Chapter 38
Chapter Thirty-Eight
The law arrived at Northmere in a plain brown coat and muddy boots.
Ellison, Wainwright’s clerk, had a face that discouraged frivolity.
His hair was thin, his cuffs neat despite travel, and his mouth so habitually compressed that Darcy approved on sight.
He removed his gloves in the study, accepted neither sherry nor idle pleasantry, and listened while Darcy laid out the matter with a completeness impossible two days earlier.
Miss Bennet was not in the room. Darcy had asked her to wait in the parlour, and for once, she had not argued.
Darcy laid it all before Ellison as one tells a surgeon what is broken.
The debt. The entail. Collins’s proposals under clerical varnish and mercantile threat.
Gardiner’s attempts. The forged acknowledgment.
The altered memorandum. The flight. The inquiries north.
His own knowledge and its source. And the likelihood that Collins, uncertain but encouraged by feminine vulnerability and geographical distance, had preferred private probing to open process.
Ellison read every paper once. Then again. Then Collins’s letter a third time, with the particular interest of a legal man discovering that sanctimony often provides better evidence than honesty, because it cannot resist documenting itself.
At length he said, “The forgery is plain enough to be dangerous, and not plain enough to be simple. Which, for our purposes, is useful.”
Fitzwilliam, ordered to silence and obeying with visible suffering, made a sound in his throat.
Ellison ignored him.
“If the matter were publicly charged at once,” he continued, “Miss Bennet could be placed in grave peril, especially if the instrument were framed as designed to obtain property or defeat lawful claim. Yet the papers have not been used to transfer title, seize goods by force, or extract money from the lender’s heirs.
They appear instead to have been retained and carried, which is bad but not as bad as profitable use.
More importantly, this letter—” He touched Collins’s pious extortion with one finger as if contamination might pass through paper.
”—is poison to any party wishing to present himself as the clean guardian of legal order. ”
“Not poison enough to keep her from a cart,” Darcy said, “if some magistrate wishes to display zeal.”
Ellison looked at him directly for the first time. “No, sir. I am a lawyer’s clerk, not an angel. I do not promise innocence where guilt exists. I promise only advice.”
“A comfortingly infernal distinction,” Fitzwilliam said.
Darcy’s mouth almost moved.
“We must move quickly,” Ellison continued, “and keep the matter from broadening. Mr Wainwright will write at once to counsel in Derby. He will also engage a friend in Lambton to ascertain whether Miss Bennet’s uncle, Mr Gardiner of Cheapside, is presently in London; and, if he is, whether he is a man upon whose discretion and disposition we may depend.
Simultaneously, a letter shall be prepared to Mr Collins—not from Miss Bennet, and not yet from you, sir, though your support will be understood—informing him that certain communications of his, along with evidence of financial pressure on ladies under recent bereavement, are in counsel’s hands and will be produced if he pursues any public accusation touching irregular household papers. ”
“You mean to blackmail the blackmailer,” Fitzwilliam said.
Ellison blinked once. “I mean to remind him that litigation is expensive and reputations porous. Men like Mr Collins usually prefer oppression to contest. Contest can be seen.”
Darcy said, “And my exposure?”
At that, Ellison folded his hands.
“Less than might have been, more than comfortable. You did not forge the paper. You did not solicit its making, so far as evidence shows. You did, however, shelter Miss Bennet after suspicion of illegality became substantial. If all were dragged into open court by a determined enemy, your conduct might be painted as accessory after the fact, or obstruction, by gentlemen less scrupulous than careful. It would not end there. Questions would arise in public about how long she lay under your roof, what your servants knew, whether your sister’s household was cover for concealment, and whether a gentleman’s consequence served to put soft cloth over felony.
You might survive the law of it, but your name and house would not emerge untouched.
Yet because you have now produced the papers through counsel before any warrant or search, and because you seek advice rather than concealment henceforth, your risk lowers considerably. Not disappears. Lowers.”
“Lowered is sufficient,” Darcy said, “if the lady’s is lowered first.”
Ellison’s expression did not change. The Colonel’s stillness broke.
Fitzwilliam swore under his breath with such violence that even Ellison glanced at him.
