Chapter 42 #2
Harrowe looked up at last, taking in the room properly for the first time. His gaze flicked to Bingley, assessed, dismissed.
“Beg pardon,” he said, with no trace of apology at all. “I didn’t figure you had company.”
“This is Mr Bingley,” Darcy said. “My friend who has just arrived from Hertfordshire.”
Harrowe inclined his head by a fraction. “Sir.”
Bingley recovered himself enough to bow in return. “I am sorry. You appear—” He searched for the word. “Urgent.”
“I am,” Harrowe said simply. He reached into the satchel again.
Darcy held up a hand. “Not yet.”
Harrowe froze, irritation flashing across his face. “Darcy—”
“Bingley,” Darcy said, turning deliberately away from him. “My apologies for Mr Harrowe. If you would excuse us for a moment?”
Bingley hesitated. His gaze moved from Darcy to Harrowe and back again, curiosity warring openly with restraint. “If you are certain.”
“I am. Thank you.”
Bingley inclined his head and went to the door, pausing only long enough to give Darcy a searching look before stepping into the corridor beyond.
Darcy closed the door behind him and turned back to Harrowe. “Now,” he said, “you may speak.”
Harrowe reached into the satchel with a decisiveness that bordered on reverence, drawing out a slim volume wrapped in oilskin so worn it looked more like habit than precaution.
The cover beneath was dark, the leather cracked and rubbed smooth at the corners, the title stamped so faintly it had to be caught at an angle to be read at all.
“I was reading the Ballads last night,” Harrowe said. “When it come on. The jolt. I felt it through the floorboards.” He glanced up. “Would’ve come straight to you—but there was somethin’ I needed to see first.”
Darcy’s gaze had fixed on the book. A pressure gathered behind his eyes that had nothing to do with fatigue. “Put that away.”
Harrowe’s brows lifted. “You’ll want to see this.”
“I wish to know,” Darcy said, sharply now, “how you came by it. I was told books of that age could not even be removed from the Archives.”
Harrowe paused, then smiled—not sheepishly, but with a small, private satisfaction.
He reached back into the satchel, this time fumbling a bit for a pocket sewn into the side, and withdrew a folded sheet of parchment, yellowed with age but unmistakable in its authority.
He laid it out carefully beside the book.
Darcy leaned forward despite himself. The seal was real. The wording archaic, formal. The dates… egad.
“You cannot be serious,” Darcy breathed.
“I am,” Harrowe replied. “Entirely.”
Darcy stared at the writ, then at him. “This grants your family complete access to restricted collections—indefinitely?”
“Correct.”
“Across generations?”
“Aye.”
Darcy straightened slowly. “On what grounds?”
Harrowe’s expression sobered. “On the grounds that what was writ there was not to be lost. Nor to drift loose among those as couldn’t tell record from rhyme. On the grounds that it was true.”
Darcy exhaled once. “And the Crown agreed to such an arrangement?”
“The Crown,” Harrowe said evenly, “required it.”
Darcy’s gaze fell to the page again. There were three dated signatures, and the top date was 1605. The same year the Ballads were first printed.
Darcy’s jaw dropped. “Then it was granted under James I.”
“Oh, aye. James had a taste for antiquities,” he said.
“Lineage. Boundaries. What gave a kingdom its shape.
He gave my forebear leave to examine parish rolls and monastic copies—quiet-like.
Mind what I told you, he claimed to be descended from Sir Gareth?
‘Twere a touch of the left hand about it,” he chuckled.
“No parson stood over that cradle, but James, he were proud of it all the same. Said such matters of inheritance were not to be neglected.”
Darcy absorbed that. “And the later dates?” His finger moved to the last one, 1769.
Harrowe’s mouth thinned. “That was His present Majesty. Reaffirmed it, he did, and a good thing, too. My old man were turned away from the Archive one day, and His Majesty would have none of it.”
Darcy hesitated. “You will forgive me if I find that difficult to reconcile with… the reports of his condition.”
Harrowe went very still. Then, very quietly, he murmured, “No. I won’t.”
Darcy blinked.
Harrowe’s voice did not rise, but it hardened. “His Majesty were raised on farming and ledgers. He reads land the way other men read faces. When the revision came before him in ’69, it weren’t madness moved him. It was memory.”
He tapped the margin, the middle date. 1662
“Charles II had renewed the licence after the Restoration—too many charters lost, too many boundaries muddled in the wars. Said records were to be kept close. James granted the first leave for the sake of order. Charles renewed it for the sake of stability. And George kept it for the sake of England.”
Darcy said nothing.
Harrowe leaned back slightly. “A king as reads history proper knows what follows when keepings fail.”
He looked directly at Darcy. “His Majesty weren’t mad when he signed it. He was afraid.”
Darcy sighed. “Very well, Harrowe. You have offered your bona fides. Now… what else do you have?”
Harrowe set the book down with care and reached again into the satchel, this time drawing out a sheaf of folded papers—pamphlets by the look of them, their edges brittle, the print uneven with age.
He laid them beside the volume already open on Darcy’s desk and began turning pages without comment, aligning passages with an instinct born of long familiarity.
“Listen to this,” he said. “Not the verse—ignore the verse. That’s there to hide it from the ignorant so it’d be kept in print.”
He tapped a line with one blunt finger.
When keeping fails and men give o’er,
The ground shall take the cry;
Not soft nor mild, but rent and torn,
Till breach be made reply.
Darcy’s gaze tracked the words.
