Chapter 33 #3
“She does not vanish,” Matlock said. “Not immediately. But she becomes more difficult to discover. The references turn oblique. The descriptions move outward—toward the land itself, until one no longer knows whether it is a reference to her ghost or just… rocks.”
Darcy nodded once, slowly. “She was not destroyed, but faded. So whatever failed… perhaps was not a single act that could be recorded plainly.”
“Or perhaps it was a breach that could be named without embarrassment. It appears that something which had required a knight’s presence was no longer protected. The highest sort of disgrace—and, if one chooses to be inventive… possibly why the Darcy name never held a title in later generations?”
Darcy glanced up. “What?”
“They should have,” Matlock insisted. “The family held all the power and influence necessary to secure royal favour, particularly during the reign of the Tudors. But perhaps echoes of a private humility? An honour relinquished and never reclaimed due to family shame?”
Darcy scoffed. “I fail to see how that has any bearing, since it is nearly eight hundred years since the Normans invaded. How many great families have risen and fallen in that time? I think you seek meaning long since forgot.”
Matlock lifted a shoulder. “It was just a notion.”
Darcy’s gaze returned to the margin, to the quiet finality of the phrase. Kept in the time of Bedevere.
“One begins to see,” he said slowly, “why later generations preferred a simple, clear moment they could dramatize over all this muddle. How many copies of this are there? Can we even be certain of its authenticity?”
Matlock laced his fingers over his waistcoat and tapped his thumbs together, a habit Darcy remembered from childhood, employed only when his uncle was displeased with himself.
“There are others,” he said. “Later transcripts. Excerpts. A few copies made in the last two centuries, once antiquarian interest took hold. As to this—” He hesitated.
“I believe this particular copy has been in the family for as long as we have known to keep it. That is all I can say with confidence.”
“You are not certain?”
Matlock cleared his throat. “I ought to be.”
“Why would you be in doubt?”
“Well, er… when my sister Catherine married Sir Lewis, she believed the book might follow her as a matter of right. Not merely as property, but as inheritance. I had to go to Kent myself, in person, to restore it to the family library where it belonged.”
Darcy’s hand stilled on the page. “She took it? On what grounds?”
“She believed,” Matlock said, choosing each word with care, “that the line which mattered, the one through which the families would converge once more, would pass through her, as the eldest. That Anne’s marriage to your father had altered the course improperly, and that she might yet correct it.”
Darcy leaned forward slightly. “By marrying Sir Lewis. Oh, yes, she has some idea about Kent, does she not? Even I have heard that bedtime story—could hardly fail to. So, this is where that comes into the matter.”
“Indeed,” Matlock grunted. “By her reading, at least, the Lady would arise in Kent.”
“Ah. I suppose she thinks that Anne is this person? It begins to make sense now, why she thinks Anne and I are destined.”
His uncle offered an unhappy scowl as he shifted in his chair until it creaked. “Your father may have thought to protect you, Darcy, but in not revealing any of this to you, he has done you a wretched disservice. Yes, I fear you have judged it rightly. My sister has… expectations of you.”
“Oh, yes, she has made them plain enough, but I never understood what that expectation rests upon. What gives her the impression… nay, the certainty, however misguided, that she has wedged her way into the matter and has the right to make such demands?”
“You would know that already if…” His uncle sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Never mind. She married Sir Lewis for his land—his location, more exactly.”
Darcy’s eyes narrowed. “If my aunt believed Sir Lewis’s lands answered to it, then the proof must be here. But I have seen no such proof, and indeed, perhaps evidence to the contrary.”
“Evidence to the contrary?” Matlock observed mildly. “That is not the phrase of a man speaking in hypothesis.”
Darcy did not answer at once. His gaze had drifted from the page to the window, where the afternoon light lay pale and uncommitted upon the glass.
“I mean only,” he said at last, carefully, “that Kent has produced no… disturbance commensurate with the expectation my aunt insists upon.”
Matlock’s brow lifted. “And elsewhere?”
Darcy’s jaw set. He reached for the edge of the table, not for support, but as if to anchor the thought before it ran too far ahead of him.
The names tingled on his tongue—Elizabeth. Hertfordshire. The hedgerow still laden with roses, the split in the ground that followed no waterway, the many unexplainable things… but he did not speak it.
Not without knowing what it would cost to say it aloud.
“Surely there are places my aunt has never thought to examine,” he replied instead. “And evidences she would not recognise as proof even if they were laid before her.”
