CHAPTER 14 #3
“You did not think I brought you there merely to admire Mr. Harding’s yard.”
“No.”
“Good. Cotton Lane first. The rest later.”
“The rest.”
“My other properties. The Manchester Square shops, the City warehouses, the bank building, and the smaller houses. I do not know that they suffer from the same disorder, but I no longer trust that they do not.”
Darcy’s hand stilled over the page.
“The bank building?”
“Yes. Mr. Marwood built it, or rebuilt enough of it to claim the credit. It is let to a banking partnership.”
“I see.”
He did see. Too much, perhaps. Cotton Lane had been a nuisance yielding a gentleman’s income. A bank building was something else: stone, iron, reputation, security, and rent made respectable by other men’s fortunes.
Miss Bennet, meanwhile, was frowning at Number Six.
“Mr. Darcy.”
“Yes?”
“You must build a structure.”
For one irrational moment, the answer in him was immediate and dangerous.
Anything.
He lowered his eyes to the papers.
“What kind of structure?”
“One that prevents Cotton Lane from becoming itself again.”
“That is ambitious.”
“Necessary. I do not mean one lease for everything. That would be tidiness, not sense. Shops and dwellings must be distinguished. Warehouses must not be treated like widows’ rooms. The bank building is its own creature entirely. But within each kind, there must be regularity.”
Darcy opened a clean page.
“Rent days.”
“Yes. Fixed and intelligible.”
“Repair clauses.”
“Plain enough that Mrs. Bell need not argue with weather.”
“Arrears.”
“Written arrangements where mercy is intended. Consequences where it is not.”
“Yard rights and storage.”
“Every inch named, or no inch claimed.”
“Renewals.”
“No lease renewed in the new year while arrears stand unpaid, unless I have expressly approved it.”
He wrote quickly.
“And commercial premises?”
“Separate form. Shopfronts, shutters, alterations, signage, back access, yards, all of it. A tradesman must know what he may change before he changes it.”
“Residential?”
“Roofs, external walls, drains, damp, glass, cleanliness, subletting, notice. I do not want a widow responsible for a roof, nor a shopkeeper excused for breaking his own shutters.”
Darcy looked at her across the table.
“You have thought about this.”
“I have been annoyed for nearly four hours. Naturally I have thought.”
That was not the whole of it. He knew it by now. Miss Bennet’s apparent suddenness was often only the visible point of a conclusion rising from beneath.
“You will also require a property agent,” he said.
“Yes. Once this scheme is settled, we shall hire a proper agent to keep Cotton Lane from relapsing into character. Then you may help me carry the system into my other investments, which are, I hope, less determined to be disagreeable.”
“You do not mean me to collect rents and inspect gutters?”
“I should be very disappointed if you tried. It would be a waste of your profession and a poor arrangement for mine.”
“I am relieved to hear it.”
“You should be. I mean to reserve you for the difficult work.”
Reserve you.
The words were practical. He received them otherwise and despised himself for it.
“Do I understand that Cotton Lane is not the difficult work?”
“Cotton Lane is the disagreeable work. There is a distinction.”
He could not help it. He smiled.
She saw, and her own expression warmed in answer before she returned to the papers.
“Mr. Beaker shall have the accounts,” she said. “Mr. Hartwood the trust and conveyances. You the leases. The agent the daily nuisance.”
“And you?”
“I shall have the unpleasant duty of deciding what I mean.”
It was lightly said, but not lightly meant.
Darcy looked at the papers spread before them: Cotton Lane’s patched clauses, mismatched obligations, and disagreeable little claims. Then he looked at Miss Bennet, standing in her library with ink on one finger, her bonnet set aside, her blue reticule lying near the rent schedule as if fashion and governance had agreed to share a table.
He had thought, at first, that she was sudden.
She was not sudden.
She was swift.
Darcy, who had spent years mistrusting haste, found himself wanting to keep pace.
“Very well,” he said.
Miss Bennet looked up.
“You will do it?”
“I will begin with Cotton Lane.”
“And after?”
“We shall see what structure survives Cotton Lane.”
Her eyes brightened.
“That is not a refusal.”
“No.”
“Nor an evasion.”
“No.”
“Excellent.” She pushed Number Three toward him. “Then let us begin with the shop that believes a shed may be acquired by confidence.”
Darcy took up his pen.
He had been hired for leases. That was all. A professional task, undertaken in a lady’s library, under the eye of her companion and the disapproval of her dog.
Yet when Miss Bennet leaned over the table to point out Mr. Harding’s shed, close enough that he caught the faint trace of cold air still clinging to her pelisse, Darcy felt the full danger of the thing.
He wanted the work.
Worse, he wanted her to want him for it.
So he wrote the first heading with great care.
Cotton Lane: Proposed Structure.