XLVIII #2
He knew her mind. He had watched it work for three months, across ledgers and border-posts and the ruin of a moneychanger's shop; he knew the sound of it, almost — the small, dreadful click of pieces meeting.
He could hear her setting them beside the one piece she already held and had never understood — the piece he had never fully explained, because it would have meant explaining a great deal he had hoped to leave in England where it belonged.
At last, she turned a smile on Bramwell. “Marchwood,” she said. “I shall remember it. Thank you, Lord Bramwell. You have told me more of use in a quarter hour than I have learned in three months, and set my mind at ease about my uncle besides.”
“I am glad of it.” Bramwell touched his hat. “The papers being in order is the primary factor, Mrs Darcy. Everything else is only speed.” After that, he made his unhurried way down the deck to rejoin his party, with the best will in the world and no notion whatever of what he had done.
They did not speak on the way down. Elizabeth went ahead of him through the low door and stood in the middle of the cabin with her arms crossed over herself. She waited while he came in and shut it behind them before she turned to face him.
“I think I worked it out on the way down,” she said. “You had better hear me out, and tell me where I have gone wrong, because I would very much rather be wrong.”
“Elizabeth —”
“You admitted, in Vitoria, that you had meant to marry Marchwood's daughter for his influence with the bank.
His name behind you, the paper rolled over, the whole thing made salvageable by an earl's countenance. I understood that. It is an ugly way to save an estate, but it is a common one, and I did not think the worse of you for it.”
“You did not? Then you had me fooled. At the time, it sounded very much like an indictment.”
“Because I was drunk and you were…” She held up a hand towards his person. “You were beyond drunk, I think.”
He stepped closer, almost touching her hand. “So were you.”
“That is not the point! I have just spent a quarter of an hour listening to Viscount Bramwell, who does not gossip and does not exaggerate and reports to the man himself, describe an earl who accumulates wealth and control like a marchant, who means to weave his own wool and be free of Spain, who looks always — his word, not mine — to his own advantage, and is very good at it.”
“As any clever man does, Elizabeth. Would you expect him not to?”
She shook her head. “But that is not a man who lends his name to save a drowning gentleman out of Christian feeling. That is not even a man who does it to see his daughter a mistress of Pemberley. Men like that do not rescue people, Fitzwilliam. They acquire them. So, I find I have a question I never thought to ask, because I was too busy being ashamed of the answer I assumed.”
His mouth hardened, and he drew back. “Ask it. I already know what it is.”
“Very well, then. What did Marchwood want from you? Because he wanted something. I have only just understood that he must have.”
He was quiet for long enough that she thought had her answer before he gave it.
“The water,” he said.
Her brows rose. “I thought you would say ‘the land.’”
“That too. Pemberley sits at the head of the Derwent valley. The whole of the textile country is downstream of me — the mills, the works, the fortunes being made in cotton and wool from Cromford to Belper and beyond. And all of it runs on water. Weirs, and mill-races, and the land that governs where the river may be dammed and drawn. I own a great deal of that land. The land that decides whether the man below me has water to turn his wheel or has not.”
Elizabeth put a hand to her mouth. “That is… considerably more, even, than I had supposed.”
He turned away from her to pour a glass of wine from a bottle he had got on board.
He was half a minute in staring at it, not even drinking, before he said more.
“A man who owns the river above your mill owns your mill.
Marchwood has wanted the Derwent water since before I ever knew his name, and he could not have it, because I would not sell — a gentleman does not put mills in his own valley, and I did not choose to be the man who turned Pemberley's water into someone's account-book.”
“So he could not buy it,” Elizabeth said slowly. The cabin tilted under her, or the ship did. “He could only…”
“Marry it.” He finally tipped back his glass. “Yes.”
She crossed her arms and huffed in amazement.
“All this time,” she murmured, “I thought it had been your notion. Your scheme, your reaching — the ruined man grasping after the earl's money and the earl’s influence. I let myself think it was that. It was easier, somehow, to think of you as a man who would sell himself to an heiress because he was, at the end of the day, the one still commanding his future and making his own choices. I had not thought of you as…” She stopped.
