Chapter Twenty-Nine Wives and Daughters

They held each other for a long time in silence. The relief of being together and safe overwhelmed Lizzy. The burden of doubt and despair she had continued to carry as she waited for Fitzwilliam began to lighten as she lay against his chest.

She felt his hand on her back and then in her hair, soft caresses. Her eyes were closed, shutting out everything present but him―touch, sound, and scent―distancing herself from the past and feeling the future nearer than it had felt in…forever.

His chuckle registered, at first not as a sound but as a movement of his chest, and then she heard it. She lifted her head to look at him. He gave her his injured but intense smile. "The blonde is gone."

She boggled for a second, and then she understood. So preoccupied with worrying about him, applying for graduate school, humoring her mother, and helping her aunt, she wasn’t thinking much about herself. However, she had gone to a beauty parlor and gotten her hair colored to an approximation of her natural brown, wanting to purge another remnant of her alias. When Fitzwilliam had seen her last, her hair still had been bright blonde.

For a moment she felt self-conscious, awkward. She touched her hair, wishing that she'd had time to wash and style it, as she wished she'd had time to shower and put on clean clothes.

Fumbling for a response, she finally smiled, but unsure. "The real me—or very nearly. What do you think?"

"Enough to tempt me," he said and leaned forward for a kiss, a surprisingly eager one, given his condition and what he had likely suffered in the past hours.

She returned the kiss with an eagerness of her own, allowing herself to rest more of her weight on him as she pushed herself up his chest, her chest pressing hard on his. She ended the kiss and pulled back, smirking at him even as her breath came fast. "Enough to tempt you , huh?"

He grimaced, partly in play. "Please don’t remind me of what I said." Pausing, he looked at her, gentleness in his eyes that she felt in the touch of his fingers against her cheek. "Haven't you figured out yet that I only said that because I already knew, at some unacknowledged level, that standing by and watching you seduce George Wickham would prove unbearable?"

She blushed with pleasure, understanding him and believing him, but she played dumb. "You knew how clumsy a seductress I would be?"

He scoffed, smiling again. "Ha! Hardly clumsy! Miraculously efficient, I say. You seduced two men at once, Lizzy Bennet, two —one with pretense and the other without even trying."

She looked around the otherwise empty hospital room, then let one coy eyebrow buoy. "Are you trying to seduce me , Fitzwilliam Darcy?"

He sighed in head-shaking resignation and sat back, letting his finger softly trail across her smiling lips. "The spirit is willing, Lizzy―so, so willing―but the flesh is weak."

She kissed his lips quickly, carefully, and then she sighed. "I know. Mine, too, spirit and flesh. Soon," she promised.

He nodded his agreement. "It's a date."

A chair stood close to the bed. She pulled it closer and sat but reached out to hold his left hand, leaning toward him. "What happened to you, Fitzwilliam? How did you end up in that office building?"

He inhaled and then slowly exhaled. "Probably it’s best to tell you the whole story, although I'm not going to worry about the precise timeline or keeping it all straight. I'll just tell you as best I can…the major events and explanations as they come to me.

"I left Casper with a hunch. Calling it a hunch probably dignifies it too much. It—whatever it was—lodged in my brain after I realized that Wickham didn’t expect the two teams that showed up on the mountain, so he must not have called for them. Someone else sent them. If Wickham wasn’t suspicious enough to arrange it, it must have been someone else's suspicion.

“And—although I admit this was a leap— what if it was not just a suspicion of you? What if it was a suspicion of Wickham, too? I mean, worry about him and what he might give away. Who had we interacted with who seemed concerned about you and Wickham ? The answer was Father Robyn ."

He stopped and licked his lips. "There was that strange, oily, officious visit he paid to Fanny in Chicago. It might have been priestly overstepping—not exactly a novelty among Episcopal priests, who often think they're God's right hand—but it stuck in my mind. Then I recalled the girl from UIC, Teresa Sanz. She’d said that Father Robyn introduced her to Lady Catherine. What if that had not been innocent? What if it had been Collingwood procuring a plaything for Wickham?

