Page 124 of Homeless

“But you admit that I am right.”

He opened his eyes and pulled back slightly. “I admit your concerns have some foundation. But I think you underestimate how much I had been longing to carry you up the steps to our house, see the delight in Georgiana’s eyes when she learns she has a new sister — a sister she will love like she could love no other. And I wanted to see you settled and safe at last, to finally give you the place you deserve in my home, and perhaps… even…” His gaze had fallen to her stomach, his hands to her hips, and she heard him swallow.

Elizabeth lifted his chin. “There will be time enough for that, I daresay. Heaven knows, we have certainly done our bit thus far.”

He chuckled, then leaned close to kiss her again. “We have two or three more days before we clear the Thames. What do you say, Mrs Darcy? Should we try our best to clinch the matter?”

She slid her arms round his neck, reaching to caress his shoulders through his coat. “With a very good will, Mr Darcy.”

XLIX

As Far as the East is from the West

They came up the river on the morning tide, and Darcy stood at the rail and watched England reassemble itself around him, plank by plank and roof by roof. He could not make himself glad of it.

It had begun before dawn as a widening of the world — the open heave of the Channel narrowing, the coasts drawing in on either hand, first as smudges and then as low, green shoulders of land — Kent to starboard and the flat Essex shore to larboard, and the Prudence threading in among the gathering traffic of hulls until the sea had become, imperceptibly, a river. Marshland gave way to fields, fields to the first straggling buildings, and the buildings thickened and crowded and climbed until there was no green left anywhere. It was only wharves and warehouses and boatyards packed shoulder to shoulder down to the waterline, and a forest of masts ahead that put Santander to shame — the Pool of London, mast upon mast upon mast, colliers and Indiamen and coasters and lighters, a floating city of rigging so dense a man might have thought to cross the river on the decks. The noise reached them across the water before the smell did, and then the smell arrived and did not leave — coal smoke and tar and river-mud and fish and the ten thousand ordinary reeks of the largest city on earth.

He had longed for this every mile of Spain. Now, each turn of the river was carrying him closer to the moment he would have to let go of her hand.

She stood beside him at the rail, her shoulder against his arm, not speaking. She had dressed in the green gown for the landing — the willow-green he had bought her in Santander, taken in now at the waist by her own needle. He had watched her dressing this morning, had even helped her button her chemise and held a mirror for her to pin her hair, and thought his heart would crack straight across.

“There will be a deal of fuss getting ashore,” he said. “It is never quick. The ship must wait her turn at the quay, and then the customs men, and the baggage, and the finding of a conveyance. Hours, likely. You had as well sit while you can.”

“I would rather stand here with you, and watch it come.”

So they stood, and he held her hand along the rail, watching the press of passengers and crew. The disembarking was precisely as tedious as he had promised her and worse, but he was grateful for all of it, because each delay was another quarter-hour he had her. There was the waiting for the berth, and the warping-in, and the gangway, and the customs officer with his ledger and his questions. And there was the sea-chest.

The sea-chest was what finally broke him, though he would not have been able to say, beforehand, that a box could do it.

They had chosen it together two days before they sailed — a single plain chest, because they had had almost nothing to put in it and one had seemed extravagance enough. Into it, over the good, comfortable Santander days and the crossing, all their things had gone together. Both their things. His shirts and her shifts, his razor and her comb, the few articles they had accumulated between them since a journey of two hundred miles had left them with nothing. All of it jumbled together in the easy carelessness of people who no longer troubled to draw a line between what was his and what was hers. And now, as they returned to their cabin to collect their belongings, with a porter waiting and the carriage yet to find, they had to take it apart.

He knelt over the open chest and did it with his own hands, because he could not bear to have a porter do it. It was the most quietly dreadful task he had performed since he had been forced to watch a fever try to consume her in Burgos. Her things here. His there. He lifted out the green shawl that matched the gown and wrapped it round her shoulders himself, and lifted out her spare shift, and the comb, and the small worn things that were hers to make a pile. Each one he set apart from his own felt like a deliberate act of undoing — like unpicking, thread by thread, the single life they had sewn together out of catastrophe. There was her stocking tangled with his. He separated them. There was no reason it should have closed his throat.

“Fitzwilliam.” She had crouched down opposite him, over the chest, and her hand came onto his where it had gone still over her old petticoat — the one she had torn to bind his side in Estella. “It is only for a little while.”

“I know it.”

“Servants can be got round. You will have my letters and I will have yours, and it would not be too scandalous, I think, if I were to ‘form an acquaintance’ with Miss Darcy. We will not be apart long. A fortnight, perhaps less, only until we —”

“I know, Elizabeth. I know all of it. I agreed to all of it, and I would agree to it again because you are entirely right, and I hate every particular of it. I would be obliged if you would let me hate it in peace while I take our life apart into two piles on a dirty cabin floor.” He stopped and shut his eyes, and got hold of himself. “Forgive me. That was not —”

“There is nothing to forgive.” Her hand tightened on his. “I hate it, too. I only did not think it would help to say so.”

They finished it together, in the end, both of them kneeling over the chest. When it was done, there were two neat piles where there had been one tangled life. He told her to take the sea-chest, because her gowns deserved more care, and a porter took his up in a canvas bag he got from the purser, and that was that.

He found her a hackney coach at the top of the wharf-lane. It looked like a good one, or as good as the rank offered, and he handed the driver more than the fare to Gracechurch Street and told him to have a care. Then, there was nothing left to do, no more delays to conjure, and it was time.

She stood by the open carriage door and looked up at him while the noise of the wharf went on around them — the porters and the carters and the shouting and the gulls — and for a moment, neither of them could find how to do it.

He was aware, even now, even here, of being watched. He always was. It was a condition of being who he was, and it was worse today than any day of his life, because Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley, given up for dead or worse in Spain these four months since May, had walked off a Bristol merchantman on the London river. There would be eyes in this crowd that knew him, and by nightfall, it would be halfway round the town that he was returned. He could not embrace his wife on a public wharf. He could not kiss her, could not hold her the way every fibre of him was straining to, could not do one single thing that a man might do to say goodbye to the woman he loved, because the whole watching world must not yet know she was his. He had to hand her into a carriage like an acquaintance. Like a cousin. Like nothing at all.

“Send word the moment you are arrived,” he made her promise. “So that I know you are safe there.”

“I will.”

“And you must send word if there is any… if you have any need of anything. Anything, Elizabeth. You have only to send.”

“I know.” Her eyes were too bright. She was keeping it back, refusing to let the tears tumble, and he loved her so much in that moment, standing dry-eyed and straight-backed by a hackney door with her chin up, that he could barely breathe around it. “Go and see Georgiana, if she is in London. She will be beside herself. Do not let my absence spoil that. Let her have her brother home whole, and be glad. I will come and meet her when it is time, and love her as you promised I would.”