“If Collins had forced it into public hearing, he might have had Miss Bennet in a cart, Darcy named harbourer to a felon, and every county gossip feeding on my cousin’s judgment like fair-day sport.
He set private spies about vulnerable women and meant to make respectability do the strangling for him. ”
Ellison’s expression held. His eyes did not.
He turned back to Darcy.
“There remains one piece of counsel, sir, in which the firm is unanimous and which I am instructed to put plainly.”
“Which is?”
“Your exposure may be substantially reduced—perhaps to a sustainable margin—by establishing visible distance from Miss Bennet at once. Removing her to her uncle’s care in London by tomorrow’s post, if she is fit to travel.
If she is not, removing yourself, and giving out that her residence here is a charity of Mrs Marsden’s, with Mrs Marsden returned in residence as principal.
A note to that effect to Mr Wainwright by tonight’s post would alter the record we may be obliged to defend. ”
“No.”
Ellison did not at once respond. He set the papers in their order on the desk with the care of a man who had not been refused an instruction in his hearing in a long while.
“Mr Darcy, the recommendation is not personal. It is the calculation of a clean defence against a willing prosecution. The longer she remains under your roof in your demonstrable knowledge of her circumstance, the more—”
“No.”
“I shall make one observation only, sir, because it is my office. If she is removed to her uncle’s care, both of you are likeliest saved. If neither of you moves, and the matter is pressed in court, you go together.”
Ellison’s proposal would have been sound, were the world it described the world Darcy lived in.
He thought of the mere, which had been clearing daily; of Mrs Pemberton’s hands, which had begun again to open; of the meadow system, which the drowner reported as taking water for the first time in twenty years.
None of it could be said to a clerk in a study in February.
“She cannot travel,” he said. “The leg is mending, but does not yet bear a coach. And I shall not leave Northmere while she remains in it. Record the refusal as you will. Without elaboration.”
Ellison inclined his head a fraction. “It will be so recorded.”
Fitzwilliam, who had recovered something of his stillness, looked at the fire and not at his cousin. He said to Ellison, “There is no part of him you will move on this, sir. Do not waste the firm’s time.”
“I am content to be wrong,” Ellison said, “if my employer is content with the outcome.” He turned the page and was done with the matter. “The agent. Briggs. What is his present situation?”
“He has been on the lanes three days. He has spoken at the smithy, at the posting-yard, at the lower turning, and at Mr Hadley’s cottage.
He has been refused at each. Mrs Hadley would not have him.
The Pemberton boy gave him a wrong path.
The smith pretended deafness. The postmaster denied any letters.
He has not, by yesterday’s report, been seen on any lane since dawn the day before. ”
Ellison considered this for some seconds.
“Three days, four points of enquiry, no information yielded. That is unusual, Mr Darcy. The village is generally the easiest end of such enquiries to undo. A coin to a smithy-boy. A bottle to a postmaster’s sister.
A man like Mr Briggs has the trade of it.
” He looked at Darcy. “The village would not have him.”
“It would not.”
“On grounds you have not in any of these papers explained to me.”
Darcy did not at once answer.
“On grounds that are not in any of these papers, Mr Ellison.”
“Then I shall not seek them. I shall be content to record that the village would not have him. That is a piece of luck, Mr Darcy, the like of which is not bought in coin. It should not be relied upon to last, and you should not, in any subsequent matter, assume any village in England capable of it.”
“I shall not.”
They worked another hour. Dates were fixed; wording argued and chosen; names weighed for whether they could be set down without summoning the persons attached to them.
Lady Catherine, if she heard prematurely, would scatter prudence in every direction; thus she must not hear before necessity required.
Charlotte Collins might know enough of her husband’s habits to be dangerous if offended and useful if disgusted.
Gardiner’s testimony, if obtained in time, could establish both the genuine debt and the coercive circumstances.
Fitzwilliam offered to occupy any messenger sent from Kent by cards, false roads, and military hospitality.
Ellison, after one cold glance, said this would be a last resort.
By the time the clerk accepted broth in the schoolroom and Fitzwilliam was released to swear into the fire, the letters were drafted, the witnesses listed, and the silences in the village still holding.