“My head told me I was just guessing, but my experience told me that the priest was off . Then the whole Wicker Man name started to make sense to me, a perverse sense―the whole Christian vs. pagan thing, the idea of striking against Christendom from a place like St. James Church. Attack the enemy from the enemy's very heart."

He shifted in the bed, grimaced, and looked at his splinted fingers. "Working off that, I went back to Chicago. I gathered up some things"―he gave Lizzy a look, and she thought our copy of Wives and Daughters ― "and I moved into a hotel near both St. James and Rosings. I wore a disguise and started following Collingwood carefully. If I was right about him and he picked up on my tail, he would be gone, in the wind. Much as I wanted him, what I really wanted was the Wicker Man, to destroy the organization. I had to bide my time.

"While I was there, I also got to know Teresa Sanz much as Bingley did, by bumping into her on campus, pretending I was an English professor―pun intended. It took a couple of 'chance' encounters and some apparently casual questions for her to begin to refer to her time at Rosings. Her references were indirect, but it was obvious to me. It was also obvious that she was deeply ashamed of what she had done there.

"She got drawn into it before she quite understood what was happening to her. Drugs were almost certainly involved, and without her knowing." Fitzwilliam’s deep frown deepened more. "From a few things she said, it was clear that Collingwood introducing her to Lady Catherine had not been chance but had been orchestrated. Lady Catherine later let something slip, post-coital murmuring"― Fitzwilliam’s face pinched―"that suggested Catherine and Wickham had asked for the introduction. "

He rubbed his swollen face with his left hand. Lizzy could tell he was fading but fighting his exhaustion. "But I also had another idea." He pursed his lips in embarrassment. "I have another friend among the analysts at Langley that I never mentioned to you or Bingley. I admit, I used him to give me a sense of who you were without any Kellynch slant before we left D.C. I needed, wanted to know more about you." He dropped his eyes and hurried on. "Anyway, I called him from Chicago after talking to Sanz and asked him to dig into St. James's finances and to compare what he found about the parish to what he could find on Lady Catherine's—purported—donations."

Lizzy was nodding, seeing it all come together in her mind much as it had in Fitzwilliam’s. She went on for him. "…and it turned out that Lady Catherine had made large donations to St. James that were not properly reflected in the Parish financial ledgers."

Fitzwilliam grinned at her. "Exactly, or at least that's what my analyst friend, Frank Churchill…?" He stopped and looked askance at Lizzy to see if she knew the name, but she shrugged her ignorance. "That's what Frank told me. She was funding the Wicker Man—not that she was the only source of funds—by giving to St. James. The bookkeeping was complicated and doubled-up. I wasn't trying to prove it, though, just to confirm that my suspicions were right. By then, I was certain they were.

“I haven’t found evidence to suggest Lady Catherine knew her money wasn’t helping St. James, but it seems likely that she wouldn’t have cared. She has plenty of it, and she and Collingwood probably had an arrangement. He would introduce young women like Teresa Sanz to her, sacrificial lambs that she and Wickham could despoil for their pleasure. Doing so would also provide Collingwood with blackmail material if Lady Catherine balked at providing the money he wanted.

"I managed to sneak into the parsonage at St. James and install some bugs. It helped that Collingwood was so secure in his pretense, his fake priesthood. He had grown to depend on Wickham to divert any suspicions away from himself."

"Avatar," Lizzy said softly, and Fitzwilliam nodded. "But the avatar was dead."

Another nod. "What happened on Casper Mountain caused serious problems for the Wicker Man, most especially the loss of Wickham. It put Collingwood under new pressures. Those helped me, too. He was too busy trying to contend with the consequences to seriously check his rearview, check for bugs in the parsonage, or notice footprints outside the parsonage."

"So, that's how you found out about the meeting at Vivos xPoint?"

He raised his eyebrows in surprise. "You heard about that?"

"Charlie told me." Lizzy pushed herself even closer to Fitzwilliam’s bed and squeezed his hand, remembering her fear when she had heard the news.

"Yes, monitoring Collingwood paid off. He called an emergency summit of the major players…the complete management team, as it were. What you and I and Bingley and Agent McDougal did in Chicago, what we did on the mountain, it forced Collingwood to reveal himself."

