Chapter 42 #2
Five years reduced to “a matter of some remark.” He deserved worse.
“Yes, I have been away some while. I have only recently arrived in London.”
Gardiner had not sat down. He stood with one hand resting on the back of a chair, watching Darcy with an attention that was neither hostile nor welcoming but something more exacting—the regard of a man reserving judgement until sufficient evidence had been presented.
The spectacles on his forehead gave him a look of interrupted industry, of a mind called away from work it intended to return to.
“You will forgive me for asking directly, Mr Darcy. It is not often that a gentleman of your position calls upon a household in Cheapside without a particular matter to discuss. Have you come on business?”
There it was. The offer and the question in one—the study door opened, the social pleasantries set aside, the ground cleared for whatever he had actually come to say.
“No… a rather more personal nature, sir.”
Gardiner's brows rose, causing his glasses to slide fractionally until he pushed them back absently. “Oh?”
“I have come because of your niece.”
The room changed. Not visibly—the green curtains did not stir, the fire did not leap, the piano in the far room continued its patient siege—but the air between the three of them altered in a way that Darcy could trace to each face separately.
Mrs Gardiner’s clasped hands returned. Gardiner’s grip on the chair tightened by a single degree.
“Which niece?” Gardiner said, though his eyes said he already knew.
“Miss Elizabeth Bennet.”
Mrs Gardiner sat down. Not in collapse, but in the careful lowering of a woman who had just moved from one kind of fear to another and wished to be steady for whichever arrived.
“Perhaps we had better speak in my study,” Gardiner said.
“I am happy to speak here, if you prefer. I apologise if I have alarmed you, for that was not my intent. I have nothing to say that requires privacy from Mrs Gardiner.” He stopped, then—because they were Elizabeth’s family, because he could not bring himself to approach them through the oblique formalities that London expected and that he had always despised and that five years at Blackscar had stripped from him entirely.
“I have been at Blackscar for the past five years. I am the keeper of the lantern. Miss Bennet and I have been acquainted since her arrival in September.”
Gardiner blinked several times but otherwise did not move. His hand remained on the chair. His expression, which had been curious, went still as if he had just received information that rearranged a great many things he believed he already understood.
“You are the keeper?”
“Yes.”
“The keeper who has been absent from his post since January.”
The bluntness of it caught Darcy short. Not away. “Absent from his post.” Language that had been chosen with care, language that belonged to a report rather than a conversation.
“Yes. I left in January to settle certain personal affairs that could not be managed by letter.”
“And the lantern?” Gardiner’s voice carried no accusation.
It was something worse—the careful neutrality of a man who had been investigating, who had assembled facts, who was now testing them against the source.
“I understand there was a period of failure. That the light went dark. How does your absence affect that?”
“The period to which you refer was before Miss Bennet’s arrival.
The apparatus…” He stopped. The full explanation required more than he could offer in a parlour, and Gardiner’s expression told him that the mechanical details were not what was being asked.
“The lantern failed before she came. Her arrival was the catalyst for its return to good order. The light has held.”
“It has held,” Gardiner repeated. He removed the spectacles from his forehead, folded them, placed them in his waistcoat pocket.
The gesture had the quality of a man putting away one instrument and reaching for another.
“Mr Darcy, I will speak plainly. I wrote to my niece a fortnight ago with information that may not yet have reached her, depending on the roads. I assume it has by now. The trustees of the Blackscar estate have been making inquiries.”
“I am aware that they are monitoring the function of the lantern. Miss Bennet conducted their assessor on a tour of the property. Entirely routine.”
Gardiner cleared his throat. “These are not routine inquiries. I hired my own investigator to learn what they were trying to discover about her, and some of it is rather personal and unsettling. They have documented the period of the lantern’s failure.
They have noted the keeper’s absence. And they have become aware that Elizabeth has been conducting.
.. frequent correspondence with a man addressed as the keeper of the tower. ”
Mrs Gardiner drew a slow breath but said nothing.
