Page 152 of Homeless

His affairs, God be thanked, were worth managing again. Pemberley was safe. The thing still amazed him when he let himself consider on it — that the house had been three days from the auctioneer's hammer and was now, instead, refinanced on sound terms against a Spanish settlement that his wife had carried into a Lombard Street banking house and rammed down the throats of two men who had told him that his claim was worth nothing. She had come home that day nearly dancing, and reported it to him with her bonnet still on and her eyes shining. He had laughed until it hurt his ribs, and then not been able to speak at all, because what breath and strength he could spare was being used to kiss her.

She had saved it. She had saved his house with the very paper she had dug out of a war, and she had done it as Mrs Darcy. There was a justice in that so complete he could hardly look at it directly.

Georgiana was at the pianoforte, but had not bothered to begin playing. Instead, she had turned round on the stool to talk. Near her, on the sofa, sat his wife and her aunt, and the three of them were deep in the pleasure of learning how many people they knew in common. The discovery that Mrs Gardiner had grown up in Lambton had delighted Georgiana past measure, and the two of them had spent the better part of the visit trading names — whether old Mr Selby still had the living at the church; what had become of the Hargreaves girls; whether the confectioner's on the square was the same one, for Mrs Gardiner had spent her childhood pennies there and would be sorry past bearing to learn it was gone. Georgiana, who had been so long the shy one, was flushed and animated, and Elizabeth sat between them with her hand tucked through her aunt's arm, drawing them on.

And yet…

He watched Mrs Gardiner as she talked, and under the pleasure of it he could see the grief that would not be put down. It was in the pauses. It was in the way her animation would falter, mid-sentence, when some turn of the talk brushed too near her husband — a mention of a fair he had once taken her to, a road they had walked in their courting days. Her face would go, for just a moment, somewhere else, somewhere dark and waiting, before she caught herself and came back with a smile and went on.

It was the one shadow left in the house, and he found he could not be wholly content while it sat on the sofa across from him, in the person of a kind woman trying so hard to be merry for her niece's sake.

Darcy was setting aside the tea he did not mean to drink when Jeffries came in with the afternoon post on a salver. Darcy took it without much attention — there was a great deal of post these days, the paperwork and business of a rescued estate grinding back into motion. Most of it was Yates or the bank or the steward at Pemberley. He sorted through it idly, setting some letters aside to be answered, when his hand stopped.

There was a letter with a foreign look to it. Travel-worn, much-handled, the direction written in a firm military hand, and franked and stamped through channels he recognised — channels he had watched his own claim go into.

Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy, Grosvenor Square, and Mrs Elizabeth Darcy. Both their names. And in the corner, the sender's hand had added a name and a place that stopped Darcy's breath in his chest.

Capt. Ferrers. Vitoria.

He did not open it. Something was rising in him, a wild, careful hope he did not dare give room to yet, because there were a hundred things such a letter might contain and only one of them was the thing he wanted.

“Elizabeth.”

All three women turned at the serious note in his voice. “There is a letter. From Spain.” He looked at his wife, and then, deliberately, at Mrs Gardiner. He saw the older woman go white and still, saw the grief on the sofa lift its head. “From Captain Ferrers.”

Elizabeth was already halfway off the sofa. “Open it. Fitzwilliam, for the love of God, open it!”

“Come here.” He held out his hand to her, because whatever it was, good or ill, he would have her beside him for it. She crossed the room to kneel by his chair. He broke the seal and unfolded it against his knee where they could both read it.

He read it once, fast, his eye flying down the lines ahead of his understanding, snatching at words. His heart began to pound, and Elizabeth had already clapped a hand over her mouth. He made himself go back to the top and read it properly, aloud, for the whole room, because there was a woman on that sofa who had waited months for these words and must not wait one instant longer than it took him to say them.

“This is dated three weeks ago. He writes that there was delivered into the hands of the British at Vitoria — brought down out of the mountains and along the river — an Englishman, ill and much reduced, who gave his name as Gardiner. A merchant of London, taken for ransom, now released, the ransom having been paid.”

The cry Mrs Gardiner made was a sound Darcy would never, as long as he lived, forget. She nearly tumbled from the sofa, and likely would have, if Georgiana had not gone to sit beside her and clasp her hand. “Go on, Fitzwilliam,” Georgiana pleaded.

“He says the man was a poor case when he came to them — not the fever, he is careful to say, for that was their first concern, but a wasting complaint of the stomach that had left him weak. But that he was living, and mending, and in no danger that their surgeon could find, only much in need of care and rest and home.” He looked up, once, at Mrs Gardiner's face, and then back down, because he could not bear it and must finish it. “He writes that he remembered the case and the name at once. That he had had it from Mrs Darcy herself, when she passed through Vitoria in the summer, that she had spoken of her uncle with such distress, and pressed his case so, that when a sick Englishman of that name was brought in, he knew him directly for the man she had grieved over. He took charge of the matter personally, and gave orders he was to have every care the place could furnish.”

Mrs Gardiner was weeping openly now, with such a look of anguished joy that Elizabeth rose from Darcy’s side to embrace her. He waited a moment — he could not, for anything, interrupt that.

Elizabeth, however, was less patient and more ready to be satisfied than he had accounted for, and she gestured wildly for him to continue. “Go on, my love, read the rest!”

Darcy's own voice was quavering suspiciously now. “He sends his compliments to Mrs Darcy most particularly. And he says —” he found the line, and read it exactly — “'You may tell the lady that her uncle is coming home. He is not yet strong enough for the passage, but he will be, and when he is, he shall be sent to England with every care. I have told him myself that he was not forgot, that there was a niece come through here some months ago who never once stopped asking after him. He wept to hear it and was grateful to know that she had come this far safely. I pray the rest of your journey home was uneventful.'“

For a moment no one moved.

Then, Mrs Gardiner put both hands over her face and shattered in great, tearing sobs. “Oh, my Edward, my Edward!” she kept repeating. Elizabeth had her aunt in her arms, the two of them clinging and rocking.

Elizabeth was laughing and wiping tears at the same time. “Oh, aunt, he is coming home! He is coming home, he is safe, he is coming home!” She wept it over and over, as if still trying to convince herself that it was true. Darcy sat in his chair with the letter open on his knee and found that he was choking on tears too, quietly, and did not trouble to hide it.

“He wept to hear of her tears for him,” he said again, softly, to no one, to himself, looking at his wife. “So he should. So should any man, to learn he was loved like that.”

LXII

A Fine Joke

The tea had been a small one — four of them only, in Lady Honoria Vane's pretty morning room, which Elizabeth still could not quite enter without a private flinch and a silent wonder at the strangeness of the world. It had been, against every expectation Elizabeth had once held, a genuine pleasure.

They had become friends. It was a shock Elizabeth had not seen coming and could not now imagine doing without. It had begun in the worst possible way, in the great hall of Marchwood House on the blackest morning of her life, and it had turned — Elizabeth was never entirely certain how — into something Elizabeth valued more than she would have thought possible. For Honoria had guessed.