Fitzwilliam shook his head slowly. "Unfortunately, his plans changed at the last moment, after I had left Chicago and relocated to the Black Hills to prepare for the meeting. I didn't know that.

"Vivos xPoint, I was willing to bet, was part of the Wicker Man, a source of funds and more. I was there a couple of days ahead of Collingwood’s scheduled arrival. Bang Fumerton was installed in one of the bunkers. I couldn't do much to prep since Vivos was crawling with security. Luckily, the place is so vast that there was no way to keep me from sneaking in. I was there when the Wicker Man's pieces arrived and kept watch from a disused bunker using a telescope. The meeting was to last for a day and night. Since Collingwood wasn't there, I assumed he would arrive later, at the last minute.

"Fumerton must've decided to demonstrate his skills for the others, or maybe he’d stored something unstable in his bunker or something, but the bunker just exploded. He lived up to his name." Fitzwilliam’s grin was grim. "The bunker was built to withstand blasts from the outside, and it certainly did well with one on the inside―so well that there was little damage to the surroundings. Everyone inside was killed."

Lizzy stood up after placing Fitzwilliam’s hand on the bed. "So you had nothing to do with Fumerton? The explosion?"

"No, honestly. Nothing. I hoped to wait for Collingwood and then capture them all at once. It would've been tricky, doing it single-handedly, but I worried that calling for help would risk discovery and send them running. I planned to gas them in the bunker once Collingwood arrived."

Lizzy shook her head. "Collingwood is not…was not…God's right hand, but that explosion might have been the hand of God―an act of God. The new God ends the old gods."

Fitzwilliam looked at Lizzy closely but did not ask her to elaborate. After a moment of thought, he nodded once. "Reversal of the movie."

"But Collingwood wasn't there."

"No, and I left almost the next day. I had a sudden sick feeling that what happened at Vivos might unhinge him, send him after revenge. Churchill had been keeping tabs on you at my urging. Sorry…it was only an over-watch, using traffic cameras between your home and the bridal shop as far toward your house as the cameras went. Nothing too invasive." Lizzy shook her head to indicate that she was not upset. "I had asked him earlier―when I had him check on the finances at St. James and Rosings―to keep an ear to the ground and try to identify a leak or mole in Langley." He pushed himself up a bit in the bed. "I admit I didn't entirely trust Kellynch or anyone else at Langley, at least not as much as I trusted Churchill."

His tone changed. "Churchill was a friend of mine at University. After Bingley and before MI-6. He moved here in Rochester just after he graduated. We sort of kept in touch, especially after we realized we were in the same line of work, broadly speaking. Sorry, I’m drifting…

"I rushed here feeling terrified that Collingwood would arrive before me. As it turns out, he did. He must've left almost immediately after hearing about Vivos. He may have had men here already who were following you, although Churchill hadn't noticed anyone."

Lizzy thought about the car in her neighborhood but said nothing. "So Collingwood did have other men here?" she asked after a moment.

"Yes, they're dead in that abandoned building. I assume the Company team has found them by now."

"Kellynch didn't mention it."

"You've talked to the director?" Fitzwilliam asked with concern in his voice and on his face.

"Yes, he called to ask me to reconsider my retirement."

He shifted forward in the bed. "And?"

"And I said no ."

"Oh." He said it noncommittally, but he relaxed back against the bed. "That's your final answer?"

"My final answer. I'm saving my yes— for later, for someone else and a different question, for a different life." She was sure he comprehended her meaning but could not meet his eyes. He had written similarly to her.

Fitzwilliam waited until she finally lifted her gaze to his. He held her eyes for a moment: "I have asked the right question, but not as the right person or to the right person. Please hold onto that yes until the question can be asked in propria persona , answered in propria persona. "

He smiled weakly. "I've decided that the key to being a spy is this: I am not who I am, and I am who I am not. It's time to be who I am."

"So, you're done? MI-6?"

"I will officially resign as soon as I am up to talking to my boss. He may retire me peremptorily. The last few weeks I've been off-book, unsanctioned, flirting with rogue ."

