60. LX
LX
Not Quite Dead
He was propped up on a bank of pillows, weak as a newborn lamb and perfectly, absurdly content. He lay and looked at the two women in his room and thought that a man could do a great deal worse than to be half dead in such company.
Georgiana sat in the window with a book, reading to him — some sort of travel account that had, more than once, made him roll his eyes and Elizabeth sputter aloud with cries of “Falsehoods, I say! I never saw a venta with a glass mirror and a tub for a bath, and you cannot persuade me that the carter did not raise his price at least twice on the journey.” It had become more of a comedic endeavour than any sort of improving account, and twice, Georgiana had been obliged to stop reading and dry her eyes from laughing at Elizabeth’s outbursts.
Elizabeth had her chair drawn close to the bed, holding his hand in both of hers.
Every little while, she would lift her free hand and lay it against his forehead, or smooth the hair back from it, or trace some idle tender line along his knuckles — small, unthinking touches that she made while listening to Georgiana, as though her hands could not be near him and be still.
He would have liked to hold her, to lean his weight against her and rest his cheek on the top of her head, but that was too great an intimacy with his sister in the room.
She had been in the bed, these last nights, when the room was dark and empty of everyone but the two of them.
But by day, she kept to the chair so that the new Mrs Darcy might not scandalise the house.
The physician had come that morning, and gone, and left behind him the first unqualified good word Darcy had had of anyone.
He would do. The gentleman would certainly come through this bout; the bark had taken hold, the fits were weakening, and barring some fresh misfortune, Mr Darcy would mend.
He would want careful nursing and a long convalescence, which Darcy was content to accept.
He had, he informed Samuels gravely, a nurse who would not countenance him dying, as she had already cheated him out of Last Rites on two occasions and had every intention of making him repay her for the trouble.
He was watching Elizabeth's face — she had that odd little downward tilt of concentration she wore when she was listening and thinking at once, and he had spent a good part of the last several days simply looking at it, savouring her — when there was a knock.
Georgiana stopped reading and looked up. “Come,” Darcy summoned.
Jeffries put his head in. “Excuse me, sir. There is a gentleman below — one of your solicitors, sir, Mr Yates from Yates and Corbin. He is asking most particularly to see you. I would have sent him off, sir, you not being fit for business, only he was uncommonly insistent, and he said…” Jeffries hesitated.
“Yes?”
“He said it was a matter touching Pemberley, sir. Said it would not keep.”
Darcy shut his eyes briefly.
Of course. No, it would not keep. Michaelmas was — he had lost count of the days, but it was close, it was very close.
It was already Monday, and this would be the formal business of the end of it, the papers a man signed to hand his family's seat over to strangers, the decent legal undressing of three hundred years.
Yates would have brought it himself out of long service and old kindness, to spare him a stranger's face at such a moment.
Darcy had known it was coming, and had been too ill to grieve it properly.
He supposed he must rouse himself now and sign whatever wanted signing and be done.
“Send him up,” he said. “Let us have it over.”
Elizabeth's hand tightened on his. “You are not strong enough for business, Fitzwilliam.”
“It is not the sort of business that wants strength. Only a pen, and a steady enough hand to make my mark, and I can manage that much lying down.” He gave her the ghost of a smile.
“It is only the last of it, Elizabeth. The formalities. Let me sign the thing and then we need never speak of it again.”
Mr Yates came up. He had been Darcy's man of business these five years and his father’s for thirteen before that.
Surely, he had been given to understand Darcy’s condition before he came up, but he still checked himself at the threshold at the sight of the invalid in the bed and the two ladies.
“Mr Darcy. Forgive me, I would not have imposed on you while you are still unwell, but the matter is pressing, sir, and I judged you would wish to know of it at once, however you were placed.”
“You judged rightly, I am sure. Sit, Yates. You know my sister. And this is…” He paused, and felt something in him take a profound pleasure in the saying of it.
