Chapter 32 #2
Darcy read standing, leaning, crouching—whatever position allowed him to keep moving.
The language resisted him at every turn.
Words shifted their meanings under his eye; spellings changed from page to page; references assumed knowledge no longer held by anyone living.
He translated, then checked himself. He cross-referenced, then doubted.
More than once, he snapped a book shut with annoyance, only to open it again a moment later, compelled by something he could not quite articulate.
It was in the Liber that he found it—not buried, not emphasised, but placed with the unthinking confidence of a scribe who assumed the phrase would speak for itself.
…as it was holden and keped in te tyme of Bedeverus.
Darcy gave a short, incredulous laugh.
The sound rang oddly in the room, too loud, too piercing, and Brutus rose, crossing to him and pressing his shoulder against Darcy’s knee.
“Preposterous!” Darcy said aloud, though whether to the book, the dog, or himself, he could not have said. “A marginal fancy. A monk’s flourish. I expect this entire book, then, must be suspect.”
He tossed the Liber aside and reached for the Harrowe volume with one hand and flipped pages with the other, still scoffing faintly, as though at a jest that had overreached itself.
How could he take any of this hogwash seriously?
Bedevere! It was a name for nursery rhymes and French novels.
A name poets reached for when they wished to lend gravity to a tale already grown thin with repetition. No serious scholar would ever—
Then he saw it again. And again.
Not the name… not exactly. But enough references to identify the myth. “The faithful knight.” “The last witness.” “The one entrusted with the king’s sword.”
Not mythic. Not reverent. Administrative, almost. As though it were not a story being invoked, but a point of reference. A dating. A fact assumed.
And the more pages he read, the more he suddenly saw.
The disbelieving smile did not fade. It simply stopped belonging to his face.
His heart missed a beat—no, more than that.
It halted, suspended in a space where breath did not seem required.
The room narrowed. The candle flames drew long and thin, stretching toward the ceiling like something straining to escape.
He became abruptly aware of his own pulse, loud in his ears, uneven, as though it had forgotten its proper rhythm.
Brutus gave a low sound, not quite a growl, not quite a whine, and Darcy reached down without looking, his fingers burying themselves in the dog’s ruff as though to anchor himself to something solid, something present.
The dream seemed to choke his lungs again—not its images, but its certainty. Fire. Her voice. The knowledge of what “binding” himself must have meant.
Darcy closed the ballads and heaved a sigh. “Well, Brutus? What now?”
Darcy did not knock so much as announce himself by the force of his fist.
The servant who answered took in Darcy’s coat, unfastened, his cravat imperfectly arranged, the rigid set of his shoulders, and hesitated. “Mr Darcy,” he greeted. “My lord is not yet—”
“I must see him,” Darcy replied, already past the threshold. “At once.”
The servant followed, protesting just enough to preserve the fiction of order, and ushered him into the small study off the eastern hall—the one Lord Matlock used before breakfast, when he wished to read without interruption.
Darcy did not sit. He stood where the light fell strongest, the book tucked beneath his arm like an accusation.
Lord Matlock arrived scarcely a minute later, coat half-fastened, hair still unpowdered, surprise plain on his face.
“Darcy?” He took in the scene—the book, the posture, the air that seemed to vibrate around his nephew. “This is… early.”
“I would call it rather behindhand.”
Matlock blinked, then recovered himself enough to gesture toward the sideboard. “You look as though you have not slept. Tea, at least. Or—” His mouth twitched, not quite a smile. “Something stronger might better suit the morning you appear to be having.”
“I will have nothing,” Darcy said, and brought the book up between them.
The spine protested as it always did, and Darcy turned straight to the page that had stopped his breath in the small hours. He set his finger beneath the line and held it there, as though anchoring it to the world.
“Did you know,” he demanded, “that this volume asserts—quite plainly, and I shall paraphrase a more modern tongue—that land was kept in the time of Bedevere?”
Matlock leaned closer despite himself. His brow furrowed, not in alarm, but in concentration. “Yes,” he said slowly. “What of it?”