"What will you do?"

He seemed unworried about the question. "All that I'm sure of is—you."

"Oh, so your plan is to do me?" It was silly, perhaps, but it felt so good to be able to banter with him. Lizzy and Fitzwilliam. Not Fanny and Ned. Not Agent Bennet and Agent Darcy. A woman and a man, each acutely aware of the other as woman and man.

"As soon as my strength returns," Fitzwilliam said, underscoring the word “strength” and deepening her blush.

The door opened and a nurse entered carrying a plain white tote bag. "A man came in with this and asked that it be given to Agent Darcy." Thanking her, Lizzy took the bag, and the nurse left.

"What is it?" Fitzwilliam asked, puzzled.

She opened it. Inside, she found a phone on top of a folded jacket. She recognized the jacket from Chicago―Ned’s. "Your phone and jacket. They must have found them in the building where you were held."

He nodded. "Rook took them from me in the parking lot." He shook his head. "When I saw him behind you in the Smiley office—"

"Where was he?" Lizzy asked. She had wondered about that a time or two since arriving at the hospital.

"He came in from a connecting room next to the one where I was being held. He’d been guarding me, but he must have left the room after I passed out. Considering how I was tied, he knew I couldn’t escape. I didn't know where he was until I saw him rushing at you. "

Lizzy would tell Fitzwilliam about her barefoot trek someday, but not today. He had dealt with enough.

"Collingwood and his men grabbed me just outside your house. I hadn’t anticipated that you’d be working at the bridal shop and thought you would likely be at home."

"Mom had a big idea about a white sale of sorts on Black Friday. I've been helping out some and couldn't refuse when she was expecting such a big day. I've seen her. I guess that she'll be fine. Right now, she doesn't remember what happened to her."

She quickly informed him what her mother could not remember―the bridal shop to the van ride―and she related what she had done to Leo and Collingwood. She reported it agent to agent, with professional detachment.

They were both still for a long moment, reckoning with what he had been shared. He gestured for her to hand him the tote bag and then reached inside and took out his phone. "Huh, they didn't destroy it. Maybe they thought they could learn something from it. It still has a charge…a little, anyway."

"What happened in that building, Fitzwilliam?"

"You can guess. I got free for a few minutes and managed to kill two of the men. But that still left Collingwood, Rook, and Leo. Collingwood promised me that I would live long enough to watch you die." His voice choked and he had to clear his throat before continuing. "He had Rook tie me, beat me, snap two of my fingers."

He looked at his phone―only as a goad to forgetfulness and an incitement to thought—and then looked up at her. "Tactically, he should have killed me. Killed you. Killed your mother. Been done with it, with us. But in the end, he was like his avatar, like Wickham. He didn't want to just defeat us…me. He desired total ruin. He wanted our living misery as much or more than he wanted our death. He lost, he's dead—only because winning wasn't enough."

Fitzwilliam caught her eyes, and his own burned bright for a moment as he regarded her. "And because he had no true conception of the Fury he kidnapped from the bridal shop."

" And because Collingwood had no conception of what spies might do when they're in love," she finished quietly.

He put the phone on the top of his blanket and nodded. “None." His eyes were beginning to droop, but he added, smiling sleepily,

Lizzy kissed his forehead as she patted his chest. She felt her own exhaustion keenly. "Not at you, never at you. Sleep, love. Sleep."

He put his hand on hers. "You, too. Go home, and take a long shower. Wash some of tonight away. Sleep. Until tomorrow."

***

Sunday, November 29

Lizzy slept later than she’d intended to the next morning. She had left Strong Memorial with her aunt and uncle, who had waited for her. Then she had gone to their house to shower and sleep. Wearing pajamas her aunt loaned her, Lizzy curled up on the big bed in the guest room under an ocean of blue blankets, snow whirling in the Rochester wind outside. After saying Fitzwilliam in an incantatory tone to herself, she warmed and sank into deep, dreamless sleep.

The Gardiners had decided to close the bridal shop for the weekend, so Aunt Christine woke up early and drove to Lizzy's house, returning with fresh clothes and then making breakfast, all before her niece finally rose. Once Lizzy had eaten and dressed, her aunt drove her to get her car at the bridal shop.

