Chapter 33 #2
“Oh! I wish he would just sell it all and they would go away and leave us!” Mama cried. “That stubborn man. He had better let Colonel Forster handle it, that is what I say.”
“Mama, please,” Jane said, more firmly now, as Mama began to gasp in earnest. She pressed a cloth gently over her mother’s eyes and held the salts beneath her nose. “Breathe slowly. Slowly.”
Lydia, who had been pacing the length of the narrow room, stopped short at the sound of heightened shouting from without. She spun to look at her sisters. “What if they set the house on fire?”
No one spoke at first.
Jane glared, making a fierce expression. “Lydia!” she mouthed silently.
“They won’t,” Kitty said quickly, though her voice wavered. “The militia are here now. Right, Jane?”
“Yes,” Jane said, seizing on it. “Colonel Forster will keep matters from becoming violent.”
The reassurance had scarcely left Jane’s mouth when a sharp crack split the air outside. Not shouting. Not the crash of wood or stone.
A rifle report—clean, sudden, unmistakable.
Elizabeth felt it first as a jolt behind her eyes, a flare of white that made the room lurch. Kitty gave a small, strangled sound. Lydia’s hand flew to her mouth, her eyes bright and terrified all at once.
“What was that?” Kitty whispered.
Another voice rose outside—angrier now, too close—and then several at once, overlapping, indistinct.
Mama tore the cloth from her face. “That was a gun,” she cried. “I heard it! Oh—oh—he is dead. I know it. I know it! Mr Bennet is dead in the yard, and no one will tell me—”
“Mama,” Jane said urgently. “I am sure Papa is—”
But the words came too late. Mama’s eyes rolled back. She slumped sideways with a soft, boneless sound, the salts scattering across the floor.
Jane caught her just in time. “Mama? Mama!”
Kitty dropped to her knees, fumbling for the bottle. Lydia stood frozen, staring at the door as though she expected it to burst inward at any moment.
Elizabeth tried to rise.
The floor tilted sharply, and she caught herself against the crate, breath coming shallow and fast. The sound of the shot still rang in her ears, louder now in memory than it had been in truth.
Outside, someone shouted an order. Another voice answered—hoarse, urgent. No one said whether the shot had been meant as a warning or a threat. No one said whether it had found its mark.
Elizabeth pressed her hand flat to the wood beside her and waited, heart hammering, for the next sound to tell them which it had been.
The tray had been pushed aside more than once.
A cup stood perilously close to the book’s corner, its tea gone dark and still, a skin drawn across the surface.
A plate bore the remains of something once warm—now untouched, forgotten—its edge nudged back to make room for another volume opened and closed again.
Matlock shifted it without comment, sliding porcelain and bread aside with the back of his hand until the table cleared just enough to bear the weight of the book between them. He turned another page. The sound was dry—the careful rasp of vellum lifted and set down again.
Darcy leaned forward despite himself, one hand braced against the table’s edge as though the surface might tilt if he did not hold it steady.
“This one is a later transcript,” Matlock said, indicating the cramped hand crowding the margin. “Copied in the twelfth century from something older. You can see where the scribe was in doubt about the spelling—here, and here. He did not understand the place-names, but he preserved them anyway.”
Darcy bent closer. The ink varied from line to line, dark where the quill had bitten too deeply, faint where the hand had faltered. Corrections pressed in from the margins, some careful, some impatient. This was not invention. It was labour.
“And this?” Darcy asked, tapping a different leaf. “The hand is not the same.”
“No,” Matlock agreed. “That is later still. Fifteenth century, perhaps. Copied from a fragment that had already lost its beginning.”
Darcy turned the page himself this time, slower.
He traced the line with his eye, then read it again, the words refusing to settle into sense.
Names repeated. Places shifted. The same phrase surfaced more than once, always slightly altered, as though no two men had agreed how it ought to be rendered.
“You see,” Matlock said, “why it was never a single book. No one trusted one account alone.”
Darcy sat back. “I see a great deal of effort,” he said. “I see patience. But I also see a fondness for embroidery. One man copies another, and another after him, each persuaded he is clarifying what came before. That is not history. It is accumulation.”
Matlock looked up. “And yet accumulation is often all history has to offer.”
