CHAPTER 62
The House’s Memory
By the second morning, Darcy had learned that a falsehood admitted into a great house did not sit in one drawer waiting to be found.
It multiplied.
It hid in ordinary ink. It passed from rent book to receipt, from receipt to remittance, from remittance to memorandum, from memorandum to a letter copied by a clerk who had never thought to ask why the original did not follow its proper course.
It lodged itself between tenant and steward, steward and master, master and son.
It wore the face of custom. It called itself convenience.
It had, in several instances, been folded neatly and endorsed in his father’s own hand.
The steward’s office was not large enough for the truth it contained.
Mr. Latham stood at the long table with his spectacles low upon his nose, a rent book open before him and three packets tied in faded tape at his elbow.
His clerk had taken the smaller desk by the window, where he copied references with the solemn despair of a young man discovering that a respectable estate might produce more paper than a Chancery suit.
Darcy had opened one drawer, then another, then a third, and found in each not explanation, but further dependence upon something else.
“This receipt refers to a payment in April,” he said.
Mr. Latham did not look up. “Which April?”
Darcy looked again. “It does not say.”
“Then we must find whether the tenant meant last April, the previous April, or the April in which Mr. Wickham preferred not to write the year.”
Darcy closed the book with more care than inclination.
“Every answer produces three questions.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Latham. “That is one of the ways by which confusion becomes useful to the wrong person.”
Across the table, a packet of correspondence waited.
Some letters were in his father’s hand. Some were copies of letters sent to Darcy House.
Some were addressed to John Wickham. Some had no business passing through a steward’s office at all.
Darcy’s own name appeared upon one folded cover, and he did not yet know whether it contained an old calumny, an intercepted appeal, or some ordinary estate matter made poisonous by proximity.
He had thought the first blow would be worst: the crossed-out provisions in the will, the sight of the Wickham name struck through by his father’s furious hand.
He had been wrong.
The worst was not a single revelation. It was the quantity.
Pemberley had not been betrayed in one motion. It had been made permeable, drawer by drawer, key by key, habit by habit, until no man could tell, without reading everything, which parts of the house remembered truly.
They did not yet know whether John Wickham had stolen from the estate.
That was the trouble.
They knew only that he could have done it, that too many papers had passed through his hands, that too many payments waited upon his explanation, and that his disappearance made innocence inconveniently difficult to maintain.
Mr. Latham pushed one book aside.
“We cannot do this alone.”
Darcy looked at him.
The solicitor’s expression was very dry. “You may dislike the conclusion, Mr. Darcy, but I must tell you that your dislike will not reduce the number of ledgers.”
“No.”
“We may secure the papers. We may identify the most urgent dangers. We may preserve evidence. But a full examination will require more eyes.”
“Eyes may be corrupted.”
“Yes. That is why they must be chosen, watched, and paid according to the usefulness of their accuracy.”
Darcy almost smiled despite himself. “You sound like my wife.”
“Then Mrs. Darcy is a sensible woman.”
Darcy did smile then, though very faintly. “Yes.”
It did not solve the matter.
By eleven he had read until the figures would no longer remain still before him.
One rent book contradicted a receipt book.
A disbursement entry had been initialled by a clerk whose hand changed halfway down the page.
Three letters from Darcy House had been copied, but the originals were not in the packet where they ought to have been.
One note concerning Mrs. Younge’s allowance was ordinary enough; another, undated and unsigned, referred to “the additional consideration promised,” which might mean nothing and therefore almost certainly did not.
When Darcy left the office, it was with the unpleasant sensation of abandoning a wounded thing upon the table.
Elizabeth was in the small sitting room below, not idle, of course.
He did not think Pemberley had yet discovered how to produce idleness in her presence.
A household paper lay to one side of her, a note half-written before her, and Mrs. Reynolds stood nearby with the attentive stillness of a woman receiving orders which had already begun to become inevitable.
Elizabeth looked up as he entered.
“You have the expression of a man who has discovered that paper breeds in darkness.”
“There is too much.”
