Chapter Twenty-Eight Loyalty

Lizzy drove, keeping her eyes and mind fixed on the road without looking back except to occasionally check her mother in the rearview mirror and without looking forward beyond the reach of the headlights. The van's front-end alignment had been badly damaged by the cinder blocks, causing it to pull hard to the left, so she fought the steering wheel to stay in her lane.

The GPS still guided her. Thank God it is still working! Thank God Collingwood didn't know Rochester and needed directions. She was banking on it taking her to Fitzwilliam.

She tried not to think about what she might find. He has to be alive. Everything Collingwood said had implied it. But maybe he’d lied to keep Lizzy compliant, knowing she would hope to see Fitzwilliam and have a chance to save him when he was already dead.

Dead. The word echoed in her heart in different directions each time she thought it, the many echoes throbbing down many hallways. It seemed not like one word but like a squad of words on the move—a death squad of words. Dark-uniformed and final. The van's reeking of blood did not help. Rivulets of it ran across the van's floor, some of it pooling under the gas and brake pedals.

Lizzy looked more closely at the GPS, at all the information on the screen, not just the arrows directing her. Two minutes to the destination.

Two minutes to my destiny. Fitzwilliam.

She had found the man she wanted to spend her life with, and she knew it. How she knew it was less clear, but that lack of clarity did not negate her knowledge. She had known him as Agent Darcy, then as Ned, and then―not until the end of the mission―as Fitzwilliam. Across those changes, she had discovered the man himself and who he was at his core. Instead of hiding him, each change had been a variation that revealed more of the man himself. She came to know Fitzwilliam by knowing Agent Darcy and Ned, just as she believed he had come to know Elizabeth by knowing Agent Bennet and Fanny. She was not, or was no longer, Agent Bennet and had never been Fanny, but each revealed aspects of Elizabeth.

No one can be all pretense; each pretense is somehow revelatory. Emerson somewhere warned that character teaches above our wills .

Lizzy shook her head. I don't need Ralph Waldo along for this ride. But then, despite her effort to shake Emerson, the next line of "Self-Reliance" came to mind anyway: Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.

Covert actions communicate, too.

Collingwood had seen only the pretense, but he was right about the reality of her strength, her courage, and even her unruliness. Those virtues had emitted a breath every moment. The breath had not made him suspicious of her at first, but it had made him suspicious of her as a candidate for Wickham's ruination.

She was not a candidate for ruination—neither by Wickham nor by Collingwood. She had proven that. But that did not mean she was immune to ruin. Fitzwilliam!

She turned left a final time, and the GPS showed that they were at the destination. It was an abandoned office building—apparently long -abandoned. The windows were boarded up, as were the doors except for one side door that she spotted immediately as she turned into the weedy parking lot. It was an open rectangle of inky blackness immune to the headlights that otherwise revealed the dingy, weathered gray of the building.

Lizzy stopped the van and shut off the engine. In the silence of the vehicle, the only sounds she could hear were her mother's deep, regular breathing and the harried barking of a distant dog. The cloying, coppery odor of blood was nauseating her, especially coupled with the knowledge that she was responsible for it. She knew there was some was on the soles of her shoes.

She took a deep breath and checked the gun she had used to shoot the priest. It still had four rounds. The second gun sat in the blood puddled around him and Collingwood. Using her thumb and forefinger, she picked up the dripping weapon. Lacking other options, she wiped it on her skirt.

"Mom? Mom?" She put a gun in each pocket and leaned closer to Mrs. Bennet. "Mom?"

No response except for a deepening of the loll of her mother’s head. Lizzy quickly checked her pulse. She seemed fine. As much as Lizzy hated the thought of leaving her mother there, she could not conjure up anyplace to leave her that was any better. She grabbed the van keys and got out, fervently praying her mother would not awaken to blood and corpses. A white Christmas wholly obscured by a Black Friday.

But Lizzy could not wait. Using Collingwood’s phone, she noted the address indicated by its GPS and called 911. She did not wait past the answer. "Shots fired…" She gave the address and stated, "CIA agent on the scene." Despite her retirement, she gave them her CIA activation code and directed the operator to contact Director Kellynch. She supplied his private number, confident it would still be the same. After she hung up, she took out the gun she had used before and began to jog toward the black doorway.

Once she got close to it, she slowed and deliberately gathered herself. Her Company habits were with her again, but now they felt like a costume. Instead of an agent pretending to be someone else, she was someone else pretending to be an agent. As anxious and fearful as she was, she had to go slowly. It was unlikely that Collingwood would have left Fitzwilliam alone…unless he had left him dead.