Darcy huffed a short breath. “You cannot expect me to believe that this”—he gestured at the spread of pages between them— “was preserved for its narrative qualities alone.”
“I never claimed as much. Quite the opposite.”
“But it does not say why, or what we are expected to do about it. Without a reason, it is nothing more than entertainment. Worse, it has become a… a vanity! Nay, a vice, for some. If I, as you insist, am the… whatever you call it, the supposed heir of this… nonsense, then I must have something sensible upon which to act!”
“Sensible!” Matlock snorted. “You act as if you are waiting for Bedevere himself to step from the pages and take you by the hand.”
“That would be my preference, yes. Nothing in here says what was done,” Darcy said. “It only implies some sort of failure. Who or what failed?”
Matlock glanced at him. “That question,” he said, “has not been answered to anyone’s satisfaction in some centuries.”
“Then what are we meant to make of it? That a family—two families—have spent fourteen hundred years copying riddles and calling it duty?”
Matlock’s eyes warmed—not with mockery, but with something like recognition. “When you put it so baldly, it does sound a touch absurd.”
Darcy gave a short, disbelieving laugh and shook his head.
“We cannot even tell where fact ended and legend began. That is assuming there was some fact, and not merely the over-indulged pride of some medieval squires. The French accounts have so badly corrupted whatever narrative we do have that one can hardly trace the truth.”
Matlock did not contradict him at once. He reached for the book instead and turned another page, slower than before, as though choosing where to place the weight of his answer.
“They did alter it,” he said at last. “That much is beyond dispute. But you mistake their offense if you think it was invention.”
Darcy glanced up. “Then what was it?”
“Preference,” Matlock replied. “And it was the Benedictines long before the French. You can hardly charge them with romantic delusions. Though, I suspect they might have polished our ancestors’ portraits somewhat, leaving less authentic material for later enthusiasts.
What they found spare, they adorned. But they did not discard the tale altogether—and that, I suspect, is why anything remains to quarrel over at all.
Confess it, would you even know the name Arthur if not for them? ”
Darcy frowned. “I have yet to see the value—”
His uncle ignored him, indicating a passage with the tip of his finger.
“Later,” he said, “the story changes hands. The French wrote for courts, not cloisters. For listeners, not archivists. They made heroes of lovers and conquerors. Bedevere was kept only because he could not be omitted—because someone had to remain at the end.”
Darcy crossed his arms. “The sword. Balderdash.”
Matlock lifted his shoulders. “That is the story, that he was to throw it in the lake after his king’s death.
But the legend has it that he hesitated—that he failed, in fact, because he could not relinquish his king.
If…” Here, Matlock stopped to chuckle and throw up a hand.
“If one can believe any of that at all. Perhaps that is the ‘failure’ you are meant to set right.”
Darcy’s eyes scanned the crabbed text cluttering the space between what was once the elegant script of a reverent monk. “That is not clarified here, and nor would I have any notion what that could possibly mean for me. Swords in lakes, goddesses bestowing kingdoms? Why, it is perfect swill!”
Matlock laid his hand flat beside the margin, careful not to touch the ancient ink.
“It may be—who knows? This is as near as the record comes. There is no account of what was asked of him. Only that he was there—and that afterward, he was not. There is mention of a Lady, certainly… but not as one would expect in a tale. She is not a creature from Tennyson’s imagination.
No one knows anything about her—who she is, where she came from.
She is simply… bound to the land, though what land remains uncertain. ”
Darcy bent closer, following the line Matlock indicated. The word lay there—spare, unadorned—set into the text as though it required no explanation at all. He read it once. Then again.
“Not a lover,” he said, though the word had not been there. “Not a temptress.”
“No,” Matlock replied. “Nor enchantress, nor sovereign. She is referred to only by function—the woman in whose keeping the place endured. As though her role were assumed, and required no justification.”
Darcy’s eyes moved back along the line. No praise. No ornament. No attempt to make her intelligible.
“And Bedevere appears only in proximity to her,” he said. “Not as her guardian, nor as her lord.”
“Precisely. A clear connection, but not defined.”
Darcy straightened, the page blurring for an instant as a name rose—unbidden, making the flesh on the back of his neck heat—and was thrust aside as quickly as it came.
“And when he disappears from the record?”