XIII The Reckoning
XIII
The Reckoning
The Aberdeen packet arrived on a Thursday. Darcy read it in the mural chamber with the candle burning, his notes pushed to one side, his pen untouched. When he finished, the letter slipped from lifeless fingers. And he had forgotten how to breathe.
Webb’s letter was dated the fourth of July. Six days to reach him — the usual run for summer weather. He had not wondered at the timing until now.
He read it again, this time scrambling for dates.
GC,
This does not pertain to the investigation.
I send it because Hodges judged it a matter of personal concern to you, and because, having looked into it since, I find the facts worse than the manner in which they reached me.
I have verified what follows, and I give it to you plainly.
You would not thank me for the gentler version.
The thread came from Colonel Fitzwilliam, who arrived at Grosvenor Square on the third of July in a poor state, having spent some considerable time with a bottle.
Hodges says the colonel had come directly from Gracechurch Street, Cheapside, where he had met by chance on the front steps a Miss Elizabeth Bennet of Longbourn, Hertfordshire, whom he knew.
What he said there, I have since confirmed from other quarters.
Mr Bennet of Longbourn died in May, without warning. The entail fell at once, and the heir put the widow and five daughters out of the house inside a fortnight. They went to Mr Edward Gardiner of Gracechurch Street, a warehouseman, brother to Mrs Bennet.
Gardiner was himself ruined this spring.
He had placed the greater part of his capital in a trading concern that paid well for two years.
In April, a single large investor closed out and withdrew his whole stake inside a week; confidence broke, the other backers followed within the fortnight, and the firm failed.
I have traced the dates. The withdrawal was the cause, and there is no reading of the sequence that makes it otherwise.
The house at Gracechurch Street is sold.
Unable to keep six women, Gardiner sought husbands for the two eldest through a connection moving in higher circles than his own, and the articles were signed in a single sitting.
Miss Jane Bennet is to marry Sir Horace Blackwood, baronet.
Miss Elizabeth Bennet is to marry Mr Thomas Sibley, of new money.
The weddings are set for the eighteenth of July.
That is the whole of it, so far as I have it. I do not know why Hodges felt it important to pass on, but it is a sorry situation, and I am sorry to be the one to set it down.
W.
Darcy read those two lines again.
Miss Jane Bennet is to marry Sir Horace Blackwood.
Miss Elizabeth Bennet is to marry Mr Thomas Sibley.
The candle guttered, and he did not lift his hand to shield it.
He had liquidated in April. Webb had moved everything in five days — accounts cleared, positions closed, assets converted or transferred.
A liquidation of that size, that speed, from a man with shipping interests, moved through the markets the way a stone moved through still water… it would have made ripples, even waves.
He had not known what Gardiner had invested in. He had not known Gardiner existed. He had been on a ship to Aberdeen by the time the ripples reached Gracechurch Street.
He had ruined them.
Not intentionally. Not knowingly. The chain ran clean from his own hand to the sign outside Edward Gardiner’s house, and there was no arrangement of the facts that changed that.
And before the Gardiners, there was Bingley.
Bingley had been on the cusp of proposing to Jane Bennet last autumn.
Darcy had been certain of it — had seen the whole thing assemble itself over a fortnight at Netherfield with the clarity of one who had been present for Bingley’s every attachment for years and knew the difference between the usual sort and this.
This had looked like the real thing, from Bingley’s side.
From Jane Bennet’s side, Darcy had not been certain.
He had read her as a young woman who could be happy with Bingley, or happy without him — and on that reading, he had decided Bingley deserved certainty before he committed himself, and had acted accordingly.
He might have been right about Jane Bennet’s feelings. He was not certain, even now, that he had been wrong. None of that signified any longer.
Because Jane Bennet was going to marry Sir Horace Blackwood, and no uncertainty about the depth of her feelings for Bingley changed what that meant.
A moderate attachment to a kind man would have been a decent life.
What Blackwood offered was not a life. And Darcy had been the one to make Bingley walk, with the best intentions available to him, and there was no reaching Bingley now to ask him to walk back.
Bingley was in London, fixed on Miss Harrington, moving towards a happiness that was constitutionally available to him in ways that had nothing to do with which woman he was pursuing.
The door to Hertfordshire had closed months ago, and Darcy had been the one to close it.
Blackwood, he had known for years — not as a friend but in the circumspect way certain men were spoken of at certain tables, once the wine had gone round and the women had left the room.
Three wives in eleven years. Each had withdrawn from the world by degrees, seen less and then not at all, and each had died quietly at home, and each inquest had found nothing; in the public telling, it was no more than hard fortune visited upon one man three times over.
That was the man Jane Bennet was going to marry.
Sibley, he had seen directly. A Thursday evening at White’s, two winters ago — Darcy in the smoking room with Fitzwilliam, Sibley two chairs distant, loud in the way men were loud when they did not expect anyone above them to be listening.
A footman had come in with a tray and jostled Sibley’s glass.
Perhaps a spoonful of wine went onto the cloth. The footman apologised.
Sibley stood, took the footman by the ear, and walked him bent over into the corridor.