Lizzy went inside for a moment to reclaim her phone, which she’d left behind when she went to the storeroom the previous night. It was still plugged in behind the counter where she'd left it.

She found a text from Fitzwilliam. Good morning. Up early. Sent my resignation to MI-6. All yours.

A tremble went through her from head to toe as she read it. A new possessiveness. Joy. Mine.

They were both done. They were both free. Free for each other, for the different life she had been imagining. Burdens once chosen were no longer borne. The Company and MI-6 were behind them.

She took a deep breath and responded. All yours, too. His.

Hanging near her was a wedding dress they had featured during the Black Friday sale. It had caught Lizzie's attention often as she worked, and she had imagined herself in it. It was simple, a bit antique, covered in silk tulle, and had a high neckline but a short skirt and an A-line silhouette. She grabbed a tag from the counter, wrote her name on it, and attached it to the dress. Next, she grabbed an IOU slip, signed it, and left it on the counter. Then she moved the dress to the layaway section of the store.

For safekeeping.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single woman in possession of a bridal gown, must be in want of a husband.

Lizzy chuckled to herself.

***

When Lizzy entered Fitzwilliam’s room, she was pleasantly surprised to find Charlie and Jane sitting with him. "Jane! Charlie! What are you doing here?"

Charlie answered while Jane rushed into a hug with Lizzy. "Kellynch sent me, and Jane took some time off to come see you both. She and Darcy have been getting personally acquainted."

Jane still had Lizzy in the hug and whispered. "I get it, Lizzy. He's something!" Pulling back, she led her to an empty chair.

Lizzy did not sit immediately. Instead, she kissed Fitzwilliam hungrily on the mouth, untroubled by the company in the room. Neither was he; he kissed her back with equal hunger.

Jane cleared her throat archly. "Okay, you two! Get a non-hospital room!"

When they finished the lingering kiss, Lizzy leaned close to his ear. "That kiss is for the not-so-subtle in and out line."

He grinned. She turned to Charlie and Jane, hugging Charlie before sitting by the bed and taking Fitzwilliam’s uninjured hand in hers. "Why did Kellynch send you?" she asked Charlie.

"Not to ask you to un-retire. Whatever it was that you said to him last night silenced him on that subject forever, he said. He knew I was worried, that I wanted to see you both. And… he wanted me to tell you that we've found the mole. Sort of."

"Sort of?" Lizzy asked as she felt Fitzwilliam stiffen beside her.

"Yes. Here's the thing. Yesterday, just before everything happened here—Kellynch filled me in, and I've told Jane—Darcy's analyst friend, a Mr. Churchill, previously unknown to me"—Charlie shot Fitzwilliam an uncharacteristically chiding glance—"asked to see Kellynch. It seems that Churchill got the good idea to stop looking for new-fangled sophisticated infiltration and check old-school ones. Like the telephone. Like to see if anyone in Langley had gotten a phone call from Chicago around the time that Lizzy traveled to Casper with Wickham.

“There were several calls, so he cross-listed them with Collingwood’s cell. Nothing. Then he cross-listed them with the church’s phone. Nothing. However, there were phone calls from St. James to D.C. the day before. One of those numbers turned out to be the home number of an administrative assistant in Langley. Her name is Steele, Lucy Steele.

“She's been interrogated. Collingwood had a tie to her, something he could hold over her. He had kept her in his pocket for a long time until he needed something important. He sent Steele photographs of Lizzy and Darcy, wanting to know if she had ever seen either of them. She said no. She works for legal in another part of the building. She thought the woman in the picture matched the description of someone she had heard about but hadn’t ever seen. Lizzy. Except for the blonde hair.

“However, Steele eats in the Langley cafeteria and got to know Charlotte Lucas there―they ate together regularly. Charlotte complained to Steele now and then about being jealous of a particular female agent, pretty with dark-hair and eyes, medium height. At lunch the day after Steele saw the picture, she mentioned the agent and asked if Charlotte had seen her lately. Charlotte answered that the agent was on a deep cover mission in Chicago with an MI-6 agent and had gone blonde —or so her boss had said."

