CHAPTER 14 #2
Two houses stood there which did not appear in Mr. Beaker’s schedule.
They were not ruinous, but they had the exhausted look of buildings owned by someone who had discovered that neglect was cheaper than care until the moment it was not.
One gutter hung in a dangerous curve. A shutter had been patched in the wrong wood.
The brickwork leaned darkly toward the adjoining wall.
Miss Bennet stopped.
“Those are not mine?”
Darcy checked the schedule, though he knew the answer.
“No. Numbers Seventeen and Eighteen are held separately.”
“How inconvenient.”
“Very.”
She studied the buildings for a moment.
“Mr. Darcy, pray make a memorandum for Mr. Beaker. He is to discover whether the remaining houses in Cotton Lane may be purchased. If I am to reform the whole street, I would rather own it.”
Darcy’s pencil paused.
It was not that he had never known large sums. Pemberley had taught him the weight of them early. Money there had never been merely money. It had been land, timber, cottages, repairs, settlements, wages, parish, memory, and name. It moved slowly because it carried too much with it.
Miss Bennet’s property was another creature. Streets, shops, yards, warehouses, leases, rent days, gutters, and clauses. Its duties came written in ink rather than grown into soil.
Even so, she had just directed the possible purchase of two houses as if she were correcting a defect in punctuation.
No — that was unfair. She had not said, buy them. She had said Mr. Beaker must discover whether they might be bought. It was not impulse. It was inquiry.
It was not rashness. It was policy forming aloud.
That made it worse.
“The purchase may be expensive,” he said.
“Very possibly.”
“And the return may not justify the price.”
“Then Mr. Beaker will tell me so, with all the satisfaction of a man preventing folly.”
Darcy almost smiled.
“You are confident of him.”
“In matters of caution? Entirely. Mrs. Marwood left ready money as well as property. Some of it has been sitting very respectably and doing very little for years. If these houses may be purchased at a sensible price, it might as well be put to good use.”
“You need not decide it now.”
“I am not deciding it. I am deciding that Mr. Beaker shall know enough to advise me.”
She looked back at the two neglected houses.
“You need not worry, Mr. Darcy. I do not mean to buy houses out of the tea account.”
The tea account.
Darcy was almost certain she intended the remark to be comic. He was less certain that it was entirely absurd. Miss Bennet’s idea of a tea account might, for all he knew, have supported a lesser family in Derbyshire for a year.
“I am relieved,” he said.
“As you should be. Mrs. Albright would consider it an offence against civilisation.”
Lord Pomington sneezed, perhaps in defence of civilisation.
By the time they returned to the carriage, Cotton Lane had produced more memoranda than any modest street had a right to require.
Mrs. Bell’s damp. Mr. Greeves’s arrears.
Mr. Harding’s yard. The two houses not in possession.
A gutter between properties. Three different rent days.
Repair clauses that appeared to have been chosen by lot.
Commercial tenants governed like householders and householders burdened like tradesmen.
Miss Bennet took her seat and did not immediately speak.
Darcy sat opposite her. Mrs. Doddridge settled Lord Pomington between them, removing a little mud from one blue sleeve with the corner of a cloth. The dog looked exhausted by public duty.
For several minutes the carriage moved through London while Miss Bennet looked out of the window.
Darcy did not interrupt.
He had been watching the lane. Then he had been watching her.
Not as he ought. Not only as a solicitor observes a client’s instructions. He watched for the next turn of her thought, hungry for it and irritated by the hunger.
Her decisions startled him because they appeared first as impulses and then, on examination, revealed themselves as conclusions. A man might guard himself against impulse. Conclusions were more dangerous. They asked to be followed.
Cotton Lane was not, he understood by then, the jewel of her property. It was the inconvenience. The trial. The disagreeable place where disorder showed itself plainly enough to be seized.
And even in its present condition, the lane must produce more in a year than he now earned by all his labour.
He had known she was wealthy. He had not understood how little of that wealth Cotton Lane represented, nor how calmly she could turn income into obligation.
At last she said, “It is not bad enough.”
Darcy looked at her.
“Miss Bennet?”
“Cotton Lane. It is not bad enough to accuse anyone of neglect, and not good enough to leave alone. That is what makes it so tiresome.”
“That is a fair assessment.”
“Mr. Beaker has accounted for what was given him to account for.”
“Yes.”
“And Mr. Hartwood has kept anything unlawful from happening.”
“So far as I can see.”
“And yet it is all wrong together.”
Darcy closed the memorandum-book upon one finger.
“Not wrong, perhaps. Unmanaged.”
She turned from the window.
“Yes.”
The word was quiet, but her eyes sharpened around it.
“That is exactly it. Everyone has done a piece of the work, and no one has owned the whole of it.”
“You require an agent.”
“I require several things. An agent is one. New leases are another. Better clauses are another. Fewer memories and more ink.”
“Memories have governed Cotton Lane too long?”
“Memories and convenience. I dislike both when they collect rent.”
That was so precisely put that Darcy had to look down at his book again.
“Where are we going?” he asked, noticing at last that the carriage had turned not toward his chambers but toward Portman Square.
“To my house.”
He looked up.
“You did not mention that.”
“I did not know it until Cotton Lane became disagreeable.”
“That is your principle of direction?”
“Often. Disagreement requires a table.”
Mrs. Doddridge said, “The library will be suitable, miss.”
“The library?” Darcy repeated before he could prevent himself.
Miss Bennet looked amused.
“You need not sound alarmed. It is only a room with books in it.”
“I am familiar with the general design.”
“Then you will do very well.”
Portman Square received them as it always did: with warmth, order, and an air of having expected exactly what had happened however little anyone else had. Mrs. Albright took in the mud, the papers, the dog’s offended fatigue, and Miss Bennet’s expression in one glance.
“The library, ma’am?”
“Yes, please. And perhaps tea.”
Mrs. Albright’s eyes moved briefly to Lord Pomington.
“And his lordship?”
“Has inspected property and survived Mr. Harding. He may have his cushion by the fire.”
Mrs. Albright accepted this as an administrative fact.
Darcy had been in Miss Bennet’s drawing-room and morning-room. He had not been in the library.
It was not a large room by the standards of Pemberley, but it had the gravity of use.
The shelves were full without being ornamental.
Books stood in ordered runs, some old, some new, many with the slightly worn look of volumes taken down by people who meant to read them.
A large table occupied the centre, already clear except for an inkstand, paper, and a green-shaded lamp.
There was a globe in one corner, a ladder against the shelves, two deep chairs near the fire, and a writing desk placed where the light was best.
It was Mrs. Marwood’s room. He knew that before Miss Bennet said anything. Not because it was feminine or old-fashioned, but because every object in it seemed to have survived by proving its purpose.
Miss Bennet removed her gloves and laid them beside her blue reticule.
“Now,” she said, “we may make sense of it.”
Darcy took out his memorandum-book. Miss Bennet spread the rent schedule and lease copies upon the table with brisk care.
Mrs. Doddridge established Lord Pomington upon his cushion.
The dog turned twice, sighed as if the burdens of ownership had exhausted him, and settled with his nose toward the fire.
Miss Bennet stood over the papers.
“Cotton Lane is to be our test.”
“Our?”
She looked at him.