Chapter Eighteen Compunction

Lizzy's tears stopped long enough for her to remove her makeup and clothes and to put on something to sleep in. She wadded up the clothes she’d just shed and threw them into a shadowy corner of her closet to hide them from her sight, hoping to keep them from reminding her of Wickham and that horrible dizziness she had felt—her heart capsizing and sinking in a kitchen vortex of shame and disgust.

She was not entirely sure why she cried once Fitzwilliam closed the door. She was sure that her heart had swollen and beat faster at his parting words. And then everything had seemed impossibly too much.

Mission impossible. Idiotic cliché.

Fitzwilliam’s words had been a promise—and a promise of a promise all at once. A promise about the mission, but not merely a mission promise, professional. Sealed with a kiss. Committed. Together.

With him. Not Ned. Not Agent Darcy. Fitzwilliam.

Fitzwilliam paid attention to his words. He spoke deliberately and reservedly. Even exhausted and emotionally spent, he was careful. It felt like he was projecting beyond the mission, speaking beyond it, his words both encircling them now and reaching ahead of them. They couldn't talk about this explicitly until they were done with the Wicker Man, done with Wickham.

It was too early for her to feel this way, for him to feel this way, and it was absolutely the wrong setting for the birth and the growth of such feelings. Mission impossible. But hearts had schedules of which missions knew nothing. Sometimes your eyes obscure your vision.

She turned off the lights and stretched out on the bed, staring up at the darkened ceiling as if its pattern of shadow and dim street lights might suggest a path forward hieroglyphically. But she found no answers, no directions there.

As she finally began to relax, she saw her father's face in the shadows above her. Why is my past presenting itself to me now? Why is he so much on my mind?

Because it had been him, his life and especially his death that had started her in this life, that had sent her into the dark.

God, I loved him so much when I was little! And she had. So much .

As she grew older, she began to see him for the man he was. But I never stopped loving him. His habitual center of personal energy was his satirical view of life, his merciless satire of others and also of himself. He had good principles in some sense, but they were on the periphery of who he was. Although he could sometimes acknowledge that he was in the wrong, he could not bring himself into the right―not by main strength anyway, although sometimes events would conspire to move him there.

By the time Lizzy was in college, she loved and was chagrined by him almost equally. He was the head cheerleader of her plan to become a professor and devote her life to books. He had done the same, but as an amateur, fortressed in his study, armored by pages. Her father had created her self-compunction. She had delighted in her father's satire and irony as a girl, encouraging it, imitating it herself, and internalizing it. By doing so, she had delighted him.

Later, she began to wonder if her growing difficulties with people―her reluctances with Jim Haden, for example―were the consequences of having made her father's habitual center of personal energy her own. Her worry about whether she could get a job teaching literature or succeed at it if she did was her deepest worry about herself. She might retreat into her books much as her father had, hiding in them. She had done that in high school, dodging much of the storm and stress of those years in the carrels of the school or the public library.

Fanny Prince really was not a stretch for me. Fitzwilliam’s aim was true.

Maybe she had chosen the Company to try and force herself into closeness with life, connect with it in its raw form and do some good—to create a new center of energy for herself, a new set of ideas to live by and live for.

But working for the Company turned out to be about survival , not about living. It was like that brutal pun in Walden: "The people who are said to live in Concord." The suggestion was that they didn't live there—or anywhere. "The people who are said to live in the Company."

Lizzy’s job distanced her from life by means of darkness and shadows―a deep cover between her and life. Her attempt to escape her father's influence had led her into a gloomy version of the very cage she feared. Cut off. Undercover. Cloaked in fiction after all. Pages. The pages of Company files rather than the pages of books.

But this mission, Fitzwilliam, had put her into contact with herself, life, her life, and what she wanted. Wanted now . Non-fiction.

It was perhaps late in the day for conversion, but Lizzy felt like that was what was happening to her. Deep and impactful change. She was in transition from disunity to unity, many to one. She had not yet reached unity, but it was, nonetheless, pulling her forward. Perhaps what she had thought was exhaustion after her last mission had been, in large part, a rising disrelish for the half-life she was leading.

She wanted a different life.

No, I want a life .

That hope carried her to sleep.

***

Thursday, October 22

She slept dreamlessly, deeply, and late. A vibrating phone woke her, a woody sound. She rolled over and slid open the nightstand drawer. It was her personal phone shaking against the wooden bottom of the drawer. She could see the caller's name.

Jane

Lizzy sat up and rubbed her eyes, blinking. The fall sun was shining outside, bright, blinding, even with the rays elongated by the season. The dark vortex of the night before was gone. Her bedroom, the entire apartment, was stable with no rotation.

Why is Jane calling me?

"Hello, Jane?"

"Lizzy, hey! Did I wake you?" the voice was excited but quiet.

She smiled lazily. "You did, but I needed to be up anyway, and you're a welcome alarm. How are you?"