Darcy’s hand tightened. “Then you knew it preserved this nonsense. These… ramblings. Arthurian relics dressed up as record. Fairy tales, nursery rhymes, the stuff of gothic nonsense! And yet it has been guarded, recopied, handed down for generations like some sacred trust, as though it contained fact rather than fancy!”
Matlock straightened, his expression shifting—not defensive, not dismissive, but genuinely puzzled. “You did not know?”
Darcy stepped closer, his teeth almost baring in frustration. “Know what?”
Matlock did not bristle at the challenge. He regarded Darcy for a long moment instead, as though weighing how much could be said plainly without losing him altogether.
“The Darcys,” he began, “were not always Darcys. That name comes later—Norman, as you observe. Land, titles, even surnames have a habit of reshaping themselves to survive conquest.” He moved toward the desk, stopped as if to sit, then gestured to the chair opposite for Darcy before taking his own seat.
Darcy frowned, then heaved a sigh and sank into the soft leather.
His uncle settled behind the desk and slowly drew out a mahogany cigar box and a pen knife. “Before that, the family was Brythonic. Border people, pushed north by the Romans. They were Keepers of crossings and margins—men who did not rule so much as guard where others passed through.”
Darcy’s mouth tightened. “You are describing function, not lineage.”
“They were the same thing, in those days,” Matlock replied mildly.
“When the Normans came, the family bent rather than broke. They intermarried, took a name that would endure in court and record. Mine did the same, as you recall. Fitzwilliam—son of William—was not chosen at random. It tethered the old blood to the new order. Mine chose respectability. Yours chose endurance.”
Darcy stared at him. “Endurance?”
“Yes.” Matlock did not look away. “The Darcys carried the line of Bedevere forward—quietly, imperfectly, but without once letting the male line break. The old Welsh name was shed. The land was retained. The duty endured, even as its meaning diluted.”
For a moment, Darcy could not speak. The room felt abruptly smaller, as though some private boundary had been crossed.
“Bedevere,” he said at last, the word sounding foreign in his mouth.
“You are telling me that my name—the history of my blood—rests on a knight who is half legend, half monastery fiction.”
Matlock’s mouth curved, not quite a smile. “You may call him what you like. He can hardly object now.”
“Bedevere?” Darcy repeated. “As in, King Arthur’s last knight, the Sir Bedevere of myth and legend? Oh, surely not, Uncle. I came here for information, not… not ghost stories concocted by some Frenchman with an overactive imagination!”
“Indeed, that is the man, but not the version you are thinking of.”
“What other version is there?” Darcy exploded. “King Arthur is a figment. A fairytale invented to sell pamphlets and novels. He never existed! And neither did his knights—that preposterous table—a sword anchored in a stone! It is utter fiction!”
“Some of it. It might truly be argued that Arthur, himself, did not exist as a single man. But Bedevere was recorded before he was romanticised. Witness before he was hero.”
Darcy pinched his brow and hissed. His uncle, a respected peer of the realm and a Member of Parliament, believed this?
Matlock, however, was carefully trimming a cigar, his eyes on his task as if it might soften his words.
“What you know, Darcy—what most people know—comes to us second-hand. Third or fourth-hand, in some cases. Yes, through French verse, through folk embellishment, through centuries of retelling that favoured romance—in the old poetic sense—over fidelity.”
“You could not be more correct on that last score,” Darcy snorted.
His uncle set aside the first cigar and began on a second, never even looking up at Darcy.
“Bedevere was not invented by the poets, only borrowed. He appears in the older Welsh accounts as Bedwyr. Said to be one of Arthur’s first companions—I rather fancy he was the war chief of a minor tribe—and believed also to be one of the last. A man of… er, endurance, if you will. Not fancy.”
Darcy gave a short, incredulous breath. “And you expect me to accept that this—” he tapped the book sharply “—is a continuous account across nearly fourteen centuries? That anyone could trace such a thing with confidence?”
