Page 134 of Homeless

She sighed, staring at his writing, and was trying to think of what she might write back when the maid knocked again.

“Beg pardon, miss. There's this come for you as well. A man brought it round from Mr Copeland at the warehouse not ten minutes past. He said I was to give it you directly, rather than Mrs Gardiner.”

Elizabeth rose. “To me? Why not to my aunt?”

“I don’t know, miss. He said it was for Miss Elizabeth, and so I’ve brought it up. The messenger said Mr Copeland means to wait on you and the missus tomorrow.”

“Thank you, Alice.” Elizabeth stared at the thing in her hand and closed the door absently.

It was a packet, worn and travel-stained, and it had been opened and closed again more than once by other hands. Her blood quickened as she looked at it. This… this was from Spain. Surely! It had the very look of something passed from one authority to the next, kicked to the bottom of a cart more than once and tossed into a ship’s hold for the sea moisture to do what it would. She tore it open, and inside, folded small, was a single sheet covered close on both sides in a hand she would have known anywhere in the world.

Her uncle's hand.

She could not, for a moment, do anything but hold it. She had not seen that hand since June, since a deal brokered with Senor Herrera over wine that never came to pass. Her eyes scanned the top, eager for news of where and when and how.

There was no date at the head of it, no August the whatever, nothing to tell her whether the man who had written it was a man of three weeks past or six, whether the words in her hands were fresh or whether the mouth that shaped them had gone silent in the weeks it took the paper to crawl home to her. She turned the sheet over, looking for it as though it might have hidden itself, and it had not, and she began to read.

It was not addressed to any particular person. He would not have given any names away if he could help it. Like as not, they had forbidden him to date the thing, saving it against need or desperation from home, so that it could be supposed to have been written at any time that proved convenient in the last few months. He was well, he wrote — she felt the lie of it in the first line, felt him choosing the word the way she chose words for her aunt. He was being used no worse than such a situation allowed, and they were not to make themselves wretched on his account, for it would all come right in the end. He was picking up enough of the language to understand what was wanted of him, and that it was wanted badly enough that while other captives had been set free, he would have to remain until the last penny had been paid.

He asked after them. He said he remembered them nightly in his prayers, and that he hoped — this was where she had to stop and press the letter to her chest and breathe before she could go on — he hoped that a certain dear person had found their way back safely to London. If so, he begged that they — for though he did not name her, it was clear now that he wrote it to Elizabeth, believing her home, safe, the sensible niece who would manage things — would look after his wife, and see the children did not want for anything.

And then, he asked, in a line that she read four times, whether anyone had had word of him, whether anyone was coming, or whether he was to understand himself forgot.

Then, as though ashamed of having written it, he had struck through with a single line, but not so heavily she could not read it beneath.

Below that, he had added, Forgive me. I know you will not have forgot. It is only that the days are long here, and a man’s endurance can only go so far.

And near the end was the thing that made her set the letter down on the coverlet and put both hands over her mouth. He added a few lines about his affairs, that if it should happen — he wrote if I should be longer detained than we hope — she was to see that Copeland had the direction of the northern accounts, and that the lease on the warehouse was renewed in the spring, and that his wife was to have whatever she needed from the funds without stint. He even found space to mention his widowed sister and her daughters, saying he had always meant to do more for them all than he had yet managed.

She wept over it. Wept over all of it — her uncle's undated letter in one hand, and her husband's frightened note in the other. How neatly they were both caught in the same trap!

Her uncle, alive on some unknown day in a country she knew too well, ill or not ill she could not tell, frightened certainly, wondering if anyone was coming, and the only thing that could reach him in time was an influence she could not command and dared not seek. And her husband, sinking, with one rescue left to him that he would never take while she stood in his way.

She folded both letters away. She only wished that she could be sure her uncle was alive to be saved at all. She would have given a great deal for a date in the corner of a letter. Without it, she could only worry over a man who might already be past saving, and to break her own heart on the chance that he was not.

LIII

A Bad Business

By the eighth day, Darcy had learned the exact shape of the word no, in all its civil variations.

Two more banking houses had received him courteously and reached, by slightly different roads, the same destination the first had — a claim was not security, and they did not lend one hundred thousand pounds on a slim promise of repayment.

His uncle had applied a gentler, more painful version of the same refusal. It had been the hardest quarter-hour of the whole business, sitting in the Earl of Matlock's library laying his ruin before the head of his mother's family and asking for any help or advice on offer.

It was not the first time they had discussed the matter. Darcy had canvassed it at length with his uncle, a dozen times, perhaps, since his father’s death, but the answer now was the same as it had always been. Matlock had warned his brother-in-law five years ago that the loan was foolish, and had been ignored. He was genuinely sorry for Darcy’s position now, but he could not command such a sum, and had, twice, enquired among his friends whether a series of private loans might be raised to salvage the home of his sister’s son. But he had come up at odd ends each time, and had no one left to ask.

And then his uncle had asked the question Darcy had known was coming and had dreaded having to answer. “I thought you had a better remedy than any of this to hand. What about your Marchwood connexion? I had understood that was as good as settled. Good God, Fitzwilliam, if an earl's daughter and fifty thousand pounds and the man's influence in the City are yours for the taking, what are you doing in my library asking me for money?”

Darcy had not been able to answer him, and had left with his uncle plainly thinking him a fool.

He had even gone to the Foreign Office himself, and been told that his claim was lodged and accounted for, and was being attended to in the ordinary course. These things took time, and that there was nothing to be done but wait.

He had exhausted, one after another, every honest door, and stood at last exactly where the bank had told him he would stand — at the edge of a sale, with a fortnight's grace in which to make peace with the matter. He had thought he understood, when he chose Elizabeth, what it would be to lose Pemberley. Now, he was watching it come to pass, and he had to consider how it would ripple down the corridors of his life and touch every thing and every person he had ever held dear.

He was in his study with the useless pile of papers before him, writing out names and thoughts and foolhardy schemes that did not come right however he arranged them, when Jeffries came in looking harried.

“Excuse me, sir. The Earl of Marchwood is below, and he is demanding to see you at once.”