The Weight of What Is Known
XIX
The letter had been sitting on the table since yesterday afternoon.
Erskine had brought it with him from London — not the letter, precisely, but the packet that contained it, sealed and addressed to the Baron of Auchengray in Webb’s hand, written as though it concerned sheep grazing and coastal drainage in case it were opened by the wrong person, which was the arrangement they had settled on in April and which Darcy had not yet needed to change.
The packet sat on the table alongside the marriage document bearing her signature, and Darcy had looked at it once, then looked away.
He had not read it that night. He had not read it yesterday either, though it had sat on the corner of the table through all of it — through the first supper, through the hours he had lain awake on the wrong side of the bolted door listening to the house settle, through the whole of yesterday while she moved through his library and wept over something on the lower shelves and he had not been able to go to her.
The third morning, he sat down and broke the seal.
GC,
I must report a failure on the clerk. My man in Redcliffe was careful, but not careful enough.
Three weeks ago, the lodging house keeper was asked, by a man she described as civil and well-dressed, whether anyone had been making enquiries about a Thomas Marsh.
She told him no. She told my man the same story, the morning after, and then Thomas Marsh was gone.
New lodgings, new name, I presume. I have not found him.
I have put two men to it, and they have nothing. The trail is four weeks cold.
I do not know whether Sterling moved him or whether the man ran on his own account.
I lean towards the former. A man who ran voluntarily would have gone farther.
Bristol is a port. If Thomas Marsh wanted to disappear entirely, he had the means.
That he has merely relocated, if my reading of it is right, suggests he is still within Sterling’s reach, which means he is still alive.
Darcy sighed and tapped his fingers on the table.
He had known that this was possible. The clerk had been a thread.
Threads could be cut. He had known it and made his plans on the assumption that what was possible might happen, and it had happened, and the part of him that had spent three months in this room doing nothing but reading the same map of his situation and finding no new roads was not surprised.
The part of him that had nothing to do with reason was a different matter.
I have now seen more of the evidence than I had a month ago.
You were quite correct in suspecting that Sterling did not merely plant false records.
He built a complete history, three years of it, in which your shipping interests and his were intertwined in ways that are, on paper, indistinguishable from the truth.
The forged manifests are not the worst of it.
There are letters. Written in your name, to his, over a period of eighteen months.
I do not know how he was able to falsify your seal.
He has had enough originals by your hand and produced enough by his to have learned to copy them with a care that will require expert examination to disprove, which requires you to be alive to call for a proceeding.
The real manifests exist. I can obtain copies through other means, and I am pursuing this. It will take time.
Time. Always bloody time, frittered away while his life spent itself in shady paperwork and darkened towers.
Time was the one thing he did not have before, and he had even less of it now with Elizabeth Bennet…
Elizabeth Darcy…. No, Elizabeth Carlisle trying to puzzle him out over dinner each evening.
There is a further matter I must report, which has developed in the last several weeks.
The file I described above, the forged correspondence, the fraudulent manifests, the three-year history, has been placed with the Home Office.
I cannot yet tell you by whom, though I will be surprised if the answer is any name other than the one we have both supposed.
The file has been logged, read, and is presently dormant, as must be the case with any matter whose subject is legally deceased.
Dormant is not the same as closed. A matter abated by death goes onto a shelf in Whitehall; it does not fall from existence.
In the common run, it would remain there untroubled.
In a matter of this character, the name of the accused, the weight of the charges, the class of the evidence, it will not be untroubled long.
It will be read again. There will be talk.
Lord Matlock was called to Whitehall on the fourteenth.
I cannot tell you what passed. I can tell you that he emerged, and acted at once in a way that indicates to me that he had been privately advised of what the file contains.
He has, I am reliably informed, moved upon the Home Secretary’s office to have the matter held out of public view.
He has the standing to obtain such a courtesy.
The Home Office has no appetite for a posthumous prosecution of a gentleman of his family’s rank.
At present, therefore, the file is quiet.
It will not remain so indefinitely, and you should not proceed as though it will.
I cannot confirm whether the colonel has been admitted to this knowledge. I can confirm that whatever the Earl now knows, he did not know it in June, and is therefore carrying it recently and privately and on his own account.
I reported in my last letter that Colonel Fitzwilliam had visited the Dover road and asked Hodges several questions.
Since then, nothing. He has not contacted Hodges again.
He has not been to Grosvenor Square, where Lord Matlock’s men are still managing the effects.
He has not, as far as I can determine, been to his regiment, though his commanding officer has apparently received a letter excusing him on grounds of family bereavement.
He is not at Matlock House. He is not, as far as my enquiries have found, anywhere I can account for.
I want to be careful not to overread this.
Men who are grieving go away. Men who do not believe the official account of a death also sometimes go away, to think, rather than to act.
It is possible the colonel is simply somewhere I have not looked.
It is also possible he is somewhere I will not like when I find it.
Richard was somewhere Webb could not find.
The possibility that Richard was grieving somewhere private was real. So was the possibility that Richard had decided to follow a thread rather than a road, and Richard had spent enough time in army intelligence to know the difference.
Richard did not believe the account. The ring had been too convenient.
A man of Fitzwilliam Darcy’s habits did not take a carriage down the Dover road alone and perish in the only kind of accident that left a signet and nothing else perfectly legible in the wreckage.
A dozen men could have set that scene, and one of them could have been Darcy himself.
Richard would know a staged death when he saw one, and the tidier the death, the harder he would look.
Darcy put the letter face down on the table and looked at his hands.
He had known, when he wrote the account, that Richard would not believe it for long.
He had built it anyway because it did not need to be believed — it only needed to give Richard nowhere to pull.
And Richard had pulled at the Dover road and found nothing, as designed, and had then apparently decided to go somewhere and do something that Webb could not see.
He picked the letter back up because the alternative was to sit in the room with that thought, and the alternative was not better.
From Hodges, regarding Miss Darcy.
He stopped.
This was the line he had been dreading. He had known, from the weight of the packet when Erskine handed it to him and from the single line visible through the ink ridges pressed into the fold, that whatever followed it was the part he could not read standing up on his wedding night.
This was the reason he had not broken the seal until now.
He made himself read it.
Hodges reports through household intelligence that Miss Darcy remains at Matlock.
Lord Matlock has kept the household quiet.
A physician has been called. She is not well, but she is with family, and she is being looked after.
Hodges reports she asked Lady Matlock, in late July, whether it was possible that the fire consumed another, not her brother.
Lady Matlock told her the ring had been found. She did not ask again.
I cannot tell you more than this. I can tell you she is not alone.
W.
Darcy set the letter down on the table and looked at it for a long time.
The ring, which Webb had placed in the wreckage on the body he had procured from God only knew where, which Fitzwilliam had identified at the inquest, had closed the warrant, closed the proceedings, and closed the official account of his death.
The ring his father had worn and his grandfather before him, and which Darcy had given to Webb in a Fetter Lane room at four in the morning as a thing worth less than Georgiana’s future.
Whether it was possible that the fire might have consumed another.
That was a more dangerous notion than his sister could possibly guess, but Lady Matlock had told her the ring had been found as if that closed the matter.
And Georgiana had not asked again.