VII The Laird in the Walls
VII
The Laird in the Walls
He had come to Auchengray an hour past midnight in a driving rain, and the household had taken him in without offence at the hour and without questions — Mrs MacLeod showing him to the Baron’s chamber, Angus taking his trunks, a fire already burning in the grate because she had judged when he might reach them.
Mrs MacLeod — iron-grey, sixty if she was a day, her mother before her having served at Auchengray — received his instructions in the morning and executed them without comment and without apparent curiosity about why a man of his evident means was living anonymously in the walls of his own house after that house had stood neglected for a generation.
Her husband Angus, weathered and older than she by a decade, had come to the estate as a boy in the late Baron’s time and had never gone far from it since.
He saddled the horses, rode to Aberdeen, returned, reported. That was all.
Whatever the Baron of Auchengray chose to do was the Baron of Auchengray’s business, and the servants of Auchengray did not concern themselves with it. The Scottish solicitor had been right. It was the most valuable thing about them.
What Darcy had not anticipated was the character of the silence between those exchanges.
He had been alone before — at Pemberley in the winters when Georgiana was at school, in London when the house was shut, and the staff reduced — but those silences had been silences he could end whenever he chose.
This was different. This silence had no door, and it smothered him with a constancy that he had not found in anything else since the hackney left Gravesend and the English coast disappeared behind him.
The mural chamber sat high in the thickness of the south wall — a narrow space whose plaster had been painted three centuries before with a hunt long since faded to brown, hounds and a stag and riders no longer quite distinct, built by some earlier laird who had wished to look out without being seen.
The only way into it was the secondary stair behind the panelling of the Baron’s chamber; from its single ventilation slit, a man might keep the whole approach to the house, and the grey reach of the sea beyond, under his eye.
He had made it his study because no caller would ever be shown to its door, and he kept his papers there, out of the path of any servant who might wonder at them.
He slept below, in the Baron’s chamber — the laird’s own room, wide and cold and far too large for the one man who filled no part of it.
He worked in the afternoons by candlelight, which was insufficient but was all he had.
Webb’s reports arrived every four days via Angus and Aberdeen, coded and dry.
Darcy read them at the narrow table in the mural chamber with the papers he had carried out of Grosvenor Square spread beside them — copies, ledgers, older correspondence, the comparison sheets he had kept back because Webb could not be expected to see at a glance what Darcy had spent years learning to see.
He drafted his replies and tried to build from the pieces some shape of the thing.
The pieces were not enough.
Sterling had been using his ships — Webb had confirmed this slowly, carefully, cross-referencing records Darcy had not known existed against registers in Aberdeen and London and at least one customs ledger that Webb had obtained by means he did not specify.
Two of the southern routes. The paperwork countersigned with a version of Darcy’s signature that was not Darcy’s signature.
A forgery, identifiable as such, under very careful examination, by someone looking for the difference.
But who had been looking, when, and how Darcy’s name had moved from the ships were his to the crime was his — that was the part Webb could not yet answer.
He did not know how long it had been happening. He did not know whether Sterling had anticipated the Home Office investigation or been caught by it and responded.
At first, he had been certain the ledger discrepancy he had found in had been a test — bait, placed where an attentive man would find it.
If Darcy ignored it, Sterling would learn he was unobserved.
If Darcy acted on it — as he had, with a careful letter over his own signature — Sterling would learn three things at once — that Darcy was watching, that he was away from London for a month, and that he moved in writing rather than in person.
If that was right, Sterling had not been caught by the Home Office warrant. Sterling had been preparing against Darcy for weeks — perhaps longer — and Darcy’s letter had only told him when to finish.
He had been going back and forth on it since Kent; it did not resolve; and not resolving it meant he could not trust his own reading of anything that had happened since he took Sterling on as a partner.
The clerk was everything, if Webb could find him.