What happened there was not a shout. It was lower and more contained than a shout, twice, and then the footman was against the wall with blood on his lip, and Sibley was back at his chair, inspecting his cuff.
It was not the fact of it that had stayed in Darcy’s chest for a week.
It was the character of it — the unhurried, almost pleasurable attention Sibley had given it, the way his face had not changed at all, as though this were merely a thing he did, and the world had no opinion that interested him.
And that was the man Elizabeth Bennet was going to marry on the eighteenth of July.
Darcy stood from the table so abruptly that the candle trembled into smoke. Four steps to the wall. He pressed his forehead against the cold stone and kept it there, because if he turned around, he was going to put his fist through something, and he was more likely to break his hand than the wall.
Sibley would have rights to her. Sibley’s hands on her — at the small of her back as he steered her into a room, at her wrist as he pulled the door to behind them, at her throat as she discovered too late what kind of man she had been given to.
Sibley closing the door and looking at her with that unaltered face, and she not knowing what the closed door meant because no one had told her.
She would look up at him with that slight tilt of her chin she had used in the shrubbery at Rosings, and she would speak — wit, and then reason, and then the appeal one makes to a man’s better nature on the assumption that he possesses one — and the words would arrive at him and slide off as words slid off stone.
Sibley would watch her spend every resource she had with the patient interest of a man watching a fly exhaust itself against glass. And then he would put his hands on her.
He would strip away her dignity in every measure a man could, and she would learn, in a single instant of pure animal knowledge, that her mind was not going to save her here, that her words were not going to save her, that her cries would not be heard by anyone who would listen.
She would understand what had been bought and what had been sold and where in that transaction she had stood.
Her mind would understand it before her body did.
Her body would understand it after — and that was the part Darcy could not — that was the part he could not —
He got himself to the basin in time. Barely. He braced both hands on the washstand and was sick into the porcelain as comprehensively as if he had been physically struck, and when there was nothing left in him, he stayed there with his forehead against the cold rim and shook.
She was his! She had been his since April — since before April, since Netherfield, since he had caught her reading by the window and not been able to turn away, since he had found himself in the room she was in every time he entered it without deciding to — and he had not told her, and had left her unclaimed and undefended in a world that had now handed her to Sibley.
His, because he loved her and had not said so, which was nothing in law and nothing in the eyes of her family and nothing to Sibley, and everything to Darcy, and the only thing he could draw upon now.
He had done this. He had done this without knowing he was doing it, which did not change what he had done. Elizabeth Bennet was going to stand in a room and give her hand to Thomas Sibley, and the chain from Darcy’s decision to that room ran clean.
He pushed off from the basin.
Could he do anything? Richard would have, if he could. But Richard had gone and drunk too much and wept about the whole thing to Hodges as if that were a solution.
Perhaps it had been, in a way. Hodges had, after all, passed on word to Darcy.
He had the title. He had the property. He had the Scottish solicitor and Scottish law about irregular marriage and a settlement that could remove Elizabeth from Sibley’s reach before the ink on that contract dried. He had it in his power to do this.
What he did not have was the right to do it honestly.
Because she could not know who she was marrying.
He was a dead man in English law, and anyone who knowingly assisted him was liable to the same charge, and he would not do that to her — would not do that to anyone, but Elizabeth Bennet least of all, who was exactly the kind of woman who would want to know everything, who would consider it her right to know everything, and who would be entirely correct.
He could not tell her. She would have to give her hand in the dark to a man whose face she had never seen, and trust that it was better than what she was leaving behind.
Could he ask her to do that?
Could he do less for her? He turned around. He walked back to the table. He picked up the letter and considered Sibley’s name, and put it down again.
She was going to marry Thomas Sibley on the eighteenth of July.
Twelve days, perhaps eleven. Angus could ride to Aberdeen tonight, before the light was gone.
The letter would be on the first southbound packet by morning, Webb in London within the week.
Webb would know what to do. There was time — barely — and the alternative was Sibley’s hand on Elizabeth’s body, his will breaking hers, and Darcy had lost quite enough.
She would not accept for her own sake. She was not going to Sibley for her own sake, and there was no offer Darcy could make to her person that Sibley had not already matched with coin. Whatever he put before her must do more for her mother and sisters than Sibley’s settlement could.
He ran the numbers in his head the way he had run ledger columns since he was nineteen.
The accounts Webb had been able to move were not what they had been before April.
The assets he had transferred north had been the workable part; what remained in London was frozen or under observation, and would not be enough, not for what this required.
Not without reaching into the Geneva reserve.
That was the account he was not to touch.
It was the account set apart against the night Webb’s express came with word that Sterling had turned the investigation his way, or a warrant had been drawn at Pemberley with his name on it.
It was the money that would carry him out of Britain before anyone knew to look, and keep him alive under some other name for whatever was left of his life.
He did the arithmetic again. He would touch it.
Webb would know how to dress the offer so the source could not be traced. Elizabeth would know what he was offering. She was the one he needed to convince.
He pulled the candle closer and began to write.