Chapter 27 #2
Darcy paced, staring at the rug. “I did a little investigating, and the local farmers are boasting the best year they have ever had. Cabbages the size of Brutus. Wheat, barley, and potatoes such as they have never seen. Bingley’s garden still had mint overgrowing the lanes in October.
Even the rose hedges are still in bloom! ”
Matlock’s first response was immediate and instinctive. He turned partway toward the bell-pull, already calculating the distances, the contracts, the speed with which such an opportunity might be secured.
“If there is grain to be had—” He stopped himself and turned. “And… you are quite sure? This is not mere fancy, Darcy. Not some single farm with a particular sort of miracle soil or a fool with a fantastical bent to his storytelling?”
“I made extensive inquiries, sir.”
Matlock considered this, his gaze intent, his thoughts evidently running ahead to questions of supply, transport, and discretion. “If there is indeed provision there, it ought to be secured,” he said. “Quietly, if possible.”
His hand moved again toward the bell, and again he checked himself. “Hertfordshire?” he repeated slowly, as though tasting the name for some quality not at once apparent.
Matlock turned then to face him fully, and in his expression there was a twisting of his countenance—subtle, but unmistakable—from the calculation of stores and routes to something more inward, more wary, as though an older map had been laid atop the newer one in his mind.
“You did not come here merely to speak of grain,” he said.
Darcy met his gaze without evasion. “No.”
Matlock swallowed. “I see.”
“I want to see it,” Darcy said. “Urgently. I know you have it.”
Matlock did not ask what he meant. He paled, drew a shaken breath, and heaved it out slowly. “I suppose there is no more putting it off.”
Then, with a grim set to his shoulders, he crossed to a cabinet set into the panelling. The key came from his pocket, not his watch-chain, which told Darcy more than any explanation might have done.
When he returned, the book lay cradled in both his hands, wrapped in a length of linen that had long since lost any pretence of cleanliness.
The cloth was worn thin at the folds and darkened where fingers had handled it again and again, as though the act of uncovering it had become habitual long before it became reluctant.
Beneath it, the volume itself was plainly bound in cloth, faded to a colour that might once have been blue or green, the spine rubbed soft by age and use. It looked less like a relic than a thing that had survived by being consulted and put away, consulted again, and never fully set aside.
Darcy’s eyes went to the cover at once, trying to make out the faded title.
“The Liber de Terris et Finibus. ‘The Book of Lands and Boundaries.’ Said to have been first written in the eleventh or twelfth century. Who knows how old this copy is, but it was never intended for hurried reading,” Matlock said, offering it.
“It is not a narrative. It offers no patience to those who seek one.”
Darcy accepted the volume and turned it in his hands, feeling the give of the cloth beneath his fingers, the unevenness of the boards, the way the spine resisted being flattened, as though it had learned to close itself against too much attention.
“You will find what you are looking for before the middle,” Matlock said, his thumb resting against the linen where the page beneath lay marked by a faint crease.
“There is a place where the hand changes. The Reverend Harrowe is said to have spent so much time with that page open that the book would never close properly again.”
Darcy glanced up. “Harrowe himself?”
Matlock lifted a shoulder. “Well! It strains credulity a bit. This might have been the very copy he referenced. Although… well. Less said on that for now, the better, I suppose.”
Darcy lowered his gaze again. “I should like to keep it,” he said quietly. It was not a request for which he would accept refusal. “For a short time.”
Matlock did not answer at once. He moved away instead, crossing to the window and standing there with his back to the room, his hands clasped behind him as though the posture might steady something internal.
“I wondered how long it would take you to say that.”
Darcy looked up. “You object?”
“No.” Matlock’s voice roughened a little on the word. “I would object only if you skimmed it, or if you believed it would explain itself readily. The book is not dangerous because of what it contains.” He paused. “It is dangerous because of what it refuses to do for the reader.”
Darcy closed the cover, careful, deliberate. “Then I will take the time it demands.”
Matlock turned back at last. There was something like resignation in his look, tempered by a grim affection. “If you make sense of it,” he said slowly, “if you truly understand what is being described and not merely what is written, then you are a better man than I ever managed to be.”
Darcy frowned. “You have read it.”
Matlock gave a short, humourless breath.
“More than once. Enough to know where I lost my footing.” His gaze rested on the book in Darcy’s hands.
“Read it where there is quiet, and no one to interrupt you with sensible objections. But understand this, Fitzwilliam—what you find there will not ask whether you wish to know it.”
Darcy inclined his head. “I have not found that knowledge ever does.”
Darcy bent again over the table, the lamp drawn closer, its flame trimmed down to a steady core of light.
He had not intended to be up so late. He had not intended to pull half the shelves bare.
And yet the study now bore the marks of a mind unravelling, writhing with truths it did not like, and unwilling to be contradicted: books stacked open on the floor, others laid face-down across chairs, slips of paper marking places he meant to return to and could not afford to lose.
He found the crease in the Liber without difficulty.
The book opened to it as though taught. The page itself bore the history of that habit—worn thin at the fold, darkened where fingers had lingered, the margin softened beyond what time alone might have accomplished.
The hand here was not uniform. The script shifted from careful to compressed, from authority to urgency, as though the act of recording had become more difficult the longer it continued.
The text had changed its purpose. Earlier pages marked and referenced. This one concerned itself instead with relation.
From te torn hegge set afore te ford,
te saide erthe is holden in perpetuite,
neyther demesne nor waste,
and schal not be enclosed by hegge nor banke,
ne taken into severaltie by any lord as it was holden in elder tyme,
and so shall remayne.
Darcy read it again, silently this time, his finger tracing the line as though the meaning might yield to pressure.
Held in perpetuity. The phrase appeared nowhere in his father’s legal volumes, nor in any charter he had ever studied.
It belonged neither to conveyance nor inheritance.
It assumed obligation without naming authority, duty without benefit.
He reached for another book, then another.
A collection of medieval annals copied by monks whose names were long since reduced to initials.
A slim volume of regional ballads—not Harrowe’s—his mother had once given him, amused at his fondness for what she had once called harmless antiquities.
He laid them open beside the Liber and began to compare.
The words were not the same. The shapes of the letters differed. And yet…
Here, in a marginal gloss half-erased by time, the same hedge. There, in a verse dismissed as metaphor, a crossing named only by what stood before it. In one ballad, a keeper mentioned only once and never again, not praised, not mourned, simply… absent.
Darcy’s breath slowed. The room had gone very quiet, not with peace, but with concentration so complete it excluded everything else.
These were not stories elaborating upon one another.
They were records circling the same absence from different angles, each careful not to say too much, each assuming knowledge that had once been common and was now lost.
He turned back to the Liber and read on. The later hand crowded the margin, tighter, darker, impatient with restraint. The tone altered again—not to explanation, but to warning.
Darcy leaned closer, the lamplight catching the uneven edge of the page. What troubled him was not what the text claimed.
It was how many different voices, across centuries, had agreed on what could not be owned—and what could not be abandoned—without ever daring to say why.