“How much too much?”
“Enough that Latham and I cannot read, compare, and understand it in any reasonable time. Every book refers to another. Every receipt must be matched against a rent entry, a tenant, a remittance, a bank record, a wage book, or a letter. John Wickham had a hand in too many things.”
“Then you must not use only your hands.”
He stopped.
Elizabeth set down her pen. “You require clerks.”
“Clerks may be corrupted.”
“Then you require clerks and a system.”
Mrs. Reynolds, wisely, looked at neither of them.
Darcy crossed to the table. “If I knew which clerks to trust, I should already have used them.”
“No,” Elizabeth said. “If you knew which clerks to trust, you would not need half the system. You do not know. Therefore the arrangement must be made to distrust everyone politely.”
Mrs. Reynolds’s eyes lowered, but not before he caught the smallest sign of approval.
Elizabeth continued, warming not into excitement, exactly, but into that formidable brightness he had learned to recognise as her mind taking possession of a room.
“No single man should receive, record, copy, carry, and explain the same piece of information. Divide the labour. One reads aloud; one checks the entry; one copies the discrepancy; Mr. Latham’s clerk verifies the reference.
Any irregularity goes twice into a book prepared for the purpose.
No accusation is accepted without proof.
No proof is acted upon until Mr. Latham has seen it. ”
“That will be slow.”
“So is blindness, in the end.”
He leaned one hand upon the table and looked at her. “And if they conceal irregularities from one another?”
“Then make concealment unprofitable.”
Mrs. Reynolds’s gaze lifted again.
Elizabeth turned to her. “Is there any man upon the estate whom Mr. John Wickham particularly disliked?”
Mrs. Reynolds did not answer at once. She was too experienced to produce a name without weighing the consequences.
“There is Bell, madam,” she said at last. “Under-bailiff for the western farms.”
“Why did Mr. Wickham dislike him?”
“Bell asked for written orders.”
Elizabeth looked back at Darcy.
“Promote him immediately,” she said.
Darcy would have laughed if the matter had been less grave.
Mrs. Reynolds’s expression almost acknowledged the justice of it.
“He is steady,” she said. “Not polished. But steady. He reads well enough and keeps his own notes. Mr. Wickham called him obstinate.”
“Excellent,” Elizabeth said. “Obstinate men are often inconvenient to anyone who prefers a verbal order.”
Darcy looked down at the paper before her. “Bell may act temporarily, but he cannot be given the steward’s authority entire.”
“No. Give him the office, not the kingdom. Put two men under him who do not owe him friendship and do not owe the Wickhams gratitude. One from the estate, one from the books, if you can find them. They are to assist him and watch him, and he is to know it.”
“You make it sound as if I am arranging a duel.”
“No. A duel is simpler. This is an office.”
Mr. Latham, entering at that moment with a packet under his arm, heard the last sentence and said, “Mrs. Darcy is correct.”
Elizabeth gave him a look of mild approval. “Mr. Latham, we are devising a means of making accuracy temporarily profitable.”
“A neglected branch of estate management,” said Mr. Latham.
Darcy took a chair.
The plan came together with a severity which, in another woman, might have seemed cold. In Elizabeth it seemed merciful, because it spared no one the truth and therefore did not require anyone to pretend.
Bell would take temporary charge of the steward’s room under written authority, limited and revocable. He would not hold estate money. He would not dismiss servants. He would not open sealed drawers without Latham or Darcy present.
Two assistants would be placed with him: one familiar with the farms, one familiar with the office books. Neither would be chosen from men tied to the Wickhams. They would keep separate notes. Each discrepancy must be entered with reference to book, page, date, hand, and person concerned.
Mr. Latham put the point into legal shape. “We begin with discrepancies. Missing receipts, altered dates, unmatched remittances, payments without authority, sums entered in one book and absent from another. Theft may be among them. But we prove the paper before we name the offence.”
“Exactly,” Elizabeth said. “You do not yet know whether you are looking for theft, concealment, obedience, fear, or old stupidity. So the system must be able to find all five.”