Darcy’s neck heated under his fine silk cravat.
“The… er… frequency of that correspondence,” Gardiner continued, “has raised questions about the propriety of her situation. A young woman, unmarried, living alone on a headland, writing regularly to a man who is not a relation and who is, by their understanding, a common labourer in the employ of the trust…” He lingered on the word common and watched Darcy receive it. “You are not a common labourer.”
“No.”
“I take it they do not know that?”
His jaw ticked, and he shook his head. “No.”
“Does my niece know who you are?”
The question was not idle. It carried the weight of a man who had sent a young woman north to accept a charge and was now discovering that the circumstances surrounding that charge had been rather more complicated than anyone had disclosed.
“Miss Bennet is aware of my circumstances. She is also aware of the arrangements I have been making to return.”
Gardiner considered this with a somewhat stricken expression. His gaze moved briefly to his wife, whose stillness in her chair had acquired the quality of someone listening with her whole body, and then returned to Darcy.
“And you intend—forgive me, Mr Darcy, but I must understand this clearly. You are telling me that you, the master of Pemberley, heir to one of the finest estates in Derbyshire, intend to return to Northumberland… to keep a lighthouse?”
Put thus, in a tradesman’s parlour in Cheapside, with the March light falling grey across the carpet and the tea growing cold in its cup, the statement did sound like something that required explanation. Darcy gave the only one that was true.
“I gave her my word. She is the steward, and I am the keeper, and the stewardship is not secure until the probationary term is fulfilled in September. I mean to be certain her position is on firm ground before that date.”
Gardiner’s mouth did not change. His eyes did.
Something moved behind them—not suspicion, which had already been present, but a deeper recognition, the kind a man of commerce arrived at when the figures in a ledger suddenly resolved into a pattern he ought to have seen three columns earlier.
The way a man looked at an answer that confirmed a question he had not yet asked aloud.
He did not pursue it. Not here, not with his wife three feet away and his nieces in the room. He folded whatever he had seen into the same pocket where he kept his spectacles and returned to the ground that could be discussed openly.
“Then you had better understand what you are returning to.” He pulled the chair from the wall and gestured for Darcy to sit down opposite him.
“The trustees wish to dissolve the stewardship. They have wished it since before Elizabeth arrived, and they have been assembling grounds to petition for alteration of the trust. There is a mechanism which does allow them to do this, if Elizabeth is found wanting in any capacity. Trinity House has expressed interest in the site, and the land itself is not without independent value. The endowment, which has been inaccessible without a steward, represents a considerable sum that the trustees are eager to redirect as the law allows. What they lacked was sufficient evidence of incapacity or impropriety. The lantern failure gives them one. Your absence gives them another. And any questions about her character…”
His heart gave one solid thud in his chest. “What does she need?”
Gardiner studied him... his jaw working as if he were deciding if he really wished to say the words. “She needs you at that tower, Mr Darcy. She needs the keeper at his post. She needs it before the trustees find cause to act, which will surely be before September.”
“I will leave London within the week.”
“See that you do.” Gardiner held the gaze a count longer, then leaned back.
The interview was not over, but the most pressing question had been answered to some provisional satisfaction.
He glanced at his wife, who had been listening with the curious stillness of a woman who heard everything and would have a great deal to say when the caller had gone.
Then Gardiner said, as though it were an afterthought—though nothing in the way he said it suggested anything unpremeditated: “Were you appointed keeper under the terms of the same trust that governs the stewardship?”
“I was.”
“Formally appointed? Your name in the deed?”
“In the logbook and the trust’s registry. The appointment was made through the trustees five years ago.”
“The exact date, if you can recall it, sir.”
Darcy cast his eyes up to the ceiling as he searched his memory. “The twenty-eighth of October 1807.”
Gardiner reached into his waistcoat pocket—not for the spectacles this time but for a small notebook, the kind a man of commerce carried for figures that could not wait for a desk. He wrote something in it. Brief. A date, a name, a reference—Darcy could not see which.