Good Company
I
The figure did not resolve itself into anything innocent.
Darcy had returned to his shipping account three times over the course of the afternoon — pushing back from the desk, walking to the window, coming back — each time expecting to find what the last hour had missed.
Pemberley’s accounts were complex enough to produce exactly this — a number that did not belong, that would resolve itself the moment the right set of books was laid beside the wrong one.
He had told himself this the first time. And the second.
The fire had burned down while he worked. Outside, the light had gone from the flat grey of a March afternoon to the grey-blue that preceded dark — that brief interval when the streets went quiet before they went loud again. The hours had passed him unobserved.
He leaned back, his eye on the fire.
Most errors in a ledger had a ragged character — uneven, a gap that wanted filling.
This had a different look. Smoother. More coherent.
He could not have put it before another man as evidence of anything.
He had learned to trust what he thought before he could explain why, and what he thought now was that someone had been careful.
He pulled a fresh sheet towards him, turned up the lamp, and wrote plainly, the way his father had taught him to write about money — without emotion, without accusation.
He set out the account for his business partner, the discrepancy as he understood it, a request that a quiet inquiry be made.
At the bottom, he noted that he would be departing for Rosings Park in Kent before the end of the week and intended to remain for a month at least, and directed that any findings be sent there.
He sat back. A month was longer than his usual stay.
Most years, a fortnight covered everything Lady Catherine required of him.
He had written in February to say a month, perhaps longer.
Her reply had carried the satisfaction of confirmed expectations; Darcy had folded the letter and ignored the inference.
He folded this one now, reached for the seal, pressed it into the wax with the flat, deliberate pressure his father had shown him when he was nine years old, and the desk had belonged to someone taller. He set the letter on the corner of the desk for Hodges to dispatch in the morning.
He was looking at the fire — the fire that had gone to embers while he was not watching it — when he heard his cousin’s voice in the hall.
Mrs Elliott’s voice replied, then Hodges, then there was laughter — his cousin’s laugh, unchanged since Cambridge.
Darcy was already standing, already moving towards the door, before he had decided to.
He opened it to find Fitzwilliam in the hall with his coat still on and his hat in his hand, saying something to Hodges that had produced a genuine smile on Hodges’ face, which took some doing.
“You were not expected until Thursday,” Darcy said.
Fitzwilliam turned. His colour was up from the cold, and the road was still in his eyes — that slightly too-alert air a long day in a carriage produced — but he looked well. Better than when he had last seen him in January.
“Thursday was always a rough approximation.” He handed his hat to Hodges.
“Haverstock settled his debts two days early, and I found I had a choice between another evening of Mallory on the subject of his hunters or coming here.” He looked past Darcy into the study, at the spread of ledgers and the lamp burning over them. “I see I have interrupted something.”
“You have interrupted something I was glad of an excuse to leave.” Darcy stepped back from the doorway. “Come in. Are you hungry?”
“Extraordinarily.”
“Good. As it happens, Cook made apple pudding this afternoon.”
Fitzwilliam stopped on the threshold and turned to him, as if dealt an unexpectedly fine hand. “Apple pudding? And you were going to eat it without me?”
“You were not expected until Thursday.”
“A man of your resources, and you could not have sent word?”
“I did not know Cook was making it until this afternoon.”
“That,” Fitzwilliam said, already moving again, coat still on, hat still in his hand, “is the least convincing thing you have ever said to me, and you once told me that horse was perfectly safe.”
“He was perfectly safe.” Darcy stepped back to let him through. “It was not my fault you fell off.”
“I have a scar.”
“You have,” Darcy said, “a very small scar.”
Darcy spoke to Hodges and sent word to the stables, and by the time these things were done, the dining room was laid, the soup was on the table, and the fire — burning since mid-afternoon — had given the room the warmth that no amount of hurrying could produce, that arrived only when stone and plaster had absorbed enough heat to give it back.
Fitzwilliam ate as if restored to civilisation after a fortnight of regimental meals, and somewhere between the soup and the first course, he arrived at the subject he had clearly been meaning to raise since the hall.
“I want it noted,” he said, “that arranging an early leave from the regiment on a fortnight’s notice is not a simple undertaking. Colonel Barnes was not best pleased.”
“I am sorry for the inconvenience to Colonel Barnes.”
“You do not sound sorry.”
“I am sorry for the inconvenience to Colonel Barnes,” Darcy said again, in the same tone.
Fitzwilliam pointed his fork. “What is so urgent in Kent that we could not go at the usual time? We have been going at Easter for fifteen years, and Lady Catherine has never yet required us before the third week of April.”
“She has been relying on my counsel more these past two years.” Darcy reached for his wine.
“There are matters that want settling — the home farm, the west tenancies, a dispute with a neighbouring landowner that she has been managing badly and will continue to manage badly unless someone sits down with her and the relevant documents. I thought it better to go early and do it well than arrive at the usual time and feel pressed.”
Fitzwilliam regarded him across the table. “Has Anne taken a sudden interest in estate management? Is that what is drawing you south so urgently?”
“Anne has nothing to do with it.”
“You are certain? Because I would hate for you to arrive at Rosings and find that a fortnight’s early arrival had given our aunt entirely the wrong impression about your intentions—”
“Richard.”