“This is my wife, Elizabeth Darcy. I had intended to arrange some business with you regarding her settlement when I am recovered… and when the standing of my affairs has been clarified sufficiently to make such arrangements.”
Yates had the goodness not to look terribly surprised. “My congratulations sir, and to you, Mrs Darcy. May I wish you every happiness.”
Elizabeth rose and curtseyed to him. “You are very welcome, sir. Please, take this chair so Mr Darcy can see the papers you have brought.”
Darcy smiled at her as she retreated a short distance to sit beside Georgiana at the window. “You may speak freely before her; there is nothing of my affairs she does not know, and in some particulars, a good deal better than I do. So, what business have we today?”
Yates bowed to Elizabeth and sat, then opened his leather case to draw out a document. Darcy composed himself to hear the terms of his own dispossession.
“It concerns the Spanish claim, sir,” Yates said as he presented it.
Darcy straightened. “Forgive me… what?”
“You will recall,” the solicitor went on, “that the certified acknowledgment you obtained was forwarded, some two months since, through the proper channels, and lodged with the Foreign Office.
I must tell you, sir, that it has done rather more than lie there.
It appears the documentation you sent home was of a completeness and an authenticity that the office had not before seen in a case of this kind — most of the war claims being got up from fragments and hearsay, and yours being drawn certified from the junta's own record. And the office, having at last a case it could stand upon, chose to press it — to make of it a kind of trial, sir, to see how far the Spanish treasury might be moved on the whole question of the debts owed to British subjects. Your claim was pushed, Mr Darcy. Pushed hard, at a high level.” He drew a breath.
“And Spain has answered. There is an offer.”
Georgiana’s book slipped to the floor. Elizabeth’s fingertips were over her mouth, her quick, dark eyes wide, even as she bent to retrieve Georgiana’s book.
“Read it,” Darcy said.
Yates read it. It was couched in the heavy language of such things, and Darcy, befuddled and slow, caught perhaps half of it as it went by — the restored crown acknowledged the debt, that much he grasped; and would undertake to discharge it; and there was a great deal about installments and terms and over a period of years, and something about a portion in coin and a further portion, a larger portion, rendered not in money but in…
He lost it here, his tired mind sliding off the legal thickets.
Some grant, some concession, something to do with the Spanish wool trade, flocks or export rights or a trading privilege, he could not fix on which.
He let his head go back against the pillows.
It was, he thought dully, another insult dressed as a settlement.
They would not pay him. They acknowledged owing him a hundred thousand pounds and they proposed to dole it back to him in dribs over God knew how many years, with the bulk of it not even in money but in wool — in sheep, in Spanish sheep, as though he were a grazier and not a gentleman with a mortgage falling due in a matter of days.
It would not answer. It could not possibly answer.
The bank wanted its principal now, at Michaelmas, in sterling, and this offered him a trickle of coin spread over years and a heap of foreign fleece.
It was nothing. It was worse than nothing, because for one moment, it had looked like hope.
“I see,” he said. “Thank you, Yates. It is a handsome gesture on their part, I am sure, but I do not see how it can be of any use to me. The bank will not wait years to be paid in Spanish wool. Pemberley falls at Michaelmas regardless, and then what use have I for a whole flock of Spanish sheep when I no longer have an estate to graze them? Unless there is more, you may as well —”
“Wait.”
Elizabeth had arisen to stand beside Yates’s chair, and there was a look on her face that he knew — that quick, sharpened look she got when she had seen something the rest of the room had walked past.
“Read the part about the wool again,” she said. “Slowly. The exact terms of it — not wool, the particulars. Is it raw fleece they offer, or the flocks themselves, or a right to trade? Say it exactly as it is written.”
Yates found the place and read it again, slowly. The thick of it was still more than he could make sense of, but Elizabeth’s face was a thing he knew better than his own heart, so he watched her. Saw the sharpening become something almost fierce, saw her draw a breath.
“Fitzwilliam.” She turned to him, and her eyes were bright.
