Chapter 9 #3
At last Mr. Philips shook his head. “Edward was a shrewd businessman as well as a generous man. The children are amply provided for. Their father’s affairs are not what we feared in those first dreadful days.”
The words ought to have eased him. They did, in part. Still, Darcy remained uncomfortable closing his fingers again around the money. “Then there must be some other use.”
“There is always some other use for money,” Mr. Philips said dryly.
“But not always the right one.” He looked toward the empty spaces in the warehouse, then back at Darcy.
“If you truly wish to honor Edward Gardiner, then keep it until the right need presents itself. Help someone who cannot repay you. He would have liked that better than a settlement of accounts he considered already closed.”
Darcy slowly lowered his hand.
Not repayment, then.
Continuation.
A kindness received and then passed onward when Providence placed the opportunity before him.
“I can do that,” he said.
Mr. Philips smiled faintly. “I rather thought you might.”
Darcy had begun to offer his farewell when a servant came dashing through the warehouse door, breathless and hatless, his face flushed from haste.
“Mr. Philips, sir!”
The attorney turned sharply. “John? What is it?”
The young man bent slightly, hands braced upon his knees as he fought for breath. “Come quick, sir. Your niece—in the cellar—floor’s unstable—or some such thing. Mrs. Thompson sent me. There’s a hidden place beneath—”
Mr. Philips was already moving. “Good heavens. What has she done now?”
Darcy ought to have remained behind. Whatever crisis had unfolded in Mr. Gardiner’s house was plainly a family matter, and he had no claim upon it.
Yet the words floor’s unstable and hidden place beneath, paired with the young man’s visible distress, propelled him after Mr. Philips before he could decide otherwise.
“If there is danger,” Darcy said, matching the older man’s pace, “I may be of assistance.”
Mr. Philips gave him one distracted glance, then nodded.
The house stood only a few streets away, respectable and handsome despite the streaks of mud still marking nearby walls from the flood.
The front door opened before Mr. Philips could knock, and they passed inside with John close behind.
Darcy barely noticed the entry hall beyond an impression of quiet disorder: crates stacked near the wall, a folded carpet leaning against the stairs, the lingering smell of damp fabric and recent scrubbing.
“Lizzy!” Mr. Philips called.
A young woman’s voice came faintly from below. “Down here!”
They descended through the below-stairs passage and into the cellar.
The air grew cold and earthy, touched with river damp.
At the bottom, Darcy saw Susan Thompson first and stopped in surprise.
For one disorienting moment, Derbyshire and London seemed to collide.
Darcy remembered Susie Thompson as Mrs. Reynolds’s niece, a capable girl from Lambton who had once visited Pemberley’s housekeeper and been recommended for service elsewhere.
Before he could ask how she came to be in Gracechurch Street, Mr. Philips pushed past him.
“What on earth has happened?” the attorney demanded. “John came to tell me you had found some sort of hidden door, and by the time I reached the house, he had lost you entirely! Lizzy, what have you done to yourself?”
Only then did Darcy see the young lady.
She stood near an open trap door in the cellar floor, her gown streaked with mud, one shoe nearly black, and a lantern set beside her.
Dark curls had escaped from whatever arrangement had once confined them, and there was a smear of dirt upon one cheek.
She looked as though she had been wrestling with the Thames and had not entirely lost.
“I have made an examination,” she said.
“You have made yourself look as though you were dragged through the river.”
“That was not my intention.”
Mr. Philips strode toward her, irritation and fear mingling in his voice. “Were you down there? Tell me you did not climb into some unknown hole beneath a flooded cellar without waiting for me.”
The young lady winced. “I would prefer not to tell you that.”
“Elizabeth!”
“But look.” In her eagerness, she thrust out her hand too quickly. Something small and bright slipped from her muddy fingers, struck the stone floor with a clear ringing sound, and rolled toward Mr. Philips’s boot.
“Oh!” She dropped at once to retrieve it, apparently more mortified by her clumsiness than by the scolding. The object had settled into a crack between two stones, and she tugged off one worn working-glove to pry it free.
Darcy descended the last steps instinctively, as though to help, but she had already closed her fingers around it and risen.
For one suspended instant, he found himself looking directly into the finest pair of eyes he had ever seen.
They were bright despite the dim cellar, lively despite exhaustion, and so startlingly expressive that Darcy forgot, quite absurdly, why he had come down the stairs at all.
Her face was not conventionally perfect.
There was mud upon it, for one thing. Yet the intelligence in her gaze, the color high in her cheeks, and the breathless mixture of embarrassment, defiance, and triumph made her arresting in a way no polished London beauty had ever been.
Behind her, Susie spied him for the first time and let out a little gasp.
“Mr. Darcy!”