"Fine, but I'm worried about you—all of you. Darcy told Charlie to call me and to tell me to call you. He seemed to think you could use a friend."

Lizzy felt warmth fill her chest, Fitzwilliam’s regard. "He was right. It's great to hear your voice!"

"Yours, too." Jane took a second before launching into her reason for calling. "So, without giving me details, can you tell me what's happening? Why's Darcy worried enough about you to continue to breach protocol? To encourage it? Darcy ?"

Lizzy blew out a breath with enough force that Jane must be able to hear it. "Well, it's not easy to explain without details."

"Is it the mark?"

Lizzy was silent for a moment. "Partly. He's complex―an evil man, devoted to the corruption of otherwise good women, and he knows how to press his advantage."

"Press his advantage?" She sounded worried, as if she understood exactly what Lizzy meant, being pinned by Wickham against the counter.

"Nothing's happened—well, not much. His hands…have been…on me. He's unleashed the full-court press. Tomorrow, I've agreed to travel with him."

"Travel? With him? That's risky, seriously risky. Outside your cover’s base, you cede control to him for real, and your backup can only be reactive, not proactive."

"I know. But I'm close. The mark wants…me…badly enough that he's willing to take me with him. He doesn't suspect me, I'm sure. This is by far our best chance to lure him into a mistake, a revelation. So far, we haven't got anything solid."

Jane was silent for a long minute. "I don't think I ever told you, but back when I was working as an analyst, I worked with a team, a man and a woman. I'll leave their names out of it. She did something similar―agreed to travel with her mark. She ended up not being able to get word to her partner about where the mark had taken her. A freak thing. The mark took her to a motel and…unleashed the full-court press. She ended up yielding to him, closing her eyes and sleeping with him."

She cleared her throat. "She convinced herself it would secure the mission objectives, make the mark more pliable, more forthcoming. But he beat her, after , savagely—nearly killed her. It was never clear if he identified her as an agent somehow or if he was just done with her. Afterward, he vanished. She did that —for nothing. She spent weeks in the hospital and then in CIA therapy, and I don't know if she ever fully recovered, body or mind."

There was another pause. When she continued, her voice was insistent, pointed. "Don't ever think of your body as a tool, or of sex as something…on your toolbelt. Maybe there are agents who can dissociate from themselves to that degree and stay healthy or at least sane, but you're not one of them, Lizzy! I know you. You feel deeply.

"In mission situations like that, it's too easy to start a slippery slope argument with yourself. ‘Well, if his hands are here, how much worse is it if they move there?’ Or ‘If I let him do this, how much worse is that?' You've always been eager, too eager to please Kellynch. Resist that urge now." Jane's voice sank to an intercessory whisper. "Think about what you're doing."

"I am. I'm not eager to please Kellynch, not anymore. Things have changed since I've been here. They’ve been changing. This is it for me. I finish this mission and then—I find another job, another life." Lizzy heard Jane’s surprised gasp at her resolve. "My motives…have changed. What I want has changed."

"What—?" Jane asked, still doubtful but coming to belief. "You mean it, don't you?"

"I do. I've sort of known it for a while. Even though it succeeded, my last mission left me so empty . When I took this mission, crazily, I was grasping at straws, angry at Agent Darcy, but I was really fighting my own unacknowledged desire to be done, trying to force myself back in ."

"By taking the kind of mission you hate, that you normally refuse?"

"In for a dime, in for a dollar." Lizzy said, still analyzing her choice in Kellynch's office, what she had actually done.

"So you think you doubled down, ending up with a mission that truly finished you instead of recommitting you?"

"Basically, yes. Do you think I'm a fool?"

"No, of course not. But I do wonder if you're telling me all that's relevant. There's something else, isn't there?"

Lizzy sat for a moment, pulling her mind fully back to the present. "There is. Fitzwilliam Darcy."

" Darcy? What do you mean?"

"I have feelings for him. Deep…feelings."

Jane started to say something but stopped, making only an unintelligible sound. After a moment, she started again. "So soon?"

"Yes. And you know I've never had any history of falling for mission partners."

"No, but you mostly work alone." Oh…right! "Are you sure? Sure of yourself, I mean? The anxiety and intensity of missions, especially seduction missions, can create…illusory feelings. Partners in deep cover, pretending to be a couple…they start believing they are a couple. Then the mission ends and the illusion melts away, like frosting on a still too-warm cake. It all slides away, and they're left as their own marks. Surely you remember cautions against this at the Farm."

Lizzy did. She had not brought them explicitly to mind, but they had been there, drilled into her long ago, not in the front of her mind until now but ultimately unforgettable. "I do remember…but this isn't that. I'm not duping myself, and neither is he."

"So he's told you that he has deep feelings for you, too?"

"Yes. No. Sort of. He's reluctant—as I am—to let it all begin in earnest, go too far, while we still have the mission to finish. For both professional and personal reasons."

