Mr. Darcy’s Keepsake (Christmastide with Mr. Darcy #1)

Chapter 1

The fire in Pemberley’s library gave little warmth that evening, though the logs hissed and popped with vigour enough. Darcy sat at his desk with the ledgers open before him, pen idle in his hand. The figures blurred into one another—sound, orderly, sufficient. All was as it should be.

He ought to have felt satisfaction at so prosperous a year. Instead, the very fullness of it left him restless, as though plenty had robbed him of purpose.

Bootsteps echoed in the corridor, brisk and unhesitating, before the door swung wide without the courtesy of a knock. Darcy did not lift his head. Only one man in England would enter his library with such a step and such indifference to ceremony.

“Still buried in accounts?” Colonel Fitzwilliam’s tone carried half laughter, half reproach. “If you continue thus, I shall send word back to Father and inform him we have lost you to figures and firelight.”

Darcy closed the folio with deliberate care. “It is my duty to attend to the estate.”

“Your duty! Always your duty. I have been home more than a fortnight, and in that time, you have contrived to evade every invitation that has crossed your path. Balls, dinners, musicales—you have refused them all. Do you mean to spend Christmastide locked in this room with your steward’s neat columns for company? ”

Darcy rose to stir the fire, though the flames leapt readily enough without his interference. “I prefer to make myself useful.”

“Useful.” Fitzwilliam threw himself into the chair opposite with the careless ease of a man accustomed to camp life. “Darcy, if I wished for lectures in economy, I would seek out a clerk. I came for cheer, and you deny me even the semblance of it. You were not always thus.”

Darcy kept his gaze on the flames. “Times change.”

His cousin said nothing for a moment, then, with exaggerated patience, “Very well. If London is too crowded, then what of Bath? The waters are warm, the company lively. A man might forget his gloom in such a place.”

Darcy gave him a look that would have chilled weaker men. “To sit in crowded pump rooms, trading inanities with strangers? I think not.”

“Indeed,” his cousin answered with exaggerated calm. “If Bath offends you, then Brighton perhaps? A sea-breeze, cards, half the fashionable world gathered in merry idleness.”

Darcy set down his pen more firmly than necessary. “The very notion of it is intolerable.”

Fitzwilliam leaned back, untroubled by Darcy’s brusque refusal. “If not London, Bath, or Brighton, what of my cousin Saybrooke? He and his lady wife are hosting a revel on Twelfth Night. A masquerade. Music, dancing, a host of diversions.”

Darcy’s lips thinned. “You know I have no taste for masques.”

“I know you have no taste for anything save solitude and account books,” Fitzwilliam retorted.

“But perhaps something quieter would tempt you. A hunting party, a few families gathered together for good food and a warm hearth. Mama’s cousin, Sir Edward Montford, has invited me to Kelton Manor in Northamptonshire.

He writes that he and Lady Montford mean to make a proper season of it.

Not too many guests—enough to fill the halls with cheer, but not so many that a man of sober mind might feel lost.”

“Ah, there it is. Your trump—I knew you would confess your real design soon enough.”

“I did not think my tactics were that transparent,” Richard said with a jerk of his jacket front. “But as I can hardly deny it, yes. I mean to go to Kelton, and I mean to drag you with me.”

“Kelton?” Darcy repeated without looking at him. “I cannot leave Pemberley. There are matters that require my attention.”

“Your steward can attend them. You certainly pay the man enough.”

Darcy turned back to his desk, taking up the quill though he had no intention of writing. “You speak as if estate management were a pastime that may be set aside at leisure. I have correspondence to answer. Accounts to reconcile. Winter is a dangerous season to abandon one’s tenants.”

Fitzwilliam snorted. “Your tenants will not rise in revolt if you absent yourself for a fortnight. Admit it, Darcy—duty is your shield. You hide behind it to excuse your solitude.”

Darcy’s hand tightened on the quill. He bent to the ledger once more, though he could not see the figures. “You presume much.”

“I presume nothing. I have eyes.”

Darcy made no reply. The fire crackled, hot and unfeeling, and the silence lengthened until Fitzwilliam shifted in his chair.

“It is no rout in London, Darcy. Sir Edward’s estate lies near Stony Stratford—three days’ ride if the roads are clear.

A modest enough company, well chosen, with no idle young misses thrown at your head.

