IV The Only Option
IV
The Only Option
He had read it once, in the doorway of his room with the hall boy’s guttering candle the only light; then he had folded it, put it in his breast pocket, and had not taken it out again.
His valet packed in silence. The carriage was brought round in twenty minutes — Darcy had not said why, and Hodges had not asked — and the house was still dark when they came out through the gate onto the road south, Kent disappearing behind him into the lane.
The horses were pushing hard. He had told the coachman not to stop unless the horses needed it, and the coachman had met his eye and asked nothing, which was why Darcy kept him.
He had the letter in four sentences, and his mind returned to them in the dark, again and again, the way a tongue finds a cracked tooth — not because he expected them to resolve into something different but because he could not stop.
He took them apart. He reassembled them.
He looked for the piece he had missed, the reading that changed the shape of it into something less catastrophic, and he did not find one.
The discrepancy in the ledger had not been an error.
He had known that in the study at Grosvenor Square when he first opened it — too clean, too visible to a careful eye, placed where a careful man would find it.
It had been an invitation, and he had accepted it with the wholehearted efficiency of pride in proper handling.
He had written to Sterling, confirmed he had seen it, told him exactly where he would be for the next month, and gone back to dinner with his cousin, satisfied that he had dealt with the matter as he ought.
Sterling would have had everything he needed within four days.
He did not let himself go further than that. Not yet.
They changed horses at Bromley. By the time London’s glow appeared on the horizon, the sky had lightened enough to see the road without the lamps; he knocked on the panel as they crossed into Southwark and gave the coachman the George Inn.
There he stepped down with Hodges and the satchel, pressed a month’s wages and keep into the coachman’s hand, and told him to stable the horses and wait for word — the trunk to stay on the carriage until further notice.
The coachman weighed whether to ask a question, decided against it, and pocketed the money.
They found a hackney two streets along, gave the driver an address two streets east of Grosvenor Square, and walked the last of the way on foot.
The Square was quiet, the houses dark, the dawn just beginning to grey the sky above the roofline.
No carriage. No lamps. No livery. Nothing that placed either of them in London before they were ready to be placed.
He let himself in with his own key and went to the study, lit the lamp himself, and sat down at the desk.
The ledger was where he had left it, set aside with the quiet satisfaction of something handled properly.
He pulled it out, opened it to the page, and then took the letter from his breast pocket and unfolded it on the desk beside it — reading it now the way he had not been able to read it in the doorway at Rosings, slowly, giving every word its full meaning.
Someone has been building a case against you.
I did not know until it was nearly complete.
The warrant is drawn — High Treason, giving aid and comfort to the enemy, specifically the movement of gold coin to France via your shipping interests.
Sterling’s name is not on the instrument, but his hand is in it.
The Home Office moves within the week. If you are in Kent, leave tonight.
— W
He set the letter down.
High treason.
Here in the study with the lamp burning and the ledger open beside them, the words had their full force — the thing that ended names, that stripped estates, that reached backward through a family’s history and forward through its future and removed both.
Whatever he had contrived to secure for Georgiana would not survive a conviction intact.
Her brother’s name would become the thing she carried for the rest of her life.
Pemberley would go to the Crown — his father’s family had spent two hundred years building something worth the name, and Sterling had spent considerably less arranging to take it.
The gallows he held at arm’s length entirely. Some things were too large for the room.
And then his mind went to what would not now happen. Whether she would have come out early that morning. Whether she would have let him walk with her. Whether the sentences he had rehearsed by firelight would have finally arranged themselves into something he could put before her.
She would have said yes. He had been certain of that since midnight — certain with an odd, hard clarity he had not permitted himself until now.
He had been hours away, sure of her answer and of what would have followed it, the hand she would have put into his, the real smile given him at last in full.
And he had abandoned her to certain confusion — because she had known.
Every walk, every evening, the nearness of it had been plain to her for days.
It had to be, for she was too intelligent for it to be otherwise, and he was leaving her with that knowledge and no answer.
Whatever she was to make of his silence, she would make alone.
He held it a moment longer, something giving way in his chest that he did not try to name, before he set it down and moved on to what needed doing.
Hodges set the satchel down by the door and stood. “Sir. I will wake—”
“No.” Darcy looked up. “No one is to be woken. No one is to know we are here.” He was already writing — an address, a time, four words of instruction — and folded and sealed it before the ink was entirely dry.
“Take this to Mr Webb; you have the Bermondsey address. Tell him the Red Lion on Fetter Lane, eight o’clock.
If he cannot make eight, he is to send word to the same place, and I will wait. ”
“Yes, sir.”
“And Hodges.” Darcy counted out what was in the desk drawer — more than a year’s living for a careful man, kept in gold against a day he had not let himself imagine until tonight — and set it on the corner of the desk.
“This is not wages. Take no situation while you wait for me; I want you free of any hours but mine. Remain here as long as the house is kept open, and keep your ears open longer. I want news of my sister above all — any letter from Matlock, any visit from the colonel, any word at all. If the colonel calls, you will see him before anyone else does; whatever he says, remember, and whatever he leaves behind, keep. After that, watch what passes through this house. If it is shut up, take what papers you may and go to a Mrs Paulson in Leather Lane — a lodging house, clean, no questions asked. You will hear from me through Webb, never directly. It may be months.”
Hodges’ eye went to the money, then to Darcy. He put it in his coat pocket without a word. “Very good, sir,” he said, and went.
Darcy turned back to the desk and added the ledger to the small pile he had already drawn from the drawer — the copies he had made in the first careful weeks after taking on the shipping interests, the correspondence that predated Sterling’s involvement entirely, the papers whose significance another man would miss because another man did not know the business as he did.
He could not take much. He needed to be gone before the kitchen fire was lit.
Sterling had built this over months, with patience, and had anticipated every obvious move.
He could not fight it — not openly, not in time; a trial would be over before the defence was properly drawn.
He could not run to the Continent; running was confirmation, and the Crown would move on Pemberley within a fortnight.
He picked up the documents, tucked them inside his coat, and surveyed the study — the lamp burning, the desk bare, the ledger gone from its corner.
His eye went to the fresh sheet of paper he had pulled towards him while Hodges was still in the room.
He sat back down. He had perhaps forty minutes before the kitchen maid came down to light the range. He picked up the pen.
It was going to require a death certificate.