes, well, I've had a day to know it and no way to make it easier for having known.” He turned his hat once in his hands. “You'll remember, ma'am, that the house had made application — that beyond the matter of the money, which is in hand, we had petitioned the government to lend its weight. To press the Spanish authorities and help see Mr Gardiner safe out and home, once terms were met.” He paused, then set his hat very carefully on his knee. “That application has been answered.”

“Oh?” said her aunt, on a rising note, hope and dread together. “Oh, and —”

“It has been declined, ma'am.”

Mrs Gardiner did not speak, but her hands began to tremble. She tried to draw a breath, but it only shook her shoulders.

“They are very sorry.” Copeland continued. “The letter is all courtesy. His Majesty's government is cautious about intervening in the matter of a private subject taken for ransom. It is not that they do not take an interest — they do, most certainly keep an account of the matter — but their interest does not extend to incursions into the mountains after captive men, the arranging of transport and travelling monies. Such cases must, they regret, take their ordinary course; the resources of the office cannot be extended to the — I have it near by heart, I've read it enough — to the particular relief of individuals, however deserving.”

“They… they will do nothing?”

Copeland toyed with his hat again and would not look up as he spoke. “They have already done all they say they mean to, ma’am. The matter has been negotiated, the money sent in its entirety, and we have the receipt of its delivery. But as Miss Elizabeth has confirmed, Mr Gardiner was held in… difficult territory, a place even the English Army declines to enter without leave, simply to retrieve one man. The door I had thought our best is shut, and shut official, with a seal on it.”

Her aunt was beyond speech already, and shattering. Her handkerchief had gone to her mouth, as it had done so much lately, but she could hardly hold herself upright long enough to keep it there.

Elizabeth could only stare, glassy-eyed and broken, at the floor. The government would not move him. The money had been given to his captors, but they had not the goodness to even restore him to the army for safekeeping, and his own government — the only body with the weight to reach across a broken land and compel a safe-conduct, to hurry a sick man through the mountains before the fever or the waiting killed him — the government had folded its hands and said not our affair.

Copeland did not stay to distress Mrs Gardiner longer. Elizabeth saw him out, but he turned to her at the door just before he left.

“There is one course yet,” he said. “I would have said more, but Mrs Gardiner is in no spirits to hear it, and it is not one the house can compass of itself. But a case such as this — a sound case, with the money managed and all the proper things done already — such a case can still be moved if some person of real consequence in the Spanish business will take it up and make it his own. Is there any chance that you, during the course of your time in Spain, might have encountered such a person?”

She could only look at the door for several seconds. “No. I spoke with so many. No one could offer any encouragement then, and I do not see how they could now.”

Copeland shook his head. “A pity. It is unfair, Miss Bennet. Monstrously unfair that a good man is left to rot for want of connexions. If he had only a friendly ear in the right place, I am sure — entirely sure, that he would be on a ship for England already.”

Elizabeth blinked enough to make her eyes focus again and put out her hand. “Thank you for everything, Mr Copeland.”

He took her hand, then put on his hat. “I only wish I could have done more, Miss Bennet. Give Mrs Gardiner my regrets, please.”

Elizabeth returned to the drawing room in a haze of grief. Her aunt had already gone — spirited upstairs, likely, by her maid, and Elizabeth sank to the sofa alone.

There was such a man. There was exactly such a man, perfectly placed to take up a case in the Spanish business and move it with a word: the Under-Secretary, who dealt in precisely these affairs, who could send word to the Spanish authorities and pluck her uncle out of the mountains as easily as signing his name, if he chose.

And she, Mrs Darcy, could not go to the Earl of Marchwood and ask him to save her uncle, because the one road left open to her uncle ran straight through the one door her marriage had bolted. Across the city, her husband was sinking for want of the same hand, blocked by the same door.

And the only way to open that door was to cease to be the thing that had closed it.

She had been telling herself since the ship that she would find another way. But the time had come to face reality — there was no other way. She knew what must be done, and if she did not do it quickly, this one possibility would vanish irrevocably and shatter more lives than just hers and his.

LIV