V The Last of Him
V
The Last of Him
The inn yard at Bromley was busy enough that Elizabeth did not notice the colonel until he was almost beside them.
He had come around the corner of the stable block, hat in his hand, with the look of having waited longer than anticipated for something not yet ready. He stopped when he saw them, with a smile that reached his eyes.
“Miss Bennet. Miss Lucas.” He bowed. “I had not thought to have company on the road.”
“Nor had we,” Elizabeth said. “Though I confess I am not entirely surprised. When did you leave Rosings?”
“This morning, as it turns out. My regiment will not wait indefinitely.” He fell into step beside them as they moved towards the inn door, the manservant following at a discreet distance with the bags. “And you? Mr Collins released you without too much ceremony?”
“He was everything gracious,” Elizabeth said. “And everything lengthy.”
Fitzwilliam’s expression suggested he found this entirely plausible. He held the door. “You had a fine morning for it, at least. The roads are dry.”
“They are,” Maria said. “We have made very good time.”
“Better than I have.” Fitzwilliam accepted the tea a serving girl brought and considered it with mild resignation.
“One grows accustomed to Darcy’s coachwork and then one is abruptly reminded what the alternative feels like on a country road.
I have been repenting my impatience with every rut since Sevenoaks. ”
They stood as the stop was short. Fitzwilliam asked after their plans in London.
“Gracechurch Street,” Elizabeth said. “Cheapside. My uncle expects us for dinner.”
“Gracechurch Street. I know it tolerably well — my regimental tailor is at Leadenhall, two turnings off, and I have spent enough afternoons waiting on him to have formed opinions about every public house in a half-mile. Your uncle is in trade?”
“He is. Mr Gardiner, of the cloth warehouses — the house is above the counting-room, near St Peter’s.”
“Near St Peter’s.” Fitzwilliam considered. “The broad-fronted one, with the green door?”
“You know it?”
“I have passed it often enough. The flowers in the upper windows would be your aunt’s doing, I imagine — no warehouseman keeps geraniums without being compelled to them.”
“My aunt does not hold with the notion that a warehouse should keep her from her geraniums.”
“Mrs Gardiner sounds a spirited woman.”
“She is.”
Maria asked what else he knew of London, and Fitzwilliam obliged with good grace — the best shops for gloves, the hazards of Fleet Street after four o’clock, which squares repaid a stroll and which did not.
He was cheerful and good company. He was exactly as she had always found him.
And yet when she glanced at him once — caught his face in the moment before he turned to answer Maria’s question about London — there was something running underneath the ease that had not been there at the parsonage on Tuesday.
Not distraction exactly. Closer to the look that came of keeping something back and doing it well enough that he would have expected no one to see it.
She did not pursue it. It was not her business, and in another minute the horses were ready, and they were parting with the ease of people who have no reason to linger.
He crossed the yard towards his hired carriage and climbed in. Their own was ready then, the manservant handed them up, and they were moving again, the Bromley inn yard receding behind them into the April afternoon.
Webb arrived at half past three, slipping in through the printer’s yard while the street was still empty, and was gone again before the ink-stained apprentices and early clerks began to move through Fetter Lane.
“The arrangements at Deptford are made,” he said. He did not sit; he never sat. “The timing is tight but workable. Friday night, if the tide is right. It will be.”
Darcy did not ask how Webb knew about the tide. Webb knew about a great many things.
His father’s signet ring was on his right hand, where it had been since the morning after the funeral, when his uncle pressed it into his palm with nothing adequate to say.
The Darcy crest was engraved deep enough that whatever survived a fire would survive with the crest still legible, still identifiable beyond any question. He turned it once on his finger.
“Must it be the ring?”
“The body must be identified as yours beyond reasonable dispute. The ring is the surest means. Once the identification is made, the warrant dies with you, the proceedings stop, your will enters into effect, and your sister is protected. The other provisions you have made secure her in any case. But yes. The ring is necessary.”
Darcy pulled it from his finger and set it on the desk between them.
“The Scottish solicitor has confirmed the trust instrument,” Webb continued, as though the thing on the desk were only another document. “The funds will be unreachable by Monday. Sterling’s people will find the English accounts frozen and nothing else.”
“And Georgiana’s additional settlement — has that been transferred to Matlock?”
“Yesterday. He will not know why until after word reaches him, and it is done discreetly enough that only he will know.”
“And the letters? You will send them after I…”
“Not until you instruct me to, or until—”
“Or until the verdict comes in.” Darcy set the pen down. “Yes. I understand the condition.”
“There is one further matter.” Webb set a folded document on the desk.
“The title search is complete. The barony of Auchengray is entirely clear — no liens, no competing claims, no record of it in any register connected to the Darcy name. It passed through your mother’s family three generations back.
The Crown’s investigators will search Derbyshire; they will search the Continent.
They will not search Aberdeenshire for a minor Scottish title held through a maternal line that does not carry your name. ”
Darcy did not touch the document. He had known this in the abstract since the Sevenoaks road, when the plan first assembled itself in the dark, and Auchengray became the answer to the question of where.
His mother had spoken of it rarely — a tower house on the coast, remote and drafty, built for defence rather than comfort, her grandmother’s people; she had gone once as a girl and described the sea as the loudest thing she had ever heard.
His father had never gone at all. That was the point.