“—and I say this as a man who has been fending off Lady Catherine’s pointed enquiries about the state of your affections for the better part of a decade—”
“Richard.”
“—and who would very much like, before he dies, to enjoy a single Easter at Rosings without the sensation of being slowly roasted over a low flame—”
“The matter,” Darcy said, “is settled. It has been settled for some years. My aunt chooses not to accept it, which is her prerogative, but I am going to Kent to attend to her estate and nothing else.”
Fitzwilliam raised his hands in surrender, reached for his wine, and let it go.
The pudding arrived, and Fitzwilliam set to it with the gravity it deserved. “How is Georgiana?” he asked. “Her last letter said very little.”
Darcy set down his spoon. “She is well,” he said. “Better than she was at Christmas. Your mother says she is sleeping properly again.”
“She wrote nothing of that to me.”
“No.” Darcy turned his glass on the cloth. “She would not. I have been indebted to her for her delicacy.”
Richard grunted as he sipped his wine. “Is she going out at all?”
“Some. She went to the Ashton girl’s birthday assembly last month and stayed the full evening.
Lady Matlock wrote to me about it at some length, as though Georgiana had stormed a French battery.
” He smiled, but it did not sit entirely easily.
“She has been at the pianoforte a great deal. Clementi, mostly. Your mother says she has nothing left to prove by it.”
“Well! That is all to the good. She writes me often enough, but there is seldom much substance to it. She did, rather oddly, ask after you,” Fitzwilliam said. “In her last letter to me. Not in the way she asks after people generally — not politely. She asked whether I thought you were well.”
Darcy scoffed. “I am perfectly well.”
“I know that. I told her so.” Fitzwilliam picked up his spoon again. “Go to Pemberley before July, Darcy. Not after. I think being home would do her good.”
Darcy did not look up at once. Outside, the wind moved through the street.
“I will collect her from Matlock in late spring,” he said. “Take her to Pemberley for the summer. There are affairs to settle in London first, after Kent.”
Fitzwilliam nodded and did not push, and reached for his wine, and the subject closed as cleanly as it had opened.
“Tell me about Haverstock,” Darcy said.
Fitzwilliam’s face opened into something considerably more cheerful.
“Haverstock has been a nuisance since October. He arrived convinced that three months at a country house party had given him a thorough understanding of military strategy and spent his first fortnight telling anyone who would listen — and several who would not — that the regiment’s current approach to supply lines was, and I am quoting directly, inefficient and frankly rather old-fashioned. ”
“Good God.”
“He was right about the supply lines, which was the trouble. He was simply so insufferably right that being right almost did him more damage than being wrong would have done.”
“What happened?”
“Marsh put him in charge of fixing it.” Fitzwilliam smiled.
“Six weeks in a supply depot outside Ware. The supply lines came back considerably improved, and Haverstock had developed a much more nuanced understanding of the difference between knowing something is wrong and knowing what to do about it. He is going to be very good in another year or two. Once he has finished being twenty-three.”
“And Mallory? You have mentioned his hunters twice this evening.”
“Mallory,” Fitzwilliam said — he had been waiting for this question — “has acquired a grey. Sixteen hands, descended on the dam’s side from something that ran at Newmarket in 1798.
He has ensured that everyone within ten miles is aware of it.
” He looked up. “The horse is by all accounts completely unmanageable, and Mallory has not yet succeeded in staying on it more than twenty minutes.”
Darcy laughed. “Has he been injured?”
“Twice. Nothing serious. He is very cheerful about it, which is almost more alarming than the injuries themselves. He falls off, gets back on, and describes the experience at dinner as though being launched into a fence post is the most interesting thing that has happened to him in years.”
They talked about the regiment until the candles had burned down a good third of their length, the evening moving back and forth between them with the ease of men who had been talking to each other long enough that conversation found its own level without effort.
Darcy refilled their glasses when they needed refilling.
The fire held its warmth; outside, the wind was steady off the river.
“I had a letter from our aunt, by the by,” Fitzwilliam said eventually, when the regiment had been sufficiently covered.
“It had been chasing me around three counties before it found me. She writes that her new parson is engaged to be married, and she writes about it in the manner of a woman who has personally arranged a match between two great houses.”
“Her information is old. Collins has been married some months. I had it from her in January.”
“Oh? Then I suppose you have had a dozen letters from her since, congratulating herself on the match.”
“The match was not precisely what she had intended for him. She did not dwell on it.” He reached for the bread.
“Her more recent letter is considerably more cheerful. Mrs Collins’ father and her younger sister are to come at Easter.
” He broke the bread and set it down. “And a friend from Hertfordshire. A Miss Bennet — I have a slight acquaintance with her, from when Bingley had Netherfield last autumn.”
His pulse went abruptly and entirely wrong.
He reached for his wine. It was very good — stronger than he had been accounting for, that was the most reasonable explanation. He drank, set the glass down, and left it where it was.
“New faces.” Fitzwilliam said it as he might have said fair weather — a pleasant, unremarkable fact. “Rosings could always do with that. Is she pretty, this Miss Bennet?”
“Good company,” Darcy said. “Clever.”
“High praise.” Fitzwilliam reached for his own glass. “Well. Something to look forward to, at least, between the home farm and the west tenancies.”
And that was all. The conversation moved on, and Darcy moved with it.
Tomorrow, they would leave for Kent.