Chapter 50
Chapter Fifty
Netherfield looked altered long before Darcy reached the drive.
The facade still stood in proportion, the windows intact, the chimneys upright, but something in its bearing had broken.
The gravel lay uneven in patches, as though the earth beneath had exhaled and not yet drawn breath again.
A length of cord had been strung across the front steps to prevent entry through the main door.
Bingley was in the forecourt with a man in a dark travelling coat and another stooping over a ledger balanced on a courtyard stone. A third gentleman, older and narrower, held a measuring rod and kept glancing from the house to the ground with the air of one who mistrusted both.
Bingley saw Darcy before he had quite reached them and broke away at once, his expression brightening in visible relief.
“Darcy! Thank heaven. I did not expect you, but I am devilish glad you are here. You see how it stands. Or rather, how it does not.”
Darcy took his hand briefly. “It looks far worse than your letter led me to believe. You cannot be lodging here.”
“No. The inn at Meryton has surrendered its best rooms. Mrs Nicholls would not hear of my remaining within these walls, and I confess I was easily persuaded. Bixby and Mr Netherton’s representative have been tireless. There is an architect—if you would like the particulars—”
“I should like them from you.”
Bingley blinked. “From me? I am afraid I shall disappoint you. I have had the explanations twice and retain only half of them. The main staircase is the worst of it. The crack runs beneath the central span—clean through. One cannot risk a foot upon it. It is as though the earth decided to cut the building in half.”
“The servants’ stair?” Darcy asked.
“Entirely sound,” Bingley said, almost apologetically. “Which makes no sense at all. It is not half so well supported. The architect swears it ought to have fared worse. But it lies on the east side, nearer the kitchens. The main stair is nearer the old drawing room.”
“A different line in the ground,” Darcy said.
Bingley gave a short, uneasy laugh. “If that comforts you, I will accept it. Though it does not comfort me. The ballroom floor has lifted in one corner. The plaster in the south gallery has fissured. The kitchens have lost a section of chimney, and the scullery wall shows daylight where it should not.”
Darcy held up a hand. “I do not require the catalogue of rooms. I require the hour.”
“The hour?”
“When did it fail?”
Bingley stared at him. “During the quake, of course. When else should a house decide to crack itself open?”
Darcy did not look away. “Nothing before that?”
“Nothing before,” Bingley said, then hesitated. “Not to my knowledge. Though—”
“Though?”
“Well, there was some settling afterward. A shifting I cannot account for. It was not during the shock itself. We found it after we had all returned from the wedding.”
“The wedding?
“Of course, you must remember. Mr Collins and Mary Bennet. A very respectable ceremony. The bride bore herself with admirable composure, though Mrs Bennet wept enough for the entire parish. I stood beside the aisle with the Lucases. It was all quite proper. Until…”
He paused, frowning at the memory.
“Until?” Darcy prompted.
“Well, the candles snuffed out. All of them. There must have been twenty at least—on the rail, at the altar, in the sconces. At the precise moment Collins spoke his vow, they went out. Not flickered or guttered. Simply out, every one of them.”
Darcy glanced up at the broken beams. “Is that so?” he breathed.
“There was no draught,” Bingley went on, shaking his head.
“The church doors were shut. No one moved. They simply—whooshed. Mrs Bennet gave a little shriek, and then everyone laughed. The clerk relit them, and the ceremony continued. Mrs Bennet is a happy woman, indeed, and I hope the same can be said for the new Mrs Collins.”
He looked up at the house behind him. “Anyway, as I was saying, when I returned here afterward, the steward met me at the gate. The crack in the stair had lengthened. Fresh plaster crumbles lay in a drift at the base. He swore it had not been so when he left for the church.”
“How… singular.”
“It is, isn’t it? He gave me the time, and it must have happened during the vows.” Bingley’s expression shifted as he watched Darcy absorb the account. The nervous brightness faded; something more searching took its place.
“You were looking into this before,” he said after a moment.
“The fissures. The old watercourses. You had the steward pulling deeds from the last five decades past and muttering about culverts no one remembered digging. I thought you more thorough than reasonably necessary, perhaps even bored into scholarship because we did not amuse you well enough. I did not think you… anticipatory.”
Darcy turned to glance behind himself.
Bingley followed his gaze toward the carriage.
