Chapter 7
The flies came first, as they always did, then the heat rose to drive them mad.
Bennet sat behind the Adjutant’s desk with his shirt undone at the throat, the quill steady.
The ledger before him was half-filled, the ink already fading.
He drew the line, dated it, and signed for two deaths before breakfast and one after.
Outside, the barrack yard baked white. Fever had taken another lieutenant the night before, and the surgeon said the Captain of Grenadiers would not last the week.
That left only the commander above him, and he seldom left his quarters.
The duty of command, such as it was, had fallen quietly into Bennet’s hands.
He had grown used to it—the heat, the paper, the slow arithmetic of loss. His life was a rhythm now: ink, tally, burial, repeat.
A shadow passed the doorway. “Mail from the packet, sir.”
The sergeant laid a canvas sack upon the desk, its drawstring dark with salt. Letters first: half for men already dead, one for the colonel, and a small bundle for the commissary. Then the papers—Gazette, Morning Chronicle, Naval Register. All months out of date, all still damp.
He opened them with more care than interest. Beneath the papers lay the small brown parcel he waited for each quarter: three books bound in blue calf, sent by an old acquaintance from London who had survived the island and owed him gratitude.
He unwrapped them. Cicero, Plutarch, and a thin volume of Cowper’s verse.
The garrison had come to call him the Don. He did not correct them; the name was an irony too justly earned.
He picked up another paper. A name caught his eye.
Major David Fitzwilliam, attached to the Madras Establishment, died of wounds received in service upon the Coast.
The notice was short, polite, the sort of death that could be printed without pain. He imagined his friend’s pressed uniform, his family proud, his name carried home without blemish.
Bennet folded the paper and leant back. Outside, the light struck the shutters and made bars across the floor. He remembered Cambridge—laughter echoing under stone, a carriage, and the sound of horses leaving in the night.
There was nothing he could write to Matlock House but condolence. To Pemberley, he could write something else.
He drew a sheet of foolscap towards him and dipped the quill. When he finished, he folded the page and sealed it with the garrison wax. Upon the outer leaf he wrote, in a careful hand:
Mr Edmund Darcy
of Pemberley,
in the County of Derbyshire
The flies had returned. One settled on the rim of the inkwell.
Bennet did not drive them away.
* * *
Bridgetown Garrison, Barbados, August 1785
The mail was late again. When it came, the bag was lighter than usual, as though the sea had taken its share. Bennet broke the wax and drew out a single folded sheet, addressed in an unfamiliar hand. The paper smelled of England.
It was brief, the diction correct to the point of offence:
Mr Edmund Darcy requests that no further correspondence be attempted. All matters arising from past acquaintance are considered closed. Mr Henry Wray, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, acts with full authority in the matter.
The formality was perfect; the world had done its duty. He folded it again and placed it upon the desk beside the dead ledger, where names faded faster than ink.
He turned the letter over. The hand was fine, London-trained. Wray—he had heard the name once, perhaps in Cambridge days, whispered among the sons of men with influence. The law was always tidy when it wished to be cruel.
He let the page fall open upon the desk, where a fly had already settled near the fold. Bennet brushed it aside without care. The gesture left a faint print of sweat on the paper.
He rose and crossed to the window. The sea burned white to the horizon, too bright to look upon. Somewhere across it lay England, folded neat as the letter itself—cold, sealed, and indifferent.
Outside, men drilled as the surf broke against the quay.
* * *
One month later, the packet came in under a sluggish wind.
The mailbag was small, the leather stiff with salt.
Only one letter bore his name, written in a hand he had not seen since Cambridge.
Bennet turned it over once before opening it.
The seal was cracked, the paper limp, as though the sea itself had already read it.
My dear Bennet,
I write only to acknowledge a debt of honour. I would not have you suppose that silence or delegation arose from indifference. There are obligations a man must own, even when he cannot name them aloud.
May Providence keep you.
ED
Meministi, amice
He traced the sweep of the hand that had once filled pages of Latin beside his own. No clerk would have written that last line, nor known the words. The Latin was proof enough. Darcy had written it, and meant him to know.
There was no date, no address—nothing by which a reply might follow. The restraint was absolute, the mercy implicit, yet it restored something the solicitor’s letter had tried to remove.
He looked about for a place worthy of it. The letter did not belong among ledgers or orders. His hand rested upon the narrow volume that had travelled with him through fever, rain, and loneliness—Cowper’s The Task. The spine was split; the edges darkened by years of heat and handling.
He set the volume on the shelf above his desk. Outside, the sun had dropped behind the harbour wall, leaving a pale light over the sea. The flies returned, patient as ever.
Bennet did not drive them away.