Page 138 of Homeless

He tried to chuckle and pinched the bridge of his nose. He had been too long in staring at his papers again, because his vision swam a little today. “She does love me, and I can report that without boasting because she repeats it every day in the notes she sends. But her uncle’s situation is less secure.”

“He is not safe yet?”

“No.” He sighed. “And the news is not encouraging. He is reported to have been ill, and much is still needed to secure his release. I have kept away, and she has declined to be known as Mrs Darcy yet because she feared some… retaliation in certain quarters. And perhaps she was right to do so. Lord Marchwood has already complicated my affairs, and it is not impossible he could slow down any hope of rescue for Gardiner, if it were learnt that his niece is the reason I declined any interest in Marchwood’s daughter.”

“Would he really be so spiteful?”

“He could. I have reason to believe he applied certain pressures in my case, but of course, I cannot prove them. He very much wanted the Derwent water, and now he shall have to spend a fortune for it if he still wishes to have it. That is why I dare not go to Elizabeth, or bring her here. I know very well that my calls are being observed.”

“But not mine.”

He straightened in interest. “No. Probably not yours.”

“Then I may go? Please say I may go, Fitzwilliam! I can look at her face and tell you if she has been keeping well, or if she has been crying, or not sleeping. I daresay both are true, but you have been trying to persuade yourself that they are not, and she has been trying to let you, because otherwise, you would have been at her door already.”

He laughed softly. “I think you have judged her rightly.”

“Oh, no, it is not her, but you I know, and her I can imagine because of how you paint her. May I go this very morning?”

He tapped a hand on the table. It was not what he wanted. Not Elizabeth back in his arms where she belonged. Not her in his home, wearing his ring and his name openly. But it was some comfort for all of them, and it was all he could safely guarantee at this moment.

“Very well,” he said.

Georgiana went still. “Very well — this morning?”

“Perhaps it would be good manners to wait a few hours. I know the mornings are much taken up by her aunt and cousins, but yes. You shall see her today. I shall arrange a carriage to take you to Gracechurch Street.”

She gasped and clapped her hands. “Oh, thank you, Fitzwilliam! I am ever so pleased. Will she be happy to see me, do you think? Ought you to send word first?”

“I think not,” he said slowly. “We have spoken of it. She will not be startled by your arrival, and you will have all the pleasure of seeing her reaction yourself. She…” He smiled a little. “She has a rather fetching way about her.”

“You mean she teases you and makes you lose your wits.”

His smile widened. “Just so. Please, give my wife my love, Georgiana. You must tell her I sent you because I could not come myself, and that I… Just give her my love. She will understand it.”

“I shall give it her a hundred times over.” Georgiana rose and took his face in her hands. “Oh, Fitzwilliam, thank you! I shall be so good to her, I promise you — I shall love her at once, I have loved her for more than a week already without even seeing her, and now — oh, I must change, I cannot meet my sister in this!”

She was gone in a flurry, up the stairs, calling for her maid, leaving him alone at the breakfast table with the cold toast and the cooling coffee.

She had thought, when she came upstairs, that she would write the note and be done with it, quickly, before her courage failed. She had not expected it to take the better part of an hour.

The sea-chest stood at the foot of the bed — the one they had bought together in Santander, the one that had held both their lives jumbled in together until they had unpicked them apart on a London wharf. She knelt before it, lifted the lid, and found the ring. She had folded it into a scrap of linen on the day she came to this house, and had not permitted herself to look at it since. She took it out now and held it in her palm, the cheap pinchbeck band that had marked her as his.

She was not going to be able to do this without weeping, so she stopped trying not to, and wept as she wrote, that ring still clutched in her left hand.

She wrote that she could not in good conscience keep him.

She had married him to be safe, she wrote, and he had made her far more than safe; he had made her happy past anything she had known how to want, and she would carry that happiness to the end of her life like a coal in her two hands. It was because she loved him that she was giving him back.

There was no longer any reason to hold him. No… consequences requiring the honourable covering of marriage. No hope worth clinging to; that was a question answered now.

Their marriage, if it was permitted to stand, would cost more than the two of them. Others would be made to suffer. They were being selfish in thinking that they could simply hold on to each other and let the rest burn. It would cost Pemberley, and everyone who depended on him. It may cost her uncle his life, for if there remained a man to be saved, she would not be able to save him without sacrifice. She could not watch her aunt go the rest of her life without the man she loved and the father of her children. She could not buy her own happiness at that price.

There was nothing between them now that could not be undone with time and pain — no child, no reason, nothing but a paper and a cheap ring and a love she meant to keep to herself for the rest of her days — for she would never marry another, she wrote; he was not to imagine she gave him up in order to be free; she gave him up to be unfree forever, bound to a man she could not have, and content to be so, if only he would take the chance she was making for him and save what could still be saved.

And then she put down the hardest lines, which she wrote last because she did not think she could write anything after them. He must go to Lady Honoria. That she knew what it would cost his pride and his heart, but that the connexion was there, and the influence was there, and the earl's goodwill would open every door that had shut against him — the bank, and Pemberley, and, she let herself hope, even her uncle, for a man restored to Marchwood's favour might yet find a way to press the case the government would not. She begged him not to be too proud to take it. She begged him not to waste, out of loyalty to a marriage she was dissolving with her own hand, the one rescue left to him.

Go and pay your addresses, she wrote, her hand shaking so that the words came out crooked. She will be glad of you, and you will do your duty by your name and perhaps build the family with her that I cannot now give you. And I shall know, wherever I am, that I did one right thing in the middle of all this, and set you free to be saved.