Harrowe flipped the page of the Liber and found the corresponding passage, written in a firmer, more deliberate hand.
When the keeping faileth,
flame shall rise before,
and waters answer in their turn;
the earth shall tremble betwixt them both
till breach be bound, or all shall burn.
Harrowe exhaled once. “It’s the same warning. Two tellings of it, that’s all. This weren’t speculation. They expected it.”
Darcy closed his eyes briefly. The pressure beneath his ribs pulsed in dull agreement.
“It was always predicted,” Harrowe went on, pacing now, agitation bleeding through his earlier restraint. “Not collapse—fracture. A tearing. A refusal to hold. But I believed”—he shook his head—“we all believed it would take generations. Centuries, even.”
He stopped and looked at Darcy again. “‘Least, I thought that until two-three months ago. Now, it is happening faster. So fast that one might believe the Lady herself had come to ruin. Or very near it.”
Darcy’s head came up sharply.
“Not ruined,” Harrowe corrected at once, lifting a hand. “Not yet. If she were gone, the ground would show it plain. Worse than this. This is—” He hesitated. “—the edge of it.”
Darcy swallowed and kneaded the palm of his right hand, for it had suddenly shot through with a fresh, stabbing ache.
Harrowe leaned forward, both hands braced on the desk. “You must tell me where she is.”
Darcy did not answer.
“We must find her,” Harrowe insisted. “Immediately. The longer she remains unrecognised—”
“She is down the hall,” Darcy said.
Harrowe stared. His eyes widened. He made a sound that might have been a laugh if it had not caught so badly in his throat. “You’re never serious.”
“I am,” Darcy replied.
Harrowe pushed back from the desk as though the wood had burned him. “She is here? In this house?” He ran a hand through his hair, agitation spilling over at last. “Darcy, what in God’s name have you been doing?”
Darcy’s patience snapped. “Everything!”
The word came out sharper than he intended. He drew a breath and tried again. “She was brought here because she was thought to be dying. Collapsing in fields. Failing without cause. London offered reprieve.”
“London?” Harrowe echoed.
Darcy’s mouth tightened. “No. I did. It was me.”
Harrowe crossed his thick forearms over his chest. “Go on.”
“When we spoke of it,” Darcy said, slowly now, carefully, “when we tested—”
“Tested?” Harrowe demanded.
Darcy turned on him, the movement sudden and ill-advised. Pain flared hot and immediate through his chest, stealing breath and sense together, but the words broke free regardless.
“I kissed her! It was a test. It failed.”
Harrowe froze, his mouth round with awe.
“It nearly killed me,” Darcy went on, the admission tearing loose everything he had held in check. “And when she drew away—when the bond was broken—the earth shattered.”
He stopped there, breath shallow, the room reeling faintly around him, and said no more.
Harrowe did not speak at once. He stood very still, eyes fixed on Darcy—not with disbelief, but with a sharp, searching intensity that made Darcy’s skin prickle.
“Of course,” Harrowe said at last. The words were almost reverent. “Of course it did.”
Darcy’s temper, already strained to breaking, snapped outright. “Pray, stop speaking of it as though it were inevitable!”
Harrowe looked up. “But it was.”
Darcy took a step toward him and had to stop himself from taking another. His chest burned, breath coming shallow and ill-managed. “You speak as though I invited it. As though I stood idle and refused discomfort, risk—”
“I speak,” Harrowe said, “having read what you’ve not yet laid eyes on.”
Darcy laughed once, harsh and without humour. “Then show it to me.”
Harrowe shook his head. “Not like this. Not in ink.”
“How? What shall I do? She nearly destroyed me! And…” Darcy swallowed, closed his eyes. “And I would do it again if it spared her.”
Harrowe’s gaze softened—not with pity, but with recognition. “That,” he said quietly, “is the problem.”
Darcy turned away, pacing the length of the study, then stopping abruptly when the movement sent a sharp lance of pain through his ribs. He caught himself against the back of a chair and forced the rest out, breath by breath.
“You come with warnings and confirmations and fragments,” he said. “You tell me this was foreseen, that it is accelerating, that delay worsens fracture—yet you offer no remedy. No instruction. Only insistence.”
Harrowe watched him closely. “I offer the only thing that’s ever counted.”
Darcy looked up.
“The Lady,” Harrowe said. “Not the role. Not the verses. Her. You said yourself she were at the centre of it all. Mayhap you were right.”
Darcy’s jaw tightened. “You think to inspect her?”
“I only want to see whether what’s happenin’ now answers to what was once set down.” He broke off, then continued more carefully. “If I’m right… then what it takes from you ain’t where it breaks.”
Darcy’s pulse hammered painfully against his throat. “Then what is?”
Harrowe hesitated. It was the first time he had done so.
“It must be given,” he said at last. “Not forced. Not proved by harm.”
Darcy stared at him. “You speak in riddles.”
“Caution,” Harrowe corrected. “And I can’t say more ‘til I see her.”
Darcy closed his eyes. The image rose at once—Elizabeth in the morning room, hands folded, gaze trusting still, despite everything he had done to unmake himself. The hollow ache answered it immediately, sharp and insistent.
“You may not alarm her,” Darcy said.
“Wouldn’t dare. But you’ve got to let me see her. Today.”
Darcy’s hand went to the bellpull. He hesitated only once—long enough to feel the weight of the decision settle fully into place—then rang.
The sound echoed down the corridor like a summons neither of them could take back.