You would not be paraded or pressed. Only a few days of tolerable society, and I would have the comfort of knowing my cousin is not burying himself alive. ”

Darcy kept his gaze on the figures before him, though the lines blurred into meaninglessness. “You overstate my condition.”

“I do not. You are not yourself, and all the world sees it. If you will not come for your own sake, then come for mine. A man grows tired of his own company.”

Darcy inclined his head, though he did not look up. He heard the scrape of the chair and the solid tread of boots moving toward the door.

“Well, I cannot compel you,” Richard said. “But should you find your solitude less companionable than you imagine, Kelton Manor awaits. I have already sent my acceptance.”

The door shut behind him with a finality that rang through the quiet library. Darcy set down the quill at last, his hand resting on the edge of the desk.

Kelton Manor. Darcy repeated the name with deliberate scorn, as though the syllables themselves might lose their hold if he weighed them with contempt.

A hunting party. Cards. Laughter echoing through corridors that were not his own.

What purpose could such diversions serve, save to remind him of all he had lost?

He turned another page of the ledger, though he could not recall a single figure he had read. The idea was preposterous. He could not absent himself from Pemberley in the dead of winter. The tenants relied upon his constancy; the steward might require his judgment at any hour. It was not possible.

And if it were… Darcy pressed the quill so hard the nib splintered. What then?

To take his place among easy company, when his very name must call forth only contempt in the minds of those who knew him best? No, solitude was the only refuge left to him. The only safe course.

He closed the ledger at last, the columns swimming before his eyes, and leaned back in the chair. If his cousin longed for noise and diversion, let him take it. Darcy had no need of such hollow cheer.

Elizabeth’s needle pricked twice before it caught the narrow hem true.

She drew the thread firm and smoothed the muslin over her knee, more for the comfort of the motion than for any great necessity in the work.

The sitting room at Gracechurch Street was warm despite December’s mean temper—coal shifting in the grate, lamp trimmed, the faint scent of orange peel and clove where her aunt had set a saucer to dry on the hob.

Beyond the window, London kept its own winter music: cartwheels on wet cobbles, a hawker calling, the river’s breath somewhere farther off.

Indoors, all was gentler. Mrs. Gardiner had taken the corner chair and was pretending to read; her gaze rested more on the fire than on the page.

“You will ruin your eyes, my dear,” Elizabeth said lightly. “That book has already confessed it will not be improved by your looking through it.”

Her aunt’s mouth tipped. “I am not reading so much as keeping company with the print.” The page turned—carefully, as if it might prefer not to be disturbed—and she set the volume aside. “You are very industrious tonight.”

Elizabeth glanced at the neat stack of finished handkerchiefs. “Industrious is a generous word. I am only determined to arrive at the bottom of a basket that appears to fill itself.”

“Like the loaves and fishes,” Mrs. Gardiner murmured, then reached to the saucer and pressed a clove deeper into the pitted orange rind. “One can hardly complain of abundance in winter, even if it is work one finds aplenty.”

There was a delicacy about her movements—no feebleness, only a care that had not always been necessary.

Elizabeth felt it without wishing to name it.

She set her needle and drew the lamp a little nearer, so the light did the work that her aunt’s strength ought not.

“The house smells very like Christmas already,” she said.

“You will have all Gracechurch Street envying us.”

“It will be the envy of very modest noses,” said her aunt, but the smile that accompanied it reached farther than her lips this time.

The door opened to admit Mr. Gardiner in a drift of damp air and city night.

He shook the wet from his hat on the threshold and rubbed his hands before the fire with an energy that always cheered Elizabeth.

“Cold enough to make a man doubt his virtues,” he declared, “until he remembers that virtue sits by the hearth.”

“Then your virtue is safe,” Elizabeth told him, rising to pour tea. “We have had care of it all the evening.”

“Only do not ask it to add figures,” he laughed, accepting the cup. “I have been with them all day, and they have proved stubborn companions. Yet the day was not wasted. I saw Mr. Taylor about the Northampton accounts; he believes the tanners there will settle before the new year.”

“Northampton?” Mrs. Gardiner looked up, interest pricking beneath her careful calm. “You mean to go yourself?”

“In a day or two, if the roads permit.” He sipped, warming. “I thought to take the northern road end of the week. A quick journey, if the turnpikes are not sulking.”

“You will not go alone,” she said with a woeful shake of her head. “It is nearly Christmas!”