A man in Sterling’s employ who had prepared the forged manifests, who could testify to who had instructed him, who had vanished from Sterling’s offices three weeks before the warrant was drawn, and whom Webb had not yet found.
He was on land, somewhere, and findable in principle.
The question was only whether Webb found him before Sterling’s men did.
Failing the clerk, there were the three captains who had carried Sterling’s cargoes on Darcy’s ships under the forged countersignature — Harker of the Constant, MacNeil of the Mary Rose, Foss of the Alicia Jane.
Each had taken his instruction from the man who came aboard with the papers, and any one of them could name him.
None of them would do it alone. A captain brought by himself into a lawyer’s office and asked to name the man who had handed him his sailing papers would hedge, or claim not to remember, or fail to arrive at all; no man staked his neck on a story no one stood beside him to confirm.
Two or three together might speak and be believed — but one, standing alone, would not, and that was the best Webb was ever likely to bring him.
And they were scattered at sea besides. The Mary Rose was outbound for Smyrna under MacNeil; the Constant under Harker lay somewhere between the Cape and St Helena on her return; the Alicia Jane under Foss had last been signalled at Funchal the week before the warrant was drawn.
None could be reached until she made port, months off, and by then, Sterling’s men would have come and gone before Webb ever arrived.
And the instant any of the three made port, she would be impounded — taken with her papers the moment she came under an English harbour master’s eye.
Without the clerk, then, there was no case. Without the case, there was no return.
He had been at Auchengray three weeks when Angus set the Aberdeen packet on the table and mentioned, with a brevity that treated words as carefully as coin, that the local factor had called.
Darcy looked up. “When?”
“Yesterday afternoon. I told him there was no one here but the servants. As usual.”
The packet sat unopened between them. Darcy considered it and thought about a county factor — the man whose job was to know the state of every property in the district, who reported to Edinburgh, who expected to be received — and about what as usual meant coming from a house with a new baron in the title never announced, never seen.
“What did he want?”
“To pay his respects. To confirm all was in order.”
“Is there anything else?”
“The Reverend Innes has called once. And the village has noticed the lantern.”
Darcy stiffened. “Which lantern?”
“The one you had in the upper rooms. Several nights last week. A man on the cliff path going home from the fishing said he had seen it last Tuesday. He mentioned it at the inn.”
Darcy turned to the ventilation slit in the wall of the mural chamber.
Tuesday. The fourth report from Webb. The part he had read three times, trying to find the thread that connected the forged signatures to the warrant, his attention narrowed entirely to the page, the lantern burning on past the hour he should have shuttered it.
Servants used candles to move about, not study lanterns that sat on a desk.
And not in the upper rooms, and not at that hour.
Anyone in a fishing village on the Aberdeenshire coast who had grown up watching which windows lit and when in the houses along the headland could tell a housekeeper’s kitchen light from a lantern burning past midnight in the baron’s chambers.
The village had drawn the only conclusion the evidence supported — someone was in the house.
And Angus had told the factor there was no one but the servants.
The factor would hear what the fisherman had said at the inn. He would call again, and the second visit would not be satisfied with the same answer as the first.
Darcy pushed back from the table, stood, walked to the narrow window and back — four steps in each direction, which did nothing except prevent him from sitting still.
A man in the factor’s position did not let inconsistencies accumulate quietly.
He noted them, and what he noted did not stay with him.
He needed an account that reconciled the lights with the denial — one that made Angus’s answer honest in its way and the Baron’s invisibility a matter of temperament rather than concealment.
A man who had arrived quietly, too deep in grief to announce himself, wanting no company and giving none.
The servants had said what they always said because he had not yet instructed them otherwise. It was untidy enough to be plausible.
“When the factor calls again, tell him the Baron arrived some days ago and is not receiving visitors. His grief has been considerable, and he requires solitude. The Reverend Innes may be told the same.” He turned back from the window. “And put the shutters on the upper rooms after dark.”