VII The Laird in the Walls #2
Angus went without another word. Darcy picked up the Aberdeen packet, held it, set it down again, listened to the sea coming in off the headland. Three weeks of carelessness with a candle, and the cover story he had counted on lasting months had been needed before the end of May.
The factor called again ten days later.
By then, Darcy had found the Laird’s Lug.
He had discovered it by accident. One morning when the walls of the mural chamber seemed closer than usual, he had taken a candle into the hidden passages merely to move, following the secondary stair downward, then sideways through a passage he had not tried before, pressing his free hand along the stone, feeling — faintly, unmistakably — a change in temperature. A draught from somewhere.
He followed it to a low door in the passage wall, barely a door, more a section of stone that swung inward on a pivot; and beyond it a chamber so cramped he could not stand upright — perhaps four feet across, a rough stone floor, a ceiling that sloped down to nothing at the far end.
And in the outer wall, at roughly the height of a man’s ear if he lay on the floor, there was a slit.
Narrow, disguised on its outer face as decorative stonework.
Designed, he saw the moment he lay down and put his ear to it, not to let in light but to let in sound.
Below him, clear and close as if the floor between them were paper rather than a foot of solid stone, he could hear the Great Hall.
He lay there for a long time, listening to the empty room below breathe.
When the factor knocked at the gate ten days later, Darcy moved to the Lug, flat on the cold stone, his ear at the slit.
He heard Angus greet him. He heard the factor’s voice — unhurried, civil, the authority in his tone; he had been doing this long enough to know that patience was more effective than insistence.
He heard Angus’s responses, brief and careful. He heard everything.
The factor said he was pleased to have a resident in the house once more, though dismayed at being turned away without meeting him. He asked after the baron’s health. He said he only needed to confirm, as was his duty, that all was in order.
Angus said all was in order.
The factor said he would look forward to paying his respects to the baron in person, when the baron was equal to receiving callers, and left.
Darcy lay on the stone, his eye on the ceiling, and dwelt on the phrase in the dark — when the Baron felt equal to receiving callers.
The man had said when, not if; he had left no room for the other word.
The factor would come back. Next time, he would expect to be received.
If he was not received, he would go away and write something down; eventually, that something would be read by someone.
Darcy had no way of knowing, from a stone chamber in Aberdeenshire, where that chain ended.
The thought arrived before he could stop it — he needed a presence at the house.
A face in the Great Hall, a voice the village could attach to a name; someone seen at the kirk on Sundays, encountered on the cliff path, noted without alarm as belonging to Auchengray.
If there were someone — anyone — to stand in that place, the cover story would sustain itself without effort.
The baron in mourning. His household in order. Nothing to investigate.
There was no one.
Not because he could not think of a name.
Whoever stood in that place would be standing in his life, and his life was forfeit if he was found.
Harbouring a man under warrant for high treason was not a misunderstanding that could be smoothed over.
It was a charge. He would not do that to anyone, and there was no one he would ask it of, in any case.
Of course, he could just take his chance.
Greet the factor casually, pass himself off as George Carlisle of nowhere but here.
But his face was known. Not here, no. Not yet.
But in London, in Kent, in Derbyshire, in every drawing room and club and shipping office where Fitzwilliam Darcy had ever stood.
The factor’s records went somewhere. Somewhere connected to somewhere else. He had not come this far by trusting that the chain would break before it reached him, and he was not going to start now.
He would take the gossip. The factor’s polite dissatisfaction.
The Reverend Innes’ unanswered calls. Whatever conclusions the village drew from the lights and the shutters and the servants who said very little.
He would take all of it. It was the price of remaining hidden, and remaining hidden was the only thing keeping him alive.
He went back down the hidden stair and worked until the candle burned out. He thought in the dark after that, because the shape of the problem was the same in the dark as in the light.
The sea went on outside the walls, the way it had gone on outside these walls for four hundred years, indifferent to everything that happened inside them.
It would have to do, he told himself.
He was not certain he believed it.