Matlock studied him now, openly. There was no triumph in his expression, no alarm—only a slow, dawning interest.
“So,” he said, after a moment, “you are not disputing the premise.”
“No,” Darcy said. “Only the conclusion.”
“Hmm.” Matlock reached for the book again and opened it, turning several leaves with care. “Here is your answer,” he said at last, pointing out a passage midway down the page. “And again, farther on.”
Darcy bent to read. The place-names were there, rendered in a hand older than the marginal text, their forms faded, their spelling irregular. He traced the line slowly, following where a later correction had been worked into the margin, the ink darker, the script more certain.
“This,” Darcy said slowly, “may be read as Cantium. The old Roman name for…”
He did not say Kent at once. The word sat uneasily beneath his eye, its letters cramped and uneven, the t nearly lost where the ink had faded.
Matlock leaned closer. “Or Cantiacum,” he said. “The hand is inconsistent. One could argue the scribe meant the Roman province entire, rather than the people.”
Darcy followed the line to its end, then to the margin, where a later hand had crowded in a correction. “And here,” he said, “the name is altered.”
“Or corrected,” Matlock replied. “That is the difficulty.”
Darcy read again, more carefully this time. “‘The hinterlands beyond Catuvellaunorum,’” he said at last. “Or—no—Catuvellani. The second l is uncertain, but is not one the land and the other the tribe?”
“It has been read both ways,” Matlock said. “Some took it for an error and amended it. Others preserved it, believing the earlier hand knew precisely what it meant.”
Darcy leaned back, the book still open in his hands. “If it is the people, then we are speaking of the old tribal territory north of the Thames. Before Londinium mattered. Before the roads made everything tidy.”
“Quite,” Matlock said. “The country of the Catuvellauni was never a single point on a map. It was a stretch—rolling ground, river crossings, difficult hedged land. The sort of place Rome complained of for refusing to behave.”
Darcy’s mouth curved faintly. “Verulamium.”
“And its surrounds,” Matlock agreed. “What we would now call Hertfordshire, with its inconvenient borders. Close enough to the city to be useful. Far enough away to be overlooked.”
Darcy nodded slowly. How had he known that county would eventually be named here?
Matlock watched him over the rim of his glass. “A convenient coincidence? You have told me the harvest was—”
“But as you have said,” Darcy interrupted, “there is too much confusion in the text to call one lucky season proof of anything.”
His uncle nodded. “Just so. It is worth noting that some of the later translators resisted narrowing it to Kent. Kent was convenient. This”—he tapped the page—“was not.”
Darcy lowered his gaze to the text again. “And if the passage does mean the place, rather than the people—”
“Then it points not to a county,” Matlock finished, “but to a threshold. Land that has changed hands often enough to forget its first allegiance, but not often enough to lose it.”
“And so,” Darcy said, straightening, “when presented with the difficulty, my aunt chose Cantium.”
Matlock inclined his head. “It was the word seen most often in certain textual copies.”
“And the one that placed authority squarely in her reach.”
Matlock did not dispute it. “She believed she was restoring coherence where your mother had subverted it.”
“I suppose that explains why she took this with her.” Darcy closed the book halfway, his fingers still holding their place. “I can hardly believe she relinquished such proof when you demanded it back.”
“Well, as to that…” Matlock paused. Cleared his throat. “She returned a volume. It bore the same binding. The same general marks of age.”
Darcy frowned. “You speak as if she might have given you a counterfeit.”
Matlock’s mouth turned downward. “Oh, no, I believe the book is genuine, as copies go. I had no cause to suspect it. But I did not know she had obtained another copy somewhere.”
Darcy’s eyes widened. “Another complete copy?”
“She claims. I knew nothing of it until after Anne was born, when she let slip that she had obtained a manuscript that she considered to be Anne’s birthright.
One she believed… truer. But I cannot be certain the one she returned to me was the same our family had kept since before memory.
I compared what I knew, of course, but that, I am ashamed to say, was rather minimal. ”
Darcy looked down at the closed book, at the worn cloth and softened corners. “So even this,” he said, “may not be what it claims.”
Matlock met his gaze again, his expression grave. “It may be the original. Or it may be a careful hand’s correction of something older. I cannot swear to it.”
“But Lady Catherine is convinced she has the authority.”
“Yes,” Matlock said. “And she means to break you on the wheel of your fate, my boy.”