Page 17 of Miss Bennet is Gone

The bottle from the modiste’s stood on the desk where he had set it at three in the morning. He took it up again under the grey daylight and turned it in his fingers as he had turned it a dozen times already.

Dark glass of the commonest sort, such as any apothecary between Holborn and the river sold a hundred of in a month. A red seal with nothing whatever stamped into it, no device, no initial, not so much as the accidental whorl of a thumb; whoever had closed it had pressed the wax with something flat and clean and had told him, by doing so, precisely nothing.

He had drawn the stopper and smelled it and got sweet wine, and under the wine something green and bitter he did not know. He had thought about tasting it and had not, being no chemist, and of no use to her dead.

Two spoonfuls remained. He had written out the name of a discreet man in Bloomsbury who would say what was in it and ask nothing afterward, and had not yet sent, because a bottle carried across London in a servant’s pocket was a bottle that could be spoken of in a kitchen, and he trusted no hand with it but his own.

And what he wanted of it was not what was in it but where it had been got, and by whom, and there the thing stopped dead. No maker’s mark. No seal to trace. Nothing about it that was not also in ten thousand other rooms in London that morning.

He put it back in the drawer and turned the key on it, because looking longer was not knowing more, and he had learned the difference once, in a hard year, and did not need to learn it twice.

Richard came at mid-morning, brought by a note that had said only come. Darcy shut the study door and told it to him as Mrs. Gardiner had told it to him, plainly, in order. The gate and the yard and the open door and the wedding gown left finished on its form, and Richard sat without moving, his hands loose on the chair arms, and let him finish.

“Four things,” Richard said when it was done. “Who carried the cordial in? Who saw the carriage in the lane? Whether anyone has been turned off from the modiste’s in the last month, because a thing like this wants a door left open from the inside. And where that card has got to, because a card does not walk. Either they took it up going out, and it had something in it worth the stooping, or it is still somewhere in that shop and you have been looking in the dark for it.” He did not say I am sorry. He did not reach across the desk. Darcy could have wept for it.

“There is a fifth,” Darcy said. “We cannot ask any of them aloud.”

“No.” Richard had got there already; Darcy saw it cross his face and settle. “The hour it’s spoken, she’s finished, found or not, married or not. So we work in the dark.” He stood and went to the window and looked down into the street, his back to the room. “I have done it before. It is the worst way there is to do a thing. We will do it anyway.”

They sent for Bishop, who came within the hour. He was the family’s man for thirty years, discreet and expensive and entirely without curiosity, which was the whole of what he was paid for.

Through him, by afternoon, they had retained an inquiry agent — a former Bow Street man named Sable, sober, close as a clam, and Bishop brought him to the study at four and presented him and withdrew.

Darcy gave him what he could. A young gentlewoman, of a family the house was connected with, missing from a modiste’s in such a street on such an afternoon, the matter to be kept wholly private. Here was a description, and the day, and the hour. He gave no name. He gave no marriage, no aunt, no cordial.

Sable wrote in a small book, unhurried. “Gone of her own will, sir, or taken?”

“Taken.”

“You’re certain?”

“I am certain.”

“Then forgive me, sir, but you’ll want to tell me more than this, or you’ll be paying me to walk past her in the street.” He said it without blame, closing the book. “A man finds what he’s let to look for. You’ve let me look for very little.”

“I am aware of it,” Darcy said, and heard how the words came out, and did not soften them. “It is the most I can give you. Find what you can with it.”

Sable looked at him a moment, a long professional look that took in the shaved jaw and the thing behind Darcy's eyes, and put the book in his coat. “The coaching inns and the turnpike books, then,” he said. “A closed carriage standing where one had no trade to stand. I’ll start there. It’s where there’s something to start with.”

And he took his hat and went, and Darcy sat with the door shut and the knowledge that he had armed the one man in England he was paying, and armed him with almost nothing, and had done it on purpose, and would do it again tomorrow.

The hardest hour of the day wore a grey morning dress and came to the study door and asked to be let in.

Georgiana sat across the desk and clasped her hands and did not ask how Elizabeth did, she had asked the night before and been answered.

“Which physician attends her?” she asked instead. “Mr. Gardiner’s man is Mr. Hewitt. I sat with Mrs. Gardiner three days ago while she praised him to the skies. If Elizabeth is so ill, I should like to know it is Mr. Hewitt at the bedside and not a stranger. I should like to send to him. Only to ask. Only that.”

“You will send to no one.”

It came out harder than he meant. He saw it strike her. He made himself not take it back.

“You will not write to Mr. Hewitt, nor to Mrs. Gardiner, nor call at Gracechurch Street. You will receive the callers we cannot refuse, and you will tell them Miss Bennet is ill and the wedding put off and that you are sorry, and not one word past that, because past that there is nothing you know.”

She was quiet a moment. Then she said, in a voice that was almost gentle, “You are not telling the truth.” He began to speak, and she went on over him, not raising it. “I don’t mean she isn’t ill. I mean whatever is wrong is not an illness, because you are not wearing the face of a man whose betrothed has a fever. You are wearing the other face. I have seen it once before. It was not an illness then.”

He looked at his seventeen-year-old sister across the desk and the whole of him rose up at once to put his head down on the blotter and tell her, to be, for the space of one confession, not the thing standing between Elizabeth and the dark but only a man with his heart cut out and a sister who loved him.

He had learned in that other year what it cost to be the one who does not break.