"And you think he's ready to make the same sort of decision you are? He’s done, ready to leave the spy world for a normal life with you?"

"I don't know," Lizzy confessed in a rushed breath. "Maybe. He wants something with me."

"Something? Are you sure it's not just a vacation, a long weekend, when the mission ends? Play out the tension between you and then part company?"

"You think he's hoping we're…what? Partners with eventual benefits?"

"I don't know what, exactly. I'm just trying to make sure you're thinking straight. I admit Darcy's done an about-face where Charlie and I are concerned. I'm making this call because of him. I'd say it's obvious that…something had changed with Mister MI-6. It may be all you want. I hope it is, Lizzy. All the time that I've known you, I've known you wanted…deep feelings, the deepest love. There was always something sending you back to Kellynch, back for yet another mission…"

The two friends sat in silence for several beats until Lizzy finally broke it. "I've been thinking about myself, Jane. This mission has stirred up more than new feelings. It’s stirring up old memories with a new sense of what they mean, who I've been, and why. I won't pretend I've got it all worked out, but I'm working on it."

"Good! I'm happy for you. But don't get too far ahead of where you are. It was obvious from the time you took this mission and dyed your hair that something was up. I wasn't sure if it was Darcy, but I suspected it. Just remember, blonde is not your natural color."

The computer beeped in the kitchen. "I will. Got to go. Mission."

"Okay. You're going to be all right?"

"Yes, Jane. Thanks for calling. You always do me good!"

She ended the call and got up, moving quickly through the apartment to the laptop and touching a button. Fanny's phone sat beside the laptop on the counter.

Fitzwilliam smiled at Lizzy from the screen. He hadn't shaved, although he looked showered and dressed. She took a breath; she could almost feel his rough inky stubble against the delicate skin of her face. The warmth in her chest from earlier spread all through her, sinking south.

"Good morning."

"Morning," she replied, pushing the laptop back a bit and climbing on a stool. "I got up late and haven't had a chance to shower or dress."

"It's fine." He paused as if thinking, then added softly, "I like your hair mussed."

For some reason, the small compliment made her feel almost dizzy. She took hold of the counter with one hand, steadying herself on her stool. Trying to sound as if she were in mission mode, she asked, "Where's Bingley?"

"He's out, hoping to meet Teresa Sanz, the UIC student and…"

"Wickham and Catherine's girl-toy ," Lizzy said by way of ending Fitzwilliam’s sentence. “Do you think we might be able to cultivate her, get her to help us in some way?"

"Well, I'd certainly like to know if she has more than a one-night knowledge of Rosings or Wickham. The fact that he went to her apartment suggests there's more. But who knows? Bingley will have to trust his instincts. None of our background on Lady Catherine suggests that she even occasionally dallies with women, so it seems more likely that Wickham invited Sanz to the bedroom."

Lizzy nodded. "By the way," Fitzwilliam added, shifting tone, "Bingley's got the library phone tree set up. If Wickham calls, he'll think he's reaching you at work. Don't forget where you're supposed to be."

"I won't."

She looked at him on the screen; he looked at her on the screen.

"Do your best to learn where he's taking you. He'll probably be cagey about it if, as I suspect, he's taking you with him on a work errand. Fanny's gotten deep under his skin, and I'm guessing he's taking a risk. When Georgiana traveled with him, she never knew where they were going and never asked questions when he disappeared. He had her so confused and co-dependent that she just accepted whatever he said, did what he told her. I guess for a while that amused him, to have shamed her into…complete self-abasement.

"Anyway, try to find out. That'll make everything easier. But if you can't, we’ll use security cameras at the airport to determine your destination. However, that will mean that we can’t get a team in place until you are airborne, and Bingley and I will be at least a few hours behind you." He stopped and smiled at her, not happily but in dark self-amusement. "Of course, you know all this."

She smiled at him, her largest smile. "It doesn't hurt to be reminded." She winked. "I'll just chalk it up to MI-6splaining .” They both laughed. But Lizzy thought of Jane's reminders, and her laughter ended before Fitzwilliam’s. "I agree with you about Wickham. A night's sleep has made it even clearer to me. He’s decided I'm…Fanny is no threat to him. He believes he can safely take her with him and get what he wants with minimal risk. Unfortunately, that means I can't push too hard about where we're going. It's not what he'll expect from Fanny. You may have to work it out from airport cameras. Make sure the Langley analysts are on top of it."

She saw a shadow behind Fitzwilliam’s eyes. Worry? Fear? He nodded hard, one time. "I'll be sure. If we don't know, Ned will text you that he loves you. If you see that text, do not get on the plane!"

"I won't. I promise." I’m back to promises again. Promises of promises.

They held each other's gaze for a moment, and then he glanced away. "Speaking of which, I need to call Langley now and alert them about what they need to do."

Lizzy started to ask if he would be coming to the apartment later in the day, but Fanny's phone vibrated. She looked down at it.

Wickham

"It's him, Fitzwilliam."