“It was not your notion at all, was it? You did not go to him.”
“No.” He was still turned away from her, and he took another drink. “He came to me. Last winter.”
Elizabeth moved to sit on the berth. “And? How did he present his proposal?”
“It was nothing of the kind at first. He sought an introduction. Called it a wish to know me better — I was a Derbyshire man of some standing, he said, and we had interests in common, and he thought it a great pity we were not better acquainted. I was not such a fool that I did not know what it meant. A man does not trouble to cultivate a gentleman two ranks below him. I knew his position at the Foreign Office. I had been trying to learn everything I could about matters with my father’s loan, long before the principal came due and the state of the war made the prospect of recovery possible.
My letters had certainly crossed his desk, so I knew he would have a comprehensive understanding of how my affairs stood.
And I knew he wanted something of me, but the first order of business seemed to be to throw his daughter in my way.
At first, I confess, my thoughts were far from complimentary to the lady. ”
“Dare I ask?”
“I assumed she was in need of an expedient marriage. That, however, was not the case. By my third meeting with Lady Honoria, I had begun to wonder what the catch was to be, for there seemed nothing objectionable in herself. So, after dinner one evening, Marchwood sat me down with port and cigars when the ladies had retired. He wanted me to understand that a connexion there would be… accommodated. That his influence with certain houses in the City might be made available to a son-in-law, where it would never be extended to a mere ‘Mr Darcy’.”
He set down the empty glass. “He offered me the rope to climb out of the well, Elizabeth. And the price of the rope was the valley. The water was the thing being bought, and his daughter and his banking friends were the coin he meant to pay for it, and I…”
He turned to look at her at last. “I did not refuse him. I did not accept him, either. I told myself I was considering it, weighing it soberly, and the truth is I had not the courage to say no to the only door that had opened. I let it stand unanswered. Went to Spain instead and found you, and there was an end of my sober considering.”
She had been braced for the wrong thing entirely, and she had come down that companion ladder prepared to be a little wounded.
To have to hear the details of his affair with Lady Honoria Vane — that he had intentionally cultivated some warm understanding with the family and nurtured feelings in and for this heiress not only because of Marchwood’s wealth.
Other earls had daughters and wealth, and a man might find a woman who genuinely suited his fancy, if he had the luxury of choice.
That was what she had been prepared to hear — that he had looked round and decided he could provoke feelings in himself sufficient to court a lady for her dowry and her father’s position.
But the truth was worse and it was also, unbearably, not his fault.
He had not sold himself. He had been shopped for.
A rich, hungry man had looked at Fitzwilliam Darcy going under and seen not a person but a valley with a wheel-turning river in it, and had sent his daughter in as the bailiff.
And Darcy — proud, upright, drowning Darcy — had been too far down to slam the door, and had left it open behind him when he sailed.
And he had come home with her instead. Who had shut that door for good simply by existing.
“What sort of man is this Marchwood? Not the office, not the his business concerns. What of his character?”
Darcy’s face flickered in thought before he replied. He was trying to be fair, which was, somehow, the most frightening thing he could have done. If he had called Marchwood a villain, she could have felt some triumph over the man. He did not.
“He is not a cruel man, that I know of,” he said carefully.
“Nor a dishonest one. I never heard that he cheated anyone or broke his word. He is only… I suppose Bramwell said it best. A man who looks to his own interests. In every particular. He does nothing that does not serve him and he leaves nothing on the table that might be got, and he does it all quite calmly, without heat, as another man says good morning. I do not think he would trouble to hate me. I do not think I signify enough to him to be hated.” A grim ghost of something crossed his face.
“I think he would simply reckon what I had cost him, and set it against what might yet be recovered, and act accordingly. That is all.”
Elizabeth's clever, tired, frightened mind took that mild and reasonable sentence and built the rest of it herself in the space of three breaths.