She crouched as she entered the doorway, whipping right, then left, blinking as her eyes adjusted to the darkness. Every nerve was on tiptoe, and her breathing was quick and shallow. Her heart felt like a cold, used dishrag, as if all the warm blood had been wrung out of it long ago.

She was in a foyer. As her eyes recalibrated, she could see enough from the faint, faraway streetlight outside to tell that the foyer had once been dressy. The floor gleamed in some spots where weak light touched it, and there was a chandelier hanging sideways that had been robbed of all bulbs, a crooked smile from a toothless old man.

No one moved. Nothing moved except Lizzy, who slowly rotated again to make sure that the foyer was clear. Looking more closely at the floor, she noticed footprints in the dust. Those spots where the streetlight had gleamed were the footprints, the spots where the dust had been disturbed. So far as she could tell, the prints headed up the wide stairs on the opposite side of the foyer. Biting her bottom lip, she hurried across the floor and, staying pressed to one wall, began to climb the stairs. Midway, she stopped to listen again.

Nothing.

She climbed on, reaching the second floor. It was darker there, but the stairs led to an intersection of two hallways. One continued in the direction of the stairs toward the far side of the building, while the other ran left and right.

Again, she stopped. She heard no sound. Fitzwilliam’s name was in her lungs, burning there, and she wanted to shout it, ached to hear a response, but she knew that would be a tactical blunder. She swallowed his name and went with her instincts, not turning left or right but instead continuing toward the far side of the building. As she did, the dim light gradually revealed a closed door at the end of the hallway.

Surprisingly, the door still had a pane of frosted glass which glowed translucently from some light source beyond the far side of the building. Even though the door’s glass pane was intact, diamond-like glass shards lined the hallway and had collected in drifts against the walls as if they had been kicked or swept there.

Lizzy could read the lettering upon the frosted glass: Smiley Insurance Agency . Beneath the words was a yellow smiley face, and below the face in smaller letters was the slogan: We Take Care of You.

Walking the broken glass-strewn hallway without making noise would be impossible in shoes. So far, she had been careful to be silent. With the van parked on the opposite side of the building, chances were that no one on the other side of the door―if there was anyone―would know she was there. Her instincts, honed by her Company experiences, told her she had guessed right and Fitzwilliam was divided from her by the frosted glass, inside but invisible.

At just that moment, a shadow passed over glass, implying movement inside the room. She listened, but the shadow disappeared without a sound. No sirens were audible yet, which didn’t surprise her. This was not a part of town likely to be frequented by police cars making rounds and probably not immediately served by dispatch even if her authorization code and name-dropping had the desired effect. For the next few minutes, maybe longer, she was on her own.

She could not wait. She had to find Fitzwilliam. Had to.

Using her right foot, she kicked off her left shoe, and then used her left foot to kick off her right. Breathing deeply but silently, she crept down the hallway toward the door, gun ready. Silence meant more than anything—silence for the sake of Fitzwilliam. Please, please be alive!

She tried to tread lightly, to distribute the weight of each step across her entire bare sole. Slivers of glass penetrated the bottom of one foot, then the other. Her concentration intensified, pushing away her awareness of the pain in her cut feet, her still-sore ribs, and her whole buffeted body. The now lurid-looking smiley face sneered from the door’s pane. It gloated at her, defying her, not cheering her. It seemed to smile more widely at each puncture or slice of her feet. The shoes she had kicked off had been bloody, and now her bare feet were bloody, the blood her own this time. Still, she moved in silence, choking back the pain, allowing it no expression.

When she reached the door, she extended her empty hand to the knob and grasped it, the metal cold to the touch. Loosening and then retightening her grip on the gun, she slowly breathed out, then turned the knob, releasing her breath and pushing the door at the same time. Some of the shards of glass had lodged in her feet, but she had no time to consider that.

She still had the gun in her hand. As the door swung out, she stepped to the side and scanned the room over the barrel. The room was full of office supplies, all in the wrong places, most in the middle of the floor. The room was large. On the opposite wall was a large window, beyond it a tree, and beyond the tree another distant streetlight. A gust of wind shook the tree, and Lizzy thought she’d identified the source of the moving shadow.

And then she saw him. Fitzwilliam. He was tied to a metal chair in the far right corner of the room past the window. Using all the discipline of her years as an agent, she made herself stand for a moment longer and sweep the room once more. The only activity was the tree limb outside moving in the wind. She let go of the door and silently ran toward him.

