The Colonel had a long ride on horseback to Honiton, followed by a bumpy, uncomfortable journey in a post chaise from Honiton to London. He was beside himself all the while, unable to sleep as he usually could when he rode in a carriage, only able to torture himself with the thought of how he would find Eliza when he reached town. By the time he arrived there, located Mrs. Glasswell's lodging house, and mounted the stairs, he was exhausted: it was nearly nine o'clock at night.
He inquired of the landlady the location of Miss Williams' chambers, and hesitantly made his way there. The hairs on the back of his neck raised in trepidation of what state Eliza might be in when he finally saw her. Before any time seemed to have passed, he was knocking on her door.
"Come in," a faint, familiar voice called, and he did.
He took in the sight of her. She seemed, for the most part, unchanged at first. Like her mother, she had fair straight hair, like spun gold, which she wore in a simple knot. She was thin of arm and face, as she had always been-thinner than the elder Eliza, and taller, too, her delicate arms long and too gangly yet to be graceful. In many regards-her mouth and chin, the set of her forehead, and her diffident manner-she was quite different from the woman he had loved in his youth. Her eyes were exactly like her mother's, however, and the pain he saw there when he entered the room was a pain he had seen too frequently in his life-it stopped his heart for a beat.
He understood his assumptions to be correct when she stood up from where she sat at her writing desk, observing that her frail form had changed to accommodate a greatly-swollen belly. "Oh, Eliza-" he crossed the room to her, taking her gently in his arms at once. She began to weep immediately, and he found himself joining her.
"Colonel Brandon, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry," she wailed, muffled as her voice was against his now-damp waistcoat.
"Eliza, my poor dear girl-" he was overcome with emotion and could not speak for several moments.
"Can you ever forgive me?" her young voice implored him when she had taken a moment to catch her breath.
Brandon held her at arm's length, his expression grave. "You have done nothing for me to forgive. You have been used ill. It is I who failed to protect you, and who must beg your forgiveness."
Eliza hung her head in shame. "No, Colonel. You misunderstand the situation. My current...predicament...I was indiscreet. I encouraged his advances. I am to blame."
"Who? Whose advances did you encourage, Eliza?"
"Oh, I...I cannot tell you." She looked away.
Brandon felt himself grow angry, though he would never show it. "You cannot name your seducer? You cannot name the man who willfully left you alone in your situation?" These words he spoke gently, but in a strained tone.
"No, for you see-I-I don't want you to hurt him." Her tears were renewed in this admission, and she began once more to sob into his chest.
"Good God, Eliza. I-" he felt trapped. He wanted to shake her, force her to confess the name of her lover, and ride off into the night to search him out and destroy him for his crimes. But he saw that even the thought of so doing made his foster daughter feel the kind of distress that she should not feel, for the good of her own health or that of the child growing within her. A man of action though he was, Brandon was feeling more and more like a victim of circumstance with each passing devastation in his life-unable to take the path that would best lead him to satisfaction, and unable to do anything to change matters.
"Eliza, I would not force you to tell me. I am… I am just relieved to see that you are safe. You will never know how much I suffered, thinking I should never see you again. How I despaired of ever seeing you again. Thank God you were not harmed worse." He said this, reflecting afterwards that she had been harmed about as much as a young woman of already-questionable parentage and reputation could be harmed. He regretted his relief, thinking once again how glad he was he had not been born a woman. What a pitiable, and unavoidable, loss of face women experienced in these situations, when the culprit who put her there would walk free-no one the wiser. He resisted the urge to strike the desk with his fist, and instead took a deep breath. "We must remove you from this place. I can place you in our Greenwich house for a while, and you can enjoy your confinement in more privacy than this house could ever afford you. Would you consent to going with me?" He had left the chaise outside, instructing the driver he would be handsomely paid for waiting until Brandon emerged with the young lady in question.
"Will you… will you stay with me a while?" She looked at him hopefully.
He gave her a fortifying smile. "But of course." In truth, she had no one else. She must feel so terribly alone. Nothing in this world could stop him from giving his charge comfort if it was in his power to do so. It would be the first time since her youth that they had stayed under the same roof, and there was no blood common to the both of them, yet he still thought of her, as he thought of John Middleton, as family in a way that his own blood-kin could never match.
He saw that her few belongings which she had brought with her to London were neatly arranged throughout her room, and it was a matter of ten minutes at most to help her pack up her trunks. The last item he found in the wardrobe, buried in a large-ish box which seemed to contain personal letters and documents, was a velveteen toy, much loved and worn, in the shape of a tiger. "Raja," she exclaimed, taking the tiger from him with too much childlike glee for a woman about to become a mother herself.
"You still have him with you, I see?"
"I have never been able to go anywhere without him. He brings me comfort."
His heart constricted with an ache at the memory of having purchased the toy for his young ward as he wandered through a market stall in London when Eliza was but a toddler, and newly arrived in his care. Back then she had barely been able to stop crying long enough to eat, her tears coming so naturally to her at missing her dead mother that she often wracked her tiny body to sleep each night, relaxing rather through the exertion of her sobs than through any kind of childish peace. While he looked for a suitable place for her to stay, himself being a poor choice due to his relative poverty and his lack of a permanent establishment, the poor child was stuck in the lodgings where he had kept her mother in her last days-full of memories of love, but lacking in the real substance of that emotion. No child should have to experience the agony of being left alone and unloved by any true friends. Colonel Brandon-then just barely more than a boy himself, at four-and-twenty-endeavored thusly to become her true friend, and began an earnest attempt at finding ways of coaxing smiles from her troubled countenance. Raja was his first successful attempt, the toy she clung to at night that helped her finally achieve respite from grief. He had told her stories of Raja's imagined exploits in India, adventures in stalking his prey, hiding from vicious fur trappers, and sitting around the veranda for very important tiger tea parties with his friends (comprised of other toys he bought for her, Dolly and Bunny being chief among them). At Christmas one year he had purchased sumptuous fabrics for her to play at sewing Raja a few pairs of breeches, for she had informed him that tigers, so used to the warm climate of India, must be cold in the snowy British land in which Raja now resided.
Doting on her stuffed toy for a few moments, she placed him in the trunk with her few other belongings, and he made to close it, but she intercepted him and reached-he thought rather surreptitiously-into the wardrobe to retrieve the papers from the box, tied together with brown twine. She placed them next to Raja and then pushed the lid down herself, moving to lock it into place.
The two of them finally exited the lodging house, Brandon paying Mrs. Glasswell the remainder of Eliza's board for the week so as to close out her account. They entered the coach and made for his property in the outskirts of Greenwich.
(Now, dutiful reader, go listen to "Water Me," by FKA Twigs.)