“It is not sheep. Do not think of it as sheep. I know you are fatigued just now, so let it be simplified. Spain is rich in merino — the finest wool in the world, the only wool of its kind, and for three hundred years, they kept the flocks under lock and would let none of the breed out of the country on pain of death. Every weaver in England has scrambled and impoverished themselves for want of it. And the war has shattered that. The flocks are scattered, plundered, driven off, the monopoly broken — and here is the Spanish crown, cash-poor and desperate, offering you not a bale of fleece but a share in that trade to help them re-establish their exports. A concession, a standing right in the very commodity that every mill in the Derwent valley — your valley, Fitzwilliam, the valley Marchwood wanted so badly he would buy a man to get at it — the very thing they are all starving for.” She had his arm now, gripping it.
“This is not an insulting trickle of coin and a pile of wool. This is a position in the most valuable trade in England at the exact moment it has been thrown wide open. Handled rightly, this is not a hundred thousand pounds paid slowly. This may be worth a very great deal more than a hundred thousand pounds. And it is a thing, Fitzwilliam. It is an asset. It is real, and it is granted by a government under its own hand, and it is exactly, precisely the sort of security a bank can be made to see and lend against.”
Darcy stared at her.
The room had tilted, but not with the fever this time — with the slow, vertiginous turn of a thing he had written off as dead sitting up to breathe.
He was too dazed to follow all of it, but he did not need to follow all of it; he needed only to hear the certainty in her voice, and know — as he knew few things in this world — that when Elizabeth looked like that, and spoke like that, about a matter of trade and money, she was right.
She had been right about her uncle's case on a ship when Harcourt scorned her.
She had been right about a dozen hard things across a hard country. She was right now.
“You are telling me,” he said slowly, “that the offer I have just written off as an insult is in fact —”
“Is in fact the thing that might save Pemberley,” she said.
“If we move quickly enough. If someone takes this offer, and the certified claim behind it, to the bank before Friday, and lays it down in front of those men to show them that Spain has now put its own hand to a promise to pay — in coin and in a wool concession that any man in the trade will value — then it is no longer a hope, Fitzwilliam. It is a bankable thing. They can lend against it. They can refinance the mortgage on the strength of it. Pemberley need not fall at all.” She turned to Yates.
“Am I wrong? Tell me if I am wrong. Is this not exactly the sort of security they would accept?”
Yates, who had been watching her with an expression of increasing and undisguised astonishment, cleared his throat.
“You are not wrong, madam,” he said. “You are — if I may say so — remarkably not wrong. It had been my own thought, in coming here, that the offer might serve to satisfy the bank, though I confess I had not seen the whole of the wool matter so… so comprehensively. Yes. Presented properly, with the claim, before the loan is called, it might very well answer. There is time, but not much. It is already the twenty-sixth, sir.”
“Then it must be presented,” Elizabeth said. “At once. Tomorrow, so they have two more full days to verify it and process the paperwork.”
“I cannot go,” Darcy said. The bitterness of it rose in him — that here, at last, was the thing that could save his family's seat, and he could not so much as stand. “Look at me. I cannot cross the room, let alone treat with bankers. Yates, you must —”
“Yates will draw the papers,” Elizabeth said, “and Yates will come with me.
But I will present it, Fitzwilliam. I will stand in that bank and make those men see good sense and the hope of increase for themselves, if I have to keep them there ‘til nightfall on Friday.” She took his hand again, her grip hard, and her eyes did not leave his.
“But I have not the right, the law does not allow it. You must sign something that empowers me to act for you, to treat with the bank in your name. Then I may do it, and do it properly, and no man there can turn me away. Yates can draw that, too. Can you not, Mr Yates?”
“I can, madam. Within the hour.”
Darcy looked at his wife, and he smiled. She could be wrong, about all of it. Very likely she was not. But even if she were, even if it all came to naught, he would never, for one moment, gainsay her. He only pitied the bankers who would have to negotiate with her.
“Give me the pen.”