Harrowe had drifted away entirely and now stood with the architect near the south wall, gesturing toward the line where brick met soil.
Brutus wandered amid the rubble, nose low, tail stiff, tracing the perimeter of the foundation as though the house itself emitted a scent.
“You have brought that fellow from London, I see. Care to tell me who he is? He looks as though he would measure the sky if given a ladder.”
Darcy turned back. “Aldous Harrowe. The man I turned to for research.”
“Research?” Bingley repeated, the word half incredulous. “Darcy.” Bingley glanced round, then turned slightly, as if to block the sound of his words from other ears.
“You told me there was something you could not account for. That Miss Elizabeth’s illness had some meaning.
That the ground beneath Netherfield felt wrong in ways you could not articulate.
I did not press you then because you seemed…
troubled enough.” His brow furrowed. “Have you revised that opinion?”
Darcy looked back at the house. At the main stair window, now boarded. At the faint, jagged seam running like a scar through mortar that had once been immaculate.
“Yes,” he said. “I have.”
Bingley drew a breath. “Then for Heaven’s sake, tell me.”
Darcy chose his words carefully, not to soften them, but to keep them from sprawling into the incoherence of superstition.
“There are several accounts I have been studying,” he began.
“Translations of ancient sources, held separately by my family and Lord Matlock’s, and some obtained by Harrowe from the Archives.
The persistent assertion that there is a place in this county where stewardship was once bound to something more than land and rent.
A line in the ground, dismissed as metaphor because it proved inconvenient to credit it otherwise.
And multiple confusions in the translations, some of which have been…
attributed wrongly, prepared for in error by my aunt, Lady Catherine. ”
Bingley nodded slowly. “You did not say all that before.”
“Because I did not believe it. Since then, I have become… persuaded. Moreover, I am also convinced that the descriptions did not refer to Kent at all, as she asserted, but here. To Hertfordshire. To this estate, to Longbourn, and the fields surrounding them. There are records of a culverted stream beneath this rise. A channel diverted when the house was expanded. The crack beneath your stair follows that course almost precisely.”
Bingley’s face lost what colour it had retained. “You mean to say this was inevitable.”
“I mean to say it was foreseen. Not as an earthquake in particular, but as a fracture. A breach. The land answering a neglect long deferred.”
Bingley let out a low breath. “And Miss Elizabeth?”
Darcy drew in a long sigh and drummed his fingers on his trouser leg.
“Her collapses occurred at the very places the records mark as strained. The hollow where she fell. The stair where she faltered and could not pass—you have not heard that, but I was there, and I witnessed it. Each lies upon the same line.”
Bingley swallowed. “You are suggesting,” he said carefully, “that she was… what? Sensitive to it?”
“More than sensitive. Commanded, I suppose. Or possessing some control she did not know how to wield.”
“By Jove!” Bingley breathed. “But what does it mean?”
“There is in the older accounts,” Darcy went on, “a figure—styled the Lady in some versions. The one in whom the land’s condition manifests first. Weakness in her precedes weakness in the soil. Recovery in her forestalls it.”
Bingley stared. “And you believe—”
“I know,” Darcy said, before he could soften it, “that when her condition altered in my presence, the ground responded.”
Bingley’s eyes widened. “Responded how?”
“When the bond between us was acknowledged—however briefly—and then broken again, the shock you felt in London was the immediate consequence.”
“Bond… I do not understand.”
Darcy sighed and grimaced. Bingley would force him to confess it again. “With a… a moment of intimacy. Call it… I do not know, affection, desire, the initiation of a union—”
“What are you saying, Darcy?”
“I kissed her!”
Bingley paled, and Darcy turned away from him to pace. “Darcy… I trusted you. I brought her to your house because I believed—”
“It was not a seduction, Bingley. I only wanted to talk to her, to see what she understood, to find out if we two could somehow, together, discover what was to be done. And the best answer we had was… well, it does not matter, because I was on the edge of a collapse when she pulled away. And that was the moment of fracture.”
Bingley’s mouth parted. “You cannot mean—”
“I do.”
The wind stirred along the broken edge of the drive. Somewhere behind them, a plank thudded against brick.
Bingley’s voice dropped almost to nothing. “Darcy. That was felt thirty miles away.”
“I am aware.”
“And I suppose you are going to tell me that the candles at the wedding had something to do with all this?”