Chapter Thirteen
Thirteen
It had been a gradual thing. That was what made it so difficult to name.
In the years immediately following the peace, Darcy had attributed the diminished returns from the estate to causes that were, in themselves, entirely credible.
The end of the Napoleonic wars had disrupted the agricultural markets in ways that no landowner in England had entirely escaped: grain prices had fallen sharply, the demand for horses had contracted with the disbanding of the cavalry, and the general uncertainty of the transition to peacetime had produced, across the country, a period of economic adjustment that the most prudent management could only partially mitigate.
He had accepted this explanation with the equanimity of a man who understands that some forces are beyond his control, and had turned his attention to the things that were within it.
But the peace was now two years old, and the markets had, by most accounts, begun to recover.
His neighbours reported improving yields and steadier prices.
The harvest had been reasonable. The home farm had produced well.
And yet the revenues of Pemberley, which ought by now to have reflected the general improvement, had not recovered in the way he would have expected.
They were not catastrophically diminished — there was nothing that would have alarmed a casual observer, or that could not, with sufficient ingenuity, be explained by reference to one particular circumstance or another.
But Darcy was not a casual observer of his own estate, and the cumulative shortfall, when he set the figures for the past three years beside those for the three years before the war, was not easily dismissed.
He had spent the better part of a Tuesday morning in late October at the library table with the estate registers open before him, and he had arrived, by the end of it, at no satisfactory conclusion.
The accounts were orderly. They were, in fact, remarkably orderly — each entry clear, each receipt attached, each column balanced to the penny.
He was not an accountant, and he was aware that there were things in the structure of a set of accounts that a trained eye would see and an untrained one would not, but he could find nothing that was obviously wrong.
The figures did not contradict one another.
They simply did not add up to what he would have expected, and he could not determine why.
Mr. Darcy had, over the course of the morning, written out three separate columns of comparison — revenues from the stables, from the home farm, from the sale of timber — and had set them against the corresponding figures from five years earlier, adjusting as best he could for the known effects of the wartime disruption.
The gap was consistent. It was not large in any single year, but it was consistent, and consistency of that kind, in his experience, was rarely accidental.
Looking back at what he had written, Mr. Darcy felt the particular frustration of a man who knows that something is wrong and cannot say what.
Mr. Slater had been steward at Pemberley for eleven years.
He had served the estate under the late Mr. Darcy and had continued under the present one with a steadiness of character and a competence in his duties that had never given occasion for complaint.
The steward was not a man of great imagination, but he was thorough, and thoroughness in a steward was worth considerably more than imagination.
Darcy had relied upon him without reservation, and the thought of examining that reliance now — of subjecting it to the cold arithmetic of a ledger comparison — produced in him a discomfort that was not entirely rational and that he was therefore inclined to distrust.
And yet Slater himself, when Darcy had raised the matter of the revenues with him — carefully, without accusation, in the manner of a landlord seeking his steward’s professional opinion — had been entirely untroubled.
He had offered plausible explanations and delivered them with the calm confidence of a man who has nothing to conceal: the price of oats had been variable, a particularly wet spring had affected the hay crop, and two of the best mares had been slow to breed.
Each explanation was reasonable. Each was, individually, the kind of thing that happened on any large estate in any given year.
Darcy had listened, and had nodded, and had come away no more satisfied than before.
The difficulty was that Mr. Darcy could not point to anything specific.
He could not say: this entry is false, or this figure does not correspond.
He could only say that the sum of many small things did not produce the result he expected, and that he did not know whether the fault lay in the accounts, in the management, in the markets, or in his own understanding of all three.
The master of Pemberley was still sitting with the registers before him, having turned the same page back and forth twice without reaching any new conclusion, when the door opened, and his wife came in.
Mrs. Darcy had the particular faculty — which she had possessed since girlhood and which marriage had not diminished — of reading a room accurately upon entering it.
She took in the open ledgers, the untouched cup of tea at his elbow, and the quality of her husband’s stillness.
She said nothing for a moment, moving instead to the chair across the table and sitting down with the unhurried ease of a woman who has learned that the best way to be told something is to make it easy to begin.
“You have been in here since breakfast, my dear,” Anne Darcy said at last, with a mildness that was not quite neutral.
“I have been reviewing the accounts.”
“So I observed.” She glanced at the open registers and at the columns of figures he had written out on the sheet beside them. “And have the accounts given you any satisfaction?”
Mr. Darcy shrugged his shoulders. There was a pause of the kind that had become, over the course of their marriage, a form of communication in itself — a pause that meant he was deciding how much to say, and that she was waiting without impatience for him to decide.
“No,” he said. “They have given me rather the opposite.”
She waited.
“The revenues have fallen,” he said. “Not dramatically — not in any way that would be immediately apparent to anyone who was not looking for it. But consistently, over three years, and by more than the peace alone can account for. The markets have recovered elsewhere. They have not recovered here, or not to the degree they ought.” He paused.
“And I cannot find the reason in the books.”
“You have looked?”
“I have looked for the better part of this morning. The accounts are in order — every entry balanced, every receipt present. There is nothing that I can point to and say: here is the error, here is the cause. And yet the shortfall is there.” He set down his pen.
“I am not an accountant. I know that. There may be something in the structure of these figures that I am not equipped to see.”
Mrs. Darcy considered this with the attention it deserved. “Could it be the markets alone? Some particular circumstance affecting Derbyshire that has not affected the south?”
“I have also asked myself that. I have spoken to two of my neighbours, both of whom report improving returns. I have read the agricultural reports. The general picture does not explain what I am seeing here.” He looked at the registers again.
“And Slater — when I raised it with him — had an answer for everything. Each year, a different cause. The weather, the prices, the breeding stock. All of it is plausible. All of it, taken together, rather too convenient.”
“You suspect him, Fitzwilliam.”
The word sat between them for a moment. Darcy did not answer immediately.
“I do not know what I suspect,” he said at last, with the careful honesty of a man who is unwilling to accuse without grounds.
“I suspect that something is wrong. I cannot determine whether the fault is in the management of the estate, in the accounts themselves, or in my own reading of them. I am not qualified to make that determination alone.” He paused. “I need someone who is.”
“A solicitor?”
“A solicitor and an accountant. The legal question and the financial one are not the same, and I want both addressed before I take any further step. I will not speak to Slater again until I know what I am speaking about. And I will not dismiss a man who has served this family for eleven years based on a feeling I cannot substantiate.”
Elizabeth nodded slowly. She did not offer reassurance, which was one of the things he valued most in her — she understood that reassurance, in a situation of genuine uncertainty, was not a kindness but an evasion. Instead, she said, “Will you tell Georgiana?”
He looked up. “No. Not yet. There is no purpose in alarming her before I know whether there is cause for alarm.” He paused. “Georgiana is fond of the horses.”
“She is,” Anne agreed, with a quietness that acknowledged more than the words contained.
Georgiana had spent a great deal of time in the stables that summer — more than usual, her brother had noticed, though he had not remarked upon it.
It was the kind of thing one did when one was recovering from something, and Darcy had been glad of it.
The thought that the stables might have been the site of a systematic dishonesty, conducted under his own roof and in his own name, produced a cold anger that he kept carefully below the surface.