His head and shoulders were slumped. His feet were tied together and then anchored to the legs of the chair. Blood stains encircled the front of the chair, spills and spatters.

"Fitzwilliam!" she whispered as she crouched down to look at him. Unsure if he was alive or dead, she put her hands gently on his shoulders and pushed him up in the chair.

He groaned—and she was so elated at the sound that she kissed his face before she registered the damage. He had been beaten. Pistol-whipped. Probably by Leo, who had clubbed her mother in the van. She had seen such damage before on missions…even inflicted it herself once during a desperate mission she had spent years trying to forget. Fitzwilliam’s face was swollen, horribly bruised, lacerated. His bottom lip was split in several places. Blood matted his chin.

She kissed him again anyway, the kiss leaving the taste of his blood on her lips.

Then she stood and stepped quickly around the chair. His hands were tied behind it, anchored to the back. She dropped the gun into her pocket to work the knot. Fingers on Fitzwilliam’s right hand—the little finger and the ring finger—were badly broken, angled unnaturally. The nausea she had carried in from the van bubbled in her stomach. She unknotted the rope, unwound it, and took his broken hand carefully in hers. The breaks were severe, but no bone punctured the skin.

She knew with a chill certainty that she was looking at the beginning of torture that would have continued. A foreplay of pain. It hadn't continued, but that was carrion comfort.

Holding his hand, she came back around the chair. She placed his hand in his lap with devoted care and then knelt to untie his feet. She noticed her fresh bloody footprints among his dried bloodstains on the floor.

His eyes flicked open and he groaned again—but this time the groan took the form of her name. "Lizzy…" He formed her name slowly, syllable by tortured syllable. Speaking made his lip begin to bleed again.

She rose, put her fingertips to his distorted cheek, and made a shushing sound. "Be quiet. I'm here. We're together."

His eyes flicked open again, stayed open this time, and he grimaced in pain. His eyes focused on her for a moment, but then his gaze slipped past her toward the door. She leaned into him as he jerked in the chair and shouted her name, shouldering her to the side.

She did not see but felt the missed blow and heard the grunt from behind where she had been bent over Fitzwilliam. She whirled to see Rook finish a downward swing with a large hunting knife―a rolling boulder with a serrated blade.

The knife narrowly missed Fitzwilliam. He had pushed Elizabeth aside knowing he could not dodge the blow if it reached him, but it had not. The force of the missed swing overbalanced Rook, and Fitzwilliam, from his chair, managed to kick him in the face. Rook absorbed the blow and stumbled to the side, one heavy step.

Once he caught himself, he lunged at Fitzwilliam, the knife raised again, murderously, up…up…to bury it as it came down. He had expected to kill Lizzy, and now he was exposed—but he would kill Fitzwilliam. As Rook’s heavy arm began to fall, Lizzy whipped the gun from her pocket and shot him in the side of his chest below his raised arm.

Changing direction, he faced Elizabeth and stalked toward her. Fitzwilliam tried to stand, to interpose himself between them, but he was too weak and collapsed in the chair. Rook seemed unfazed by her bullet. He smiled at her, a feral version of the smiley face on the frosted door. She fired again and again. He kept coming, knife out, smile fixed.

And then, as if in slow motion, theatrically, he began to collapse. He teetered, dropped the knife, and sank to his knees, then forward onto his palms, face to the floor. It seemed as if the floor were swallowing him brutish bit by bit. He sighed like great bellows emptying, and then he lifted his head. "Bitch!" he managed to croak as he slumped forward, flat on the floor.

Lizzy stepped over Rook's massive body and put her arms around Fitzwilliam, pulling him from the chair. As she did, she felt him try to assist her and stand.

Wailing. She heard wailing—and thought she was making the sound until she realized it was sirens, sirens coming closer. The police.

"Collingwood and a man named Leo―they left a while ago. Said they’d take you prisoner and be back,” Fitzwilliam whispered urgently into her ear.

“Both dead.”

“Good.” He breathed a sigh of relief. “Then there’s no more. Safe. We’re safe. Rook was all."

He managed to get his feet under him enough for Lizzy to help him walk. He was not a small man. Sharing their burden together, they stumbled slowly toward the door.

***

Saturday, November 28

Lizzy drank the last of the bitter coffee from the paper cup and dropped it in the wastebasket. She stood in a long hallway outside a waiting room at Strong Memorial Medical Center.

Waiting. Aching. Waiting.

