Chapter Thirteen #4
“Eleven years. Slater came to us from a neighbouring property when my father was still alive. He has always been — “Darcy paused. “He has always been reliable. I sent him to Liverpool for three days.”
“Has he made any significant purchases in recent years? Property, improvements to his own house, anything of that kind?”
A brief silence. “I do not know,” Darcy said, with the particular flatness of a man who has just realised that he ought to know and does not. “I have not looked.”
“It may be worth looking,” Elias said, without emphasis. “But first — I should like to see the ledgers. The stable accounts and the register of sales together, if you can have them brought. And if there is a separate book for livestock — cattle as well as horses — I should be glad of that also.”
Darcy gave the necessary instructions, and within half an hour, Elias was established at a table in the library with three volumes before him.
After an hour and a half, Elias had reached the point in the stable accounts where the pattern was beginning to suggest itself without yet being fully legible, when the door of the library opened.
Elias looked up.
Miss Darcy stood in the doorway with a book in her hand and an expression of such complete surprise that it was clear she had not been told the library was occupied.
She was dressed simply, her hair arranged without ornament, and the expression on her face — the rapid sequence of recognition, astonishment, and something that was not quite either — passed across it with a transparency that she recovered from almost immediately, composing herself with the speed of long practice.
“Mr. Bennet,” she said. Her voice was steady. Her colour was not quite.
Elias had risen. “Miss Darcy.” He was aware, in a way that was not entirely convenient given the work before him, that he was considerably more pleased to see her than the professional circumstances warranted.
He kept this observation to himself. “I beg your pardon — I was not aware that I had taken possession of the library. I can easily move to another room.”
“No — please.” She stepped inside and then stopped, as though uncertain whether to stay or go, and the uncertainty was so unlike her usual composure that it told him something he had not been sure of before.
“I did not know you were coming to Pemberley. My brother did not — that is, he mentioned only that a man from Mr. Fletcher’s office would be visiting on a business matter. ”
“He was quite right. I am here on a business matter.” He paused. “I hope I find you well, Miss Darcy.”
The formality of it was deliberate — a small courtesy, an acknowledgement that they were in her brother’s house and that the situation required a certain care — and she received it as such, with a slight inclination of her head and a composure that was now entirely recovered. “Very well, thank you. And you?”
“Quite well.” He glanced at the book in her hand. “I am sorry to have displaced you. I shall not be much longer — another hour or two, I think.”
Miss Darcy looked at the open ledgers on the table, then back at him, with the particular intelligence of a young woman who has grown up in a house where business is conducted and has learned to read its signs.
She did not ask what he was looking for.
She said, instead, with a quietness that was not quite casual, “Is it serious?”
He considered the question for a moment. It was not a question he was at liberty to answer fully, and probably Miss Darcy guessed that.
“I do not yet know,” he said, which was true. “I am still reading.”
She nodded, accepting this. Then she said, with a slight hesitation that was the only indication of what it cost her: “The horses are well. I have been riding every morning this week. I thought — “She stopped. “I thought you might like to know, since you asked after them. When we last met.”
Elias had not, in fact, asked specifically about the horses.
He had asked after her. But the horses were what she was prepared to offer, and he understood the substitution perfectly. “I am glad of it,” he said. “The park must be very fine at this time of year.”
“It is.” A pause. “The lake is particularly good in the morning, when the mist is still on it.” She said this with the careful restraint of someone sharing something they value, not entirely sure of the reception.
Then she added, more lightly, “Though I confess I have not fallen into it recently, which I consider an improvement.”
He smiled — he could not help it — and she smiled back, and for a moment the library was not a room in which a fraud was being investigated but simply a room in which two people were standing by a fire.
“I received your basket,” she said then, quietly, as though the words had been waiting for the right moment and had decided this was it. “It was very — it was a great kindness.”
“It was a very small thing.”
“It was not small to me.” She said it simply, without emphasis, and looked at him with a directness that was, for her, unusual, and that he found it necessary to meet steadily. “I kept the ribbon.”
He did not say anything for a moment. There was, he thought, a great deal that could be said, and a great deal of it that was entirely inappropriate to say in her brother’s library, in the middle of a professional visit, on a Tuesday morning in October.
He was aware of this with a clarity that did not make it any easier to maintain.
“I am glad,” he said at last, “that it arrived safely.”
She looked at him for a moment longer, then looked away, and the composure that settled back over her face was that of a young woman who has said what she meant to say and is satisfied with having said it.
“I will leave you to your work,” she said, with a naturalness that was almost entirely convincing. “I can find another book.”
“Miss Darcy.” She paused at the door. He had not intended to say anything further, and was not entirely sure, when he spoke, what he was going to say.
“When I have finished here — when the business is concluded — I wonder if I might ask your brother’s permission to walk in the park. If the morning is fine.”
She turned. The expression on her face was not surprise, exactly — it was something quieter and more careful than surprise, the expression of a person who has been hoping for something and is now required to decide whether to believe it has arrived.
“I am sure,” she said, with a steadiness that was not quite effortless, “that my brother would have no objection.”
Miss Darcy left. The door closed behind her with the soft precision of a well-made door in a well-made house.
Elias stood for a moment, and then sat down, and looked at the open ledger, and reminded himself, with some firmness, that he was here to read figures but didn’t.
***
The pattern, once Elias had discovered it, was not subtle.
It had been concealed not by ingenuity but by the simple assumption that no one would trouble to compare two sets of figures that appeared to belong to entirely different concerns — that the stable accounts would be read as stable accounts.
The sales register as a sales register, and that no one would ever make the connection between them, with both the curiosity and the authority to examine them together.
The quantities of hay and oats purchased for the stables were considerable — large enough to maintain a substantial number of horses through the spring months.
Yet when Elias had passed the stables on his way in that morning he had seen no such number. There were carriage horses, hunters, and a few riding mounts, but nothing approaching the stock implied by the feed bills.
He turned to the register of horse sales.
Seven young colts had been listed there in the first six months of the year, each described briefly and sold for modest sums as animals of inferior quality.
On their own, the entries might have raised no suspicion; estates frequently disposed of young stock that did not suit their purposes.
But when Elias compared the dates of those sales with the continuing purchases of feed, the arithmetic became difficult to reconcile.
Horses that had supposedly left the estate in February appeared still, in the accounts, to be consuming hay and oats well into April.
A colt recorded as sold on the third of March was followed by feed bills in April and May that assumed his continued presence in the stables.
He opened the cattle register and found the same pattern, though differently disguised.
Calves were recorded as sold in the autumn at prices that were, for the quality of Pemberley’s breeding stock, remarkably low — poor condition, not worth keeping through the winter — yet the home farm feed accounts for the months that followed showed no corresponding reduction in expenditure.
Animals that had officially left the estate continued, in the arithmetic of the feed bills, to eat.
Elias sat back and looked at the figures for a while.
The conversation at the White Hart returned to him with a precision that was, in the circumstances, almost unwelcome.
Slater knows his business. You go to him at the right time, ask in the right way, and you’ll have a colt out of Pemberley for half what it’s worth.
The ledgers could not show what had happened outside the estate’s records — they could not name the buyers, or the prices actually paid, or the arrangement by which the difference had been transferred — but they confirmed the mechanism with a thoroughness that left little room for alternative interpretation.
Animals recorded as sold at a loss appeared, from the feed accounts, to have remained on the estate for months afterwards, their keep still charged to Pemberley.
At the same time, their true value was realised elsewhere and pocketed by the man responsible for recording the transactions.