The English world had no map to it and no reason to draw one — a property outside the whole network of associations that constituted Fitzwilliam Darcy’s visible life, and that invisibility was worth more than stone walls.
“Can the servants be relied upon,” he asked, “if investigators make enquiries in the county?”
“The Scottish solicitor was in no doubt. He said a housekeeper once loyal to a lady would be doubly loyal to the lady’s son, and seemed to consider it a point requiring no further argument.”
Webb did not move immediately. “There is one thing I have not entirely resolved. Auchengray was your mother’s inheritance.
If your family’s solicitors are thorough, if Lord Matlock or Lady Catherine ever think to review the full Fitzwilliam settlement, the property will surface.
It would come back to them or be transferred to Miss Darcy upon your decease. ”
“When was the last time anyone in my family thought about Auchengray?”
“I could not say.”
“I can. My mother’s marriage portion was signed thirty years ago, and neither my uncle nor my aunt has set foot in Aberdeenshire in living memory, nor had any reason to.
They will not think of it — not in the first months, not while the grief is fresh and the proceedings are still being unwound.
And if they think of it eventually, I intend by then to be in a position where it no longer signifies.
Is there anything in the solicitor’s records connecting the barony to the trust? ”
“Nothing a casual review would find. And the Edinburgh firm has no standing instruction to notify anyone in England of developments at the property. No one in London will receive an unsolicited reminder.”
It was not perfect; it was the best available, and the best available would have to be enough. “Very well.”
Webb left.
He sat for a while in the lamplight with the city beginning to stir outside the shuttered window, then pulled the first sheet towards him and began. He set it aside at the salutation.
A letter found afterward would tell Sterling’s people what the ring was meant to conceal — that he had known, that he had arranged the thing, that the corpse at Fetter Lane was not what it was presented to be.
Anything in the nature of a farewell, found, would dismantle the plan before it had begun.
He was not permitted to say goodbye. He could write only what he might have written anyway — what his uncle, his sister, his cousin would expect from him in April of an ordinary year, and nothing beyond it.
His uncle was the easiest. The Earl of Matlock liked routine reports, and Darcy wrote one — the Rosings visit, his aunt’s opinions on the Hunsford road, the estate agent’s proposal in the home-farm matter, a line of thanks for a loan of horses in February, the expectation of seeing his uncle and aunt at Pemberley for the August shooting.
He signed it as he always did. It would go in the pile with every letter he had written his uncle in fifteen years and tell Sterling’s people nothing.
Georgiana took longer. He burned the first attempt — too full of the things a brother writes only when he is taking his leave — and the second was worse.
The third, he began by forcing himself to remember that his sister was at Matlock, aged sixteen, and to write her only what she would hear from him in an ordinary April.
He wrote her about Kent — Lady Catherine and the Hunsford road, Fitzwilliam being tolerable company in spite of himself, Mr Collins’ oratory on the subject of salt-cellars, which he thought would make her laugh.
He told her he had been thinking, for no reason he could account for, of the summer he had taken her to the Lakes — her observation at Windermere that the world had not been finished yet, which had returned to him this week more times than he could account for.
He told her she had worn out Clementi by now and ought to try Haydn.
He added — for she would have asked — that Miss Bennet had been among the parsonage party, and that the weather had been dry enough for walking.
He told her he expected to collect her for Pemberley by July.
He read it back and found that, almost against his will, he had written her a true letter.
The Windermere line carried everything it had ever carried and nothing an investigator would see.
The line about Miss Bennet was a seed for a future he had no right to claim, and he had planted it anyway.
He signed it Your most affectionate brother, which was the only farewell he could afford.
He folded both letters and set them aside for Webb, who would see them posted from Kent, as though they had been written there with the rest.
Then he wrote a third, shorter and plainer, to Colonel Fitzwilliam — not the truth, not Auchengray or the alias or any of it, only that if the worst came to pass, the colonel should apply to Webb directly, and Webb would know what to tell him.
He folded it separately, marked with an instruction that it was not to be sent unless Darcy himself gave the word.
Fitzwilliam could not know, and that was the only mercy Darcy could offer him; but if everything else failed, he wanted one door left open, held ajar by a man who asked no questions and kept everything.
Then he pulled a fresh sheet towards him and stared at it for a long time.
He had not planned to write this one. It was not logical; it served no practical purpose; it was in every measurable sense a waste of the time he did not have.
He wrote it anyway — not the way he had rehearsed the proposal at Rosings, with the careful construction of trying to find the right words, but the way the letter to Georgiana had finally come, without deciding to, without knowing what it would say until it was already said.
He told her that he had intended to ask her something, that he had been a day away, perhaps less, and that he had been quite certain of what she would have said — that the certainty was one of the few things he was taking with him intact.
He told her that he had never met anyone who argued the way she argued, which was a strange thing to put in a letter but was also, in his experience, the truest measure of a mind worth knowing.
He told her that when she had said most people are rather sturdier than the men protecting them tend to suppose, he had known she was right and had not been able to say so, and that he was sorry for it.
He told her that whatever she made of the world without him in it, she would find it inadequate to her.
He read it back once, folded it, and did not set it with the letters for Webb. He put it in his breast pocket instead, next to Webb’s letter, where it had been pressing against his ribs for four days. Webb could not have this one.