She had been waiting for an eternity, or so it felt. Purgatory . Both Fitzwilliam and Lizzy’s mother were being treated, but she had yet to hear any word about either. She had been more or less chased into another room, where a nurse had dressed the cuts and wounds on Lizzy's feet. Someone had produced a sweater for her to wear. She had not even realized she was freezing until she was in the ambulance with her mother and Fitzwilliam.

She had already called her aunt and uncle on a hospital phone. They were now on their way to the hospital and should be arriving soon.

After calling them, she had phoned Kellynch. First, she told him to contact Charlie, to make sure he was okay and to alert him in case some surviving piece of the Wicker Man had made its way to D.C. Second, she related all that had happened to her that night, all that Collingwood had told her.

Kellynch had already dispatched teams in Rochester to follow up with local law enforcement and claim the scene. He wanted to talk to Fitzwilliam as soon as possible. Lizzy agreed…but with the silent caveat that she would talk with Fitzwilliam before he talked to Kellynch.

She was standing near the wastebasket thinking about Fitzwilliam when she heard a man clear his throat. "Are you Elizabeth Bennet?"

She paused for a second, the question striking her. First it had been Father Gabriel’s question, and then Collingwood’s question. "Yes, that's me."

"I'm Dr. McTaggart. I'm caring for your mother. Sorry about the night the two of you have had." Lizzy had told the ER staff about the attack on her mother without going into any other explanatory detail. Evidently, word had been carried to Dr. McTaggart.

She nodded, grimly chuckling. "A blacker Black Friday than most."

"Yes, indeed." He gave her a sympathetic look. "I'm happy to tell you that your mother is resting comfortably. She needed a couple of stitches. But she's suffered a severe concussion, so there may be lasting effects. We'll have to worry about post-concussion syndrome, and she may have some dramatic short-term effects: slurred speech, memory loss, phosphenes…"

"Phosphenes?"

"Seeing stars or, more technically, seeing light even without light entering the eye. It could come and go. All the effects could."

"And post-concussion syndrome?"

"Headaches, dizziness, mood shifts―particularly depression―sleep trouble, cognitive deficits. If they do occur, they usually pass after some weeks, maybe a few months."

"Can I see her?"

"Sure, but keep the visit brief. And just roll with whatever she says. If she remembers, fine. If not, play along or tell her a story that won't be too upsetting. You can tell her all that happened later…when she's recovered."

"Thank you, Doctor."

"Follow me." He started walking.

She did not immediately follow. "Do you know anything about the other patient I brought in? Fitzwilliam Darcy?"

"No," he shook his head, "but I'll check on him while you see Mrs. Bennet."

She found her mother sitting up halfway in a bed, her head bandaged. Dark bags hung beneath her eyes. She looked older than Lizzy could ever remember, closer to death.

Maybe that's just the after-effect of the night I've had. Yea, though I walk… Her eyes burned and tears formed, but she was able to wipe them away before her mother turned toward the door.

"Hey, Mom." She pulled a chair close to the bed and sat down gingerly in it, her whole body aching.

Her mother turned stiffly toward her. "Lizzy, what happened? I went to talk to Father Gabriel and then…I don't know…I can't remember. Why can't I remember?"

"It's okay, Mom," Lizzy responded, her mind working. "You fell in the storeroom and bumped your head. But you're going to be okay."

Her mother nodded in half-understanding. "I've got an awful headache, Lizzy. I guess I drank too much during the big sale. But you know? It was a good day! We made a lot of money and dressed a lot of lovely brides-to-be." She stopped, and then her face showed displeasure. "But where’s Christine? Did she just send me to the hospital and stay at the shop? It’s just like her, to put the business ahead of me. That place only survives because of me…"

"She'll be here in a minute, Mom, and she's very worried about you."

"Are you okay, Lizzy? Did you fall in the storeroom, too? You sat down in that chair like you were hurting. But remember, I'm the one in the hospital bed."

"I remember, Mom. I'm fine, only residual soreness from that accident I had before I came back to Rochester. I'll take some aspirin."

"I still don't understand that accident or how it happened or where."

"Don't worry about it now. We can talk about it when you're feeling better." That was not a conversation she looked forward to.

Mrs. Bennet shook her head sadly, then regretted the movement and frowned in pain. "I don't understand people, Lizzy," she said plaintively. "Why is it that no one cares about what's happening in their lives the way I care about what's happening in mine? It makes me resentful. Where is your aunt?"

"I'll go and see if I can find her," Lizzy said, grasping her mother's hand and rubbing it, sorry for her, for all that had happened…and sorry that her mother was impossible. "You just relax."

In the hallway, Lizzy met Dr. McTaggart, who had been coming to find her. "I've talked to Dr. James―she's been caring for Agent Darcy. He's been cleaned up, and his face has been stitched. A couple of the wounds were deep, more tears than cuts. She'll find you in the waiting room soon. Another team is working on his hand. His fingers were badly broken."

She nodded. "But will they heal?"

"Dr. James says they will, but how well they will function will be determined by nature and therapy."

"Thanks, Dr. McTaggart."

He took a long moment to look at her. "You need sleep, Miss Bennet. This was a traumatic night."

"After I've seen him."

"All right. I'm going to check on your mother again." He nodded and went into her mother's room.

"Lizzy!" It was Aunt Christine. Behind her by a step or two was Uncle Hubert. She ran the final steps toward Lizzy, her shoes echoing on the polished floor, and swept her niece into a hug―or as close to sweeping her into one as could be done cautiously.

In her aunt's arms, Lizzy suddenly let go, and she wept.

"It's okay, Lizzy. It's okay. We're here." She felt her uncle's hand rubbing her back.

On the phone, she had kept the details sparse, only relating what was essential. Now, led back into the empty waiting room by her aunt's warm, caressing hand, she sat down and quietly told them all that happened. She told it the way a Company agent might tell it. Exact and unemotional, the tone of a debrief.

That did not keep the Gardiners from being horrified and deeply concerned about her. Her aunt hugged her again. Uncle Hubert hugged her and shook his head, having previously learned Lizzy's CIA job from his wife. He and Lizzy had not acknowledged it to each other before now. "You're a remarkable woman, Elizabeth. We're proud of you." His words touched her deeply, helping to ease the nausea she had felt since the van.

The three sat together in silence for a while until a nurse came and told Lizzy that she could see Fitzwilliam. Her aunt leaned toward her with a broad wink before Lizzy stood. "Tell Ned we love him already."

A nurse seated at the nurses' station waved at the nurse walking with Lizzy. "Is that Miss Bennet?"

"Yes, that's me," Lizzy answered for her.

"There's a call for you here. A Director Kellynch." The woman said the name as if she were unsure whether “Director” was a first name or a title.

As little as Lizzy wanted to talk to him right now, she changed direction and walked to the station. The woman hit a button on the phone, handed the receiver to Lizzy, and walked a few steps away to give her a bit of privacy.

"Director?"

"Lizzy, sorry to bother you, but how is Agent Darcy?"

"Okay, as far as I know. I'm about to go in to see him now."

"Did the locals trouble you? I threw my weight around―my considerable weight―and rather violently."

"No. The Rochester Chief of Police radioed the patrolmen on the scene. Everything was…fine after that. They were deferential."

"Good! Very good. I won't keep you long. I just wanted to know how he was doing—and I wanted to tell you something."

"What's that, sir?" The old habits of deference were hard to break.

"Tonight was…unpleasant, I know. But doesn't it prove to you that this is where you belong, that you are a Company woman? That this is your life? Come back home, Agent Bennet."

She exhaled slowly, and the very thing that Kellynch asked about flashed before her eyes. Her life.

Except that years of it had not really been hers. They belonged mostly to Kellynch and aliases, just as her weeks in Chicago had belonged to Kellynch and Fanny. If her Company years were divided between the director and the aliases, the remainder did not amount to much. She had sacrificed enough of herself, enough of her life, enough of her lifetime.

Finitude. She had one life, a finite life. It occurred to her, standing there with the receiver to her ear and Kellynch waiting on the line, that to choose the Company was to choose a life too close to death.

She wanted a life close to life. Mother, wife, and teacher.

She now chose. "No, thank you, sir."

She hung up the receiver quietly.

***

Fitzwilliam’s eyes were closed when Lizzy came in. His right hand was atop the blanket covering him, his little and ring fingers splinted. Lizzy ran her fingers through her disheveled hair and hated that she still wore her bloody dress and bloody shoes. She wished she could shower, change, and present herself to him looking more like the woman she wanted to be and less like the woman she had been.

He turned to her immediately. Once he smiled—as much of a smile as the swelling and stitches would permit—she forgot to worry about how she looked, forgot herself, and forgot the smiley face on the frosted door. She ran to him and put her head on his shoulder, her body across his. He pulled his other hand from beneath the covers and embraced her.

"I love you, Lizzy," he passionately whispered to her. "I love you."

She knew it already, but that did not keep the words from being the sweetest she had ever heard. Fitzwilliam had written the words to her, and she had read them, but now she heard them while in his arms.

He had more to tell her, she knew. But for now, this was so much more than enough.