"Shit!" Lizzy said.

"Charlotte just didn't think, or she didn't think what she said would matter, or she just didn't care at that moment. Steele left Langley and called Collingwood on a burner phone. That’s how he found out who you were―that you were a CIA agent working with an MI-6 agent." Charlie stopped and looked at Lizzy.

"So when you said 'sort of,’ you mean that it's not clear whether Charlotte counts as a mole. She's the leak, but it's not clear what her motivation was, whether it was carelessness, cattiness, or what. Steele is the mole, and what Charlotte is…well, it sounds like that remains to be determined."

"Yeah," he said with a shrug, "in more ways than one. She's due to face Kellynch today. It's all the more complicated because the two of them, they…" he trailed off, his meaning clear.

Lizzy nodded. "I thought so. So she finally got him, and now she's going to lose him?"

"It looks that way. Walter Kellynch is too protective of the Company and its reputation to put his feelings for Charlotte―whatever they might be―ahead of the job."

"Charlotte was a friend of yours?" Fitzwilliam asked Lizzy.

"Sort of." She didn’t think about her choice of expression until she’d said it. "I doubt she acted out of truly evil motives. She’d convinced herself that I was her competition for the director and let that gnaw at her…and it cost her. Dearly."

They put the news about Charlotte to one side and spent the next hour or so catching up with Jane and Charlie. Jane had career news to share, too. She was considering a management position at a head-hunter firm in D.C. that offered much better pay and much less travel. She still hadn't yet made up her mind about whether to accept the job, which was why she hadn't mentioned it during their Thanksgiving call a couple of days earlier, but she was leaning in that direction. Charlie expressed his support for whatever decision she made, but it was obvious he was delighted that the job wouldn't take Jane from D.C. and that she wouldn’t be on the road as much.

He had his own career news. He’d asked Kellynch for reassignment. He wanted to work as an instructor on the Farm, to be based in D.C. and no longer involved in deep cover assignments. The director had not said yes, but Charlie was sure he would.

Lizzy sang an impromptu chorus of Old McBingley and, surprisingly, Darcy and Jane joined in for the E-I-E-I-Os . Charlie smiled and blushed.

A nurse came in with more good news. Fitzwilliam was going to be released from the hospital the next day.

Leaving him chatting with Charlie and Jane, Lizzy walked to her mother's room. Aunt Christine, who was spending the day with Mrs. Bennet, had already texted and reported that she was doing well. When Lizzy entered, she found her mother asleep.

Mrs. Gardiner was reading in a nearby chair—a paperback copy of Gaskell's Wives and Daughters. When she saw Lizzy notice the title, she held the book up. "I wanted to see what all the fuss was about."

“So how long has she been asleep?" Lizzy asked as her mother emitted a soft snore.

"An hour or so. She spent the morning ordering the nurses about like servants."

"Has she remembered anything?"

"No, not that I can tell. But she's eager to get to the shop and do the receipts on Black Friday. ‘A banner day!’ she keeps saying."

"That it was."

"How is Ned—Fitzwilliam?"

"Just Fitzwilliam, please. No more Ned, and no more Fanny. He's good." She paused, and then she confessed, “I sent him a picture of a wedding dress this morning."

Aunt Christine lifted her eyebrows. "Oh? The high-necked A-line hanging near the counter?"

"How did you know?" Lizzy smiled, delighted but also surprised.

"I saw you admiring it more than once. I've never seen you look at one that way before, personally …like you were imagining yourself wearing it. Do you think it's a good idea, to send a picture of that at this point in your relationship?"

Lizzy nodded confidently, sighing. "We're together, Aunt. Fitzwilliam’s not going to spook, and neither am I."

Aunt Christine’s eyes welled with tears. "Then I'll tear up that IOU I'm betting you left on the shop counter. The dress will be my wedding present to you." Her voice grew softer. "You've always been a daughter to me, Elizabeth."

Lizzy wiped away her own tears and drew her aunt into a long-lasting hug.

Mrs. Bennet continued snoring.