Chapter 40
Chapter Forty
The house in Berkeley Square was little more than dust and disuse and something fainter beneath both—the ghost of old residents, perhaps, or the memory of fires that had not been lit in five years.
The two servants his solicitor had retained stood in the entrance hall with the stiff courtesy of people who had been maintaining an empty house for half a decade and were uncertain whether the arrival of its owner was cause for relief or alarm.
The rooms were intact. That was the most that could be said for them.
The furniture wore its dust sheets like shrouds.
The curtains had been drawn so long that the fabric had stiffened in its folds, and when Darcy pulled one aside in the front parlour, a fine silt of grime drifted from the rod and caught the January light in a grey veil.
The chandelier above the dining table was wrapped in muslin.
The mirrors were covered. The carpets had been rolled and stacked against the walls in the manner of a household preparing not for absence but for burial.
He walked the house from cellar to attic.
The cellar was dry, which was more than he had expected of a London cellar left unattended for five years.
The kitchen was clean but bare—the range cold, the pantry empty save for a tin of tea and a jar of salt that the servants had kept for their own use.
The bedrooms on the first floor were orderly beneath their shrouds.
His father’s bedroom—the master’s room, which was now his—held the same mahogany bed, the same writing desk, the same view of the square through windows that had not been washed since the year of his departure.
He opened the window. London entered—the clatter of carriages, the shouts of street vendors, the grey noise of a city in winter.
The air was cold and tasted of coal smoke.
He stood at the window and breathed it in and tried to remember the last time he had stood in this room.
He could not. The memory refused to resolve.
He had been here, once, in this house, in this life, but the man who had stood at this window bore so little resemblance to the man standing at it now that the continuity between them had been severed, and no amount of dust sheets could restore it.
Lady Matlock had visited the house the previous month, apparently, in anticipation of his return.
Her inventory was thorough and her verdict merciless.
The house required new staff—a housekeeper, a cook, two maids, a footman at minimum, and that was only the beginning.
Only enough to open it for repairs. The kitchen required equipping.
The dining room required new curtains. The drawing room required new upholstery, as the existing fabric had deteriorated past the point at which recovering would be more economical than replacing.
The front parlour needed papering. The nursery—she mentioned the nursery without comment, which was a comment in itself—needed airing.
And the mistress’ chamber… He would not look at her recommendations there just yet.
There was only one woman’s opinion he wanted there.
He sat at his father’s desk, with the letter in one hand and the stone in the other, adding the figures in his head.
The London house would cost nearly as much to open as the north gallery had cost to repair, and the opening was not optional if Georgiana’s presentation was to proceed from a proper address.
Lady Matlock had made the arrangements for the season’s planning, and her efficiency in that regard left him little to do but approve her choices, which he did without argument, because the alternative was to sit in her drawing room and be consulted on matters of lace and invitation stock about which he had no opinion and no competence.
But the house was his to manage. The house was the thing that could not be delegated, because the tradespeople required the master’s eye and the master’s signature and the master’s presence in the rooms where the work was to be done.
He spent three days choosing fabrics. Or rather, he spent three days being shown fabrics by an upholsterer from Mayfair who had been recommended by Lady Matlock and who treated the selection of drawing room silk with a gravity that suggested the fate of nations hung upon the distinction between primrose and pale gold.
Darcy could not distinguish between them.
He chose the one that was less yellow, for no reason he could articulate, and signed the order, and the upholsterer departed with the satisfied air of a man who had guided an incompetent safely through treacherous waters.
The stone sat in his waistcoat pocket throughout.
He reached for it between appointments—after the upholsterer, before the painter, during the interminable meeting with the agency that supplied domestic staff.
The agency woman regarded him with the frank appraisal of someone who assessed households for a living and had drawn her conclusions about his before he opened his mouth.
A gentleman of considerable means, occupying a house that had been shut for five years, with no wife and no housekeeper and a presentation to plan—the agency woman saw the gaps in his domestic establishment the way Norwood had seen the gaps in the cottage’s mortar, and her professional recommendations carried the same impersonal devastation.
He hired a housekeeper. He hired a cook.
He approved the painter’s estimate for the front parlour.
He signed papers and wrote cheques and sat in rooms where men and women explained things to him that he did not understand and would not have cared about if he had understood them.
It was a weight he carried from appointment to appointment like a stone in his other pocket, one that brought no comfort.
Lady Matlock’s dinner was small. She had promised this. Eight guests, mostly old acquaintances, no one who would tax him beyond the ordinary requirements of table conversation. She had promised this as well, and she had kept the first promise admirably.
The second proved less reliable.
The dining room at Matlock House seated fourteen, and Lady Matlock had arranged the eight with the strategic intelligence of a woman who had been managing dinner tables for thirty years.
Lord Matlock occupied the head, genial and largely silent, a man who had long since ceded the social management of his household to his wife and was content to eat his fish and observe.
Richard sat at the far end, charming a pair of elderly sisters whose connexion to the family Darcy could not determine and did not investigate.
The remaining guests arranged themselves around the middle of the table with the carelessness of people who dined out regularly and who understood their roles in the evening’s composition.
Darcy had been placed beside Miss Arenden.
She was perhaps twenty—fair, composed, with the careful deportment of a young woman whose first season had gone well enough to warrant the expenditure of a second, yet poorly enough to necessitate it, and whose family had sufficient standing to secure an invitation to Lady Matlock’s table.
She was, in the language of the world Darcy had been absent from for five years, a prospect.
Not a brilliant one—her father was a baronet of moderate fortune and no particular distinction—but a creditable one, the kind of young woman whom the mothers of Derbyshire would have placed before him ten years ago with the quiet confidence of farmers setting out seed in well-tended soil.
She addressed him with a composure that suggested either genuine confidence or excellent preparation.
“Mr Darcy, I understand you have been some years abroad.”
“I have been in the north. Northumberland.”
“Oh! How wild that must have been. I confess I have never travelled farther north than York. Is the country very bleak?”
“It is direct.”
The answer confused her, as he had known it would. She recovered well—a small laugh, a tilt of the head, the social machinery turning over smoothly after a brief misfire. “Direct! What an unusual way to describe a landscape. I should very much like to hear more.”
He should have obliged. He knew the steps of this dance—not because he had ever been good at them, but because he had watched George perform them with an ease that had made the watching both a pleasure and an education.
George would have told her about the coast. George would have made the grey sea and the cliff and the tower sound romantic, would have drawn the wildness of it into a story that left Miss Arenden leaning forward in her chair, charmed and intrigued and convinced that the man beside her was as interesting as his circumstances suggested. George had possessed that gift.
Darcy did not. Darcy possessed the opposite—the gift of making fascinating things sound like reports, of draining the warmth from a subject by treating it with the thoroughness it deserved rather than the lightness it required.
“The coast is exposed,” he said. “The weather comes off the North Sea without interruption. The villages are small. The economy is fishing, primarily, with some agriculture inland.”
Miss Arenden’s smile remained, but it required obvious effort that had not been necessary thirty seconds earlier. “And what took you there, Mr Darcy? Family business?”
“A lighthouse.”
The word turned over behind her rather unremarkable eyes like a fish delivered to the wrong address. Miss Arenden looked at him the way a person looked at a sentence diagrammed incorrectly—with the conviction that the parts were all present, but the arrangement defied comprehension.
“A lighthouse,” she repeated.
“I was the keeper.”