Matlock’s expression softened into something almost amused. “My dear boy,” he said, lowering his knife, “my own ancestors would take some umbrage at that objection. They maintained—quite cheerfully—that they were descended from a fellow named Peredur fab Efrawg.”
Darcy narrowed his eyes quizzically.
Matlock chuckled. “The French amended his character somewhat and named him Galahad. Fine name, rolls romantically off the tongue. But I suspect the real man was much as he was portrayed in the Mabinogion—less perfect, more human. The kind of man who learns too late and pays for it. And my family believed this story so thoroughly that they ordered their lives around the notion.”
Darcy’s mouth fell open. “If I thought you were going to keep plying me with nonsense, I would never have come.”
Matlock studied him a moment longer, then set the cigar he had been trimming between his fingers and held it out. “You look as though you could use this.”
Darcy did not take it. “No.”
“As you like.” Matlock struck a light, drew once, and rose from his chair.
He began to pace—not restlessly, but with the long, measured steps of a man accustomed to thinking on his feet.
Smoke followed him in a thin, deliberate line.
“You asked why I believe it. The short answer is that belief was never optional. It was taught as fact long before it was understood as theory.”
Darcy leaned forward in his chair. “Did my father believe it?”
Matlock stopped. The pause was brief, but it told. “He believed enough,” he said at last. “More than he wished to admit. Less than his mother had hoped.”
Darcy absorbed that in silence.
Matlock resumed his pacing. “Tell me, did you know that the original un-looked-for arrangement between the families was not you and Anne de Bourgh?”
Darcy looked up sharply. “No.” He blinked. “Then who?”
“My sister Catherine was meant for George Darcy. Arrangements made before they ever met.”
He sat very still. His father and Lady Catherine? Why, they would have strangled each other on their wedding night! “I did not know that. But I do not see what—”
“It matters,” Matlock cut in gently, “because you see, our two families never quite forgot each other.” He took another slow draw on the cigar. “For better than a thousand years, they circled. No alliances. No shared estates. But neither line was allowed to run unchecked.”
Darcy frowned. “Unchecked?”
“The old belief,” Matlock said, “was that one house alone could not bear what had been broken.” He stopped pacing and looked directly at Darcy.
“Your line carried obligation without instruction. Ours preserved memory without authority. Over generations, each dimmed, diluted—yours into duty without understanding, ours into stories without teeth.”
He tapped his cigar before continuing.
“When blood ran only one way for too long, the charge decayed. Not vanished—more like a pistol misfiring.” A faint smile.
“Lands that prospered and then did not. Ill ladies—like Anne… both Annes, I daresay. Failed heirs—my own son Randall, my heir, appears unable to… Well.” He shook his head. “You see the troubles.”
Darcy’s throat tightened. “And the answer?”
“Reunion,” Matlock said simply. “Not for sentiment, but correction. The belief was that what had once been divided—action and witness, vow and memory—must at last coincide in living people, or the thing itself would continue to degrade.”
He gestured vaguely, as if at centuries rather than furniture. “Your ancestors acted. Mine remembered. Neither was sufficient alone. And both families understood—long before any of us—that waiting any longer would leave nothing left to restore.”
Darcy’s fingers tightened on the arm of the chair. “I still do not…” He cut himself off. At this point, what else could he do but listen? “Forgive me. Go on.”
Matlock withdrew his cigar to puff a wisp of smoke and admire it.
“When it was discovered that both houses had children of marriageable age at the same time, there was talk. Serious talk. Enough that expectations began to form again—the eldest Darcy son for the eldest Fitzwilliam daughter. There was even a settlement drawn up.”
“And yet,” Darcy said, his voice rasping now, “my father did not marry her.”
Matlock’s mouth curved, faintly. “No. Because George Darcy fell boots over waistcoat for my sister Anne the moment he set eyes on her. And once that happened, there was never any question of altering the course.”
He let the smoke drift a moment between them before adding, quietly, “The union of the families still took place, but love has